| Saturday, April 3, 2004 |  |
| Spam |
 I finally got around to installing a spam solution on my server. It took a while because I hadn't really gotten around to researching it, and didn't realize how good they've gotten, and that some of the best solutions are free.
What I installed was MailScanner and SpamAssassin. I had to rework my Sendmail setup a little bit so that it has two queues, one incoming that MailScanner picks up from, and one outgoing that the messages are delivered from to local accounts. MailScanner does some good things on its own in catching suspicious messages of various kinds, including the most obvious spam that includes attachments that nobody would ever send in e-mail. And for spam it calls SpamAssassin, which uses a whole bunch of methods for giving each message a spam score. Including real-time access of databases of messages that have been identified as spam by others very recently. SpamScanner is also wired for connecting up with a full-featured virus scanner, but all of those seem to be commercial, so I'm not going to spring for that just to be nice to my windows mail users who don't have a virus scanner of their own. Besides, I'd guess that that would use more server processor cycles than I'd be happy with. The short conclusion is that it works remarkably well. Otherwise I was personally counting on the built-in Bayesian spam filter in Eudora, which at first worked wonderfully, but as more and more spammers started including ridiculous amounts of random content, and as they started spelling their keywords in inventive and insane ways, it had stopped working. Meaning that despite catching hundreds of spam messages every day, other hundreds of messages made it through to my mailbox. Now SpamScanner and SpamAssassin give messages a score, which Eudora uses in its spam assessment. And they also put a flag in the subject line of likely candidates, like [link]. I hadn't really meant to leave that feature on, but since it is almost always correct, it is actualy helpful. It allows me to simply have a last filter in my list of mail filters that throws everything with that flag into my junkmail folder. The result being that only a handful of spam messages make it through to my inbox every day. And those flags will make it easier for other mail users on my server to filter their messages. So, ahhh, a little breathing room again. I'm less likely to throw real messages away just because the sender used a subject that sounds spam-like, like "Hello Flemming". [ Diary | 2004-04-03 03:08 | 2 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| An interesting life |
 An old friend from highschool wrote to me recently. Actually it took me a moment to place who he was, as I hadn't thought about him for a moment since then. But we were hanging out a bit even if we weren't in the same classes. He was a friendly sort of oddball, who was restoring veteran motorcycles and driving them around, mostly in his front yard.
He had recently been to some kind of anniversary gathering in our old school. I don't know why nobody invites me to those things, other than that they never bother to look on the Internet, but that's another story. Anyway, as he was looking over the list of people there, he realized that most of our schoolmates had the equivalent of Danish .gov addresses. I.e. they were working for the local city, county, government agency of various kinds. Good, solid very boring jobs, close to where they grew up. Paper pushers, planners, looking like their parents. And my friend here had led a rather different life. Lived in a dozen different countries. The deserts and jungles of South America, being a deepsea fisherman in Alaska, leading construction projects in various exotic places, being a community agriculture activist in South Africa, marrying a girl he met in Cuba. Speaking a whole bunch of languages. Wrote a book about his life. So, he wrote to me because he found my weblog. The way was interesting enough, as he was looking up "Cede & Co" to see who really owned his company, and he ended up on one of my pages, and recognized my name. But, to get to the point, he was happy to find that there was at least one other person who had been leading some kind of interesting life. OK, he's obviously ahead of me in terms of exotic places, but it is not a contest, and the point is how one leads one's life. Would it bore you to death to stay in the same stable job for most of your life, doing very ordinary things, getting a good mortgage, and feeling very engaged because you join the parent council on your kids' school? Or is life an adventure, a mystery, a challenge, a journey of transformation? Not that one has to put down half of the western world, but I tend to get along best with people who are on some kind of adventure. [ Diary | 2004-04-03 04:08 | 3 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Always-on cameras - Sousveillance |
 Ton Zylstra recently commented on how the accepted norms around picture taking have changed. At least in a crowd of techies where everybody has at least one digital camera with them at all times. People no longer seem to mind constant picture taking. They mostly don't stop what they're doing and start posing. Which makes it easier to take good pictures of what is really going on.
Personally I always have a problem when taking pictures. I'm in the middle of some experience, and I'd like to capture it. But the moment I pull out my camera, it is already a different experience and the presense of the camera changes it a bit. Just as much because of my own hangups as based on people's reactions. As, really, a lot of people no longer care. But I somehow never have a photographer identity. Somebody who is a "real" photographer doesn't hesitate in walking up front and sticking a camera in somebody's face, and hanging around a bit to get a good shot. But that is often because they don't consider themselves part of the action, but rather an independent observer who can float around as they wish, and who consider themselves having the right to photograph whatever is there. I'm usually a lot more self-conscious and try not to intrude. And I personally have a hard time being invisible. So often I don't get the pictures that were there to be gotten. What would appeal to me would be an always-on camera on my body that simply recorded everything I was seeing, and then I could go and pick out the good parts later. So I could then concentrate on my experiences, and I could reference the recordings based on my own peak moments, and go back and find the exact picture that best shows it. There are all kinds of issues in that, of course. Such as privacy. Is it ok to record people covertly? What if there was a light that showed that recording was taking place? See, it doesn't have to be a secret, but I'd like to get around the akwardness of the picture taking moment. If everything is recorded, both I and others will get used to it and not change our behavior. There's an article on Hewlett Packard's site about always-on cameras, and the various issues surrounding the idea. The privacy issues again. But they're also trying to address the technical issues of how to find the interesting moments. If you record what you did for 8 hours, chances are that most of it was really boring and not worth keeping. So, can some automated software tool help you pick out the good parts? Personally I don't care about that overly much. I'd be happy with the ability to scan through the recordings really quickly, and to reference them by time. I pretty much know what times were worthwhile, so I just need to be able to find them again, which I can do visually, if I can scan through the day in a couple of minutes. HP doesn't seem to be planning a product any time soon. But somebody will do it. Within less than five years, I'm sure. A tiny multi-gigabyte harddisk can quite well record video of your whole day. A high quality camera can quite well fit unobtrusively into a pair of glasses. The technical problems aren't hard. And if first a bunch of techheads start having these, and others think it is cool, there's no turning back. Despite that many people will have hesitations about allowing such things, I think there are many advantages and many side benefits. See Britt Blaser's idea of the Personal Flight Recorder. If lots of people have always-on cameras, continuously recording, crime as we know it will change. It is much harder to hide shadey dealings, much harder to deny what really went on. The key point is that these things will be in the hands of individuals, not some authoritarian government. Of course I'm trying to avoid thinking about scenarios where the FBI forces some backdoor to be built-in, so they can tap anybody's feed as they please. The answer is to put the technology into common use before they get around to demanding such things. .. Whaddya know, no sooner have I written the above before a couple of synchronistic and very related items show up. So, for more exciting stuff on that, see Britt's recent post on "sousveillance", and Joi Ito's mention of an International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance in Toronto April 12th. Exactly on these kinds of subjects. See this topic list: * Camera phones and pocket organizers with sensors;And here, from Britt is a comparison of surveillance and "sousveillance". Splendid word. Yeah, let's turn it all around. I love it. There's nowhere to hide from the people. [ Technology | 2004-04-03 05:27 | 2 comments | PermaLink ] More > |