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Category: Technology

Crocodile spam

Well, mt-blacklist lasted a good month or so. I’m now getting hit by a clever guy who figured out that by varying the capitalization of his URLs, he can get past the simple filters. Course, I can complicate the regexp some, but it’s still fragile. Second order solution is the distributed spam database, which works pretty well as these things go.

Use that net

Did you ever read Usenet? Miss those newsreader days? Population: One is now available via NNTP. It is perhaps a bit quixotic of Dan to scrape weblogs rather than slurping up RSS feeds, but it’s a kind of quix I have to admire. The old diesel engine of blog syndication, as it were.

Shaking out cats

Jon Udell has a very good article about using Bayesian techniques to categorize blog postings. I think this is rather interesting, because I keep meaning to try Bayesian filtering on (alternately) Usenet and my mailing lists. The difference between me and Udell is that he went out and did it and got paid for writing about it.

Now that he’s pointed me at the right tools, I may try this on Usenet. Bwah hah ha.

Bad registrar, no biscuit

The smack, it has been put down. ICANN just ordered VeriSign to fix the DNS by tomorrow evening, or else:

Given the magnitude of the issues that have been raised, and their potential impact on the security and stability of the Internet, the DNS and the .com and .net top level domains, VeriSign must suspend the changes to the .com and .net top-level domains introduced on 15 September 2003 by 6:00 PM PDT on 4 October 2003. Failure to comply with this demand by that time will leave ICANN with no choice but to seek promptly to enforce VeriSign’s contractual obligations.

My earlier discussion of this is here. Link to the ICANN letter via BoingBoing.

Domain hijack

VeriSign, the curators of the .org and .com domains, just abused the living hell out of their power. As of this morning, any time you try to look up a domain name that doesn’t exist, you get an IP for one of their hosts.

In layman’s terms, this means that if you mistype the domain portion of a URL in your browser — let’s say you type http://www.yankeeessuck.com — it’ll redirect to a VeriSign page. It also means that if you mistype the domain portion of an email address, your mailer will attempt to deliver that email to a VeriSign server. Most likely it’ll just bounce… but there’s no guarantee. Hope you weren’t trying to send mail to a user who happens to exist over there.

The appropriate agency for complaints is ICANN, who oversees domain names. The ICANN email address for complaints is comments@icann.org. The ICANN phone number is (310) 823-9358. The ICANN fax number is (310) 823-8649. The ICANN address is 4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 330, Marina del Rey, CA 90292.

Grrr.

What's it look like

If you’re interested in CafePress Publishing, you ought to check out this report from someone who’s tried it. He’s pretty positive, on the whole, but he provides enough information so that you can easily decide for yourself.

They still aren’t doing perfect bound books, and they still plan to put CafePress advertising in each book, though, so my interest level is pretty low at the moment.