Geek Drivel

Internet users rejoice: one of the world’s top spammers has been indicted! Only another ten billion to go.

No, there aren’t ten billion spammers at present, despite the evidence of your in-box. From what I’ve heard, there are only about 200 large spam operations at any one time. But that makes little difference when, like the mythical hydra, two more spring up for every one you cut down. If there’s money to be had by doing something, there will be people doing it, regardless of laws. And since the Internet is world-wide, and laws are limited to (at most) a single region, there’s zero chance that laws will ever stop (or even noticeably slow down) spammers.

The real solution to the spam problem is technical. Bayesian filters, spam-fighting organizations, block-lists, securing systems against spam-zombies, unforgeable identification systems for senders… none of it is perfect, but it all contributes to making spamming less effective, hitting the spammers where it hurts: in their pocketbooks.

That’s the only way to stop spamming, or any financially-motivated crime: remove the financial motivation.

A long time ago, I bought a license for the ZoneAlarm Pro software firewall. I don’t use it anymore (no reflection on ZoneAlarm, which was excellent the last time I used it, I just don’t see sufficient need for it any longer to justify installing it), but I still sometimes get e-mails from Zone Labs, touting certain “partner” utilities. Most of them are useless to me, but this latest one deserves special mention.

It’s for a utility that would sound fairly useful, if they’d pitched it right. It is supposed to allow you to access files remotely, secure and hide your network, identify intruders and kick them off of the system, map your network, test Internet speeds, and have an easy-to-use interface on top of all that. And it’s priced attractively too. But their marketing guys decided to concentrate on how easy it makes printer and file sharing… something that’s already falling-off-a-horse easy on a Windows network. “No more emailing files to yourself just to print them out,” it touts. I can well imagine that a few people might do that, but most people with the minimal technical know-how to set up a Windows network in the first place will already have the files and printers shared that they wish to, accessible to all the systems on the network. If they don’t, it’s a matter of maybe six mouse-clicks to make them so.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe a lot of people really are so ignorant that they can’t create shared folders on a Windows network. But even at my most cynical, I can’t believe that, and the ad insults the intelligence of anyone who knows even a tiny bit about running a Windows network. Which leads me to predict that unless these guys get a new marketing strategy pretty quickly, Network Magic is going bye-bye, regardless of it’s technical merits.

(Disclaimer: I haven’t used the program, or even looked at it. I don’t know whether it does what it claims to or not, I’m just critiquing the focus of the ad.)

It is with a heavy heart that I read this article this morning, saying that the recently-revived Doctor Who series is once again headed for oblivion.

As a teenager, I would stay up late one night a week to catch reruns of a full story (a variable number of episodes, totaling anywhere from 45 minutes to several hours long) on our local PBS station, the last thing it showed before shutting down for the evening. The special effects were cheesy, many of the costumes were laughable (at best), and the acting was often ridiculously overblown, but the stories were often thought-provoking and had bits of dry British humor (or “humour”) laced all through them. I was interested to hear that they were bringing it back a few years ago, and was quite impressed with the first season of it, especially as this incarnation (regeneration?) was made with a full budget and Hollywood-level writers, actors, and special-effects guys while still being true to the spirit of the original Doctor.

At least it looks like he’ll get a proper send-off, rather than being abruptly canceled. And who knows… the television industry rarely leaves a popular idea untouched for long.

UPDATE: It seems that I spoke too soon… a friend sent me information saying that the story is bogus. Russell T. Davies may be considering moving on to other projects (though the BBC is even denying that), but the show itself will still go on.

Always have a backup plan. –Mila Kunis
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Open source is an amazing software concept, even if the documentation often lags behind the program by a large amount. But OpenCola, “a freely licensed soft-drink”?!?

This story caught my eye because using DNA for data storage — plant DNA, in that case — was part of one science fiction book I read (I believe it was I, Jedi, by Michael A. Stackpole, published in 1999). The concept is undeniably neat, and it made perfect sense in the context of the story, but I can’t figure out what purpose it would serve in reality.

“We’re thinking hundreds of millions of years” — what knowledge would be relevant over hundreds of millions of years, that couldn’t be more safely stored by other means?

…Two OSes diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
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GoddessJ enjoys playing The Sims, more than anyone else I know. She’ll spend days creating houses and building up her characters so that they can afford them. But when she heard that 20th Century Fox has purchased the movie rights to The Sims, she was less than impressed. “Pong: The Movie can’t be far behind,” she remarked caustically.

Come on, guys. Doom: The Movie was utter crap, and Doom the computer game had at least three sentences of plot to it — which is three more than The Sims can boast. Please, just don’t do it.

I know that thieves generally aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, but this guy has to be one of the dumbest I’ve heard of in a long time.

I was recently told that my blog posts seem “rather cynical about clergy,” so I wanted to clear up any confusion. I am not an atheist, or against religion, and I don’t have any complaint about most clergymen; they serve important roles to many people in the world, and I respect them for that.

However, I do have a problem with people who cause pain and suffering to increase their own power, wealth, position, or reputation, or who blame “the devil” for their own actions or for whatever they don’t like in the world. Those people will be mocked and ridiculed mercilessly here, regardless of whether they’re clergy or not.

With that out of the way, we return you to your regularly scheduled blogging, already in progress.