Posts by Russell Brown
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Here's the Gisborne Herald site:
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Everyone clear on this ?
Completely freaked out.
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When I first saw the title I thought this was a blog about the Peter Stewart case. Obviously not, but I wondered if you were planning to blog on it RB?
I hadn't planned to. I didn't know anything about the case until today, and I don't have anything to go on anyway.
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Anyway, that's more or less the version according to Popper ...
Oh great. Here's me trying to make PAS less intimidating and you waltz in and start quoting Karl bloody Popper ...
Don't you have a cat or something?
;-)
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Barracuda sell security software, so couldn't be called impartial ...
The Mesaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, which tracks more than 100 million mailboxes, reported an 80-85% figure for the proportion of spam in all email, and that was for Q4 2005. It's huge.
I've never had Gmail fail on me. When my corporate email fails, it's mostly due to incompetence.
That's simply not correct. When the guy from SpamAssassin has his server taken down, it's hard to deny that it's a real, objective problem. I sat through Steve Champeon's email workshop at the last Webstock. It was unbelievable.
If email service was a big component of ISP costs, surely you'd be able to buy IP-only service at a discount. AFAIK, you can't.
Perhaps someone who knows the detail could comment (Peter Belt?) but Ihug's big email collapse was a result of the previous owners being unwilling to make another large capital investment to cope with spam loads when they knew they'd be selling up. It's a significant cost.
Gmail's spam load does seem to be levelling out -- but do you really want Google to be the only people in the world who can run a mail server?
The Wikipedia article on email spam is running an estimate of 90 billion messages a day for 2007. That's insane.
The problem with dealing with spam as a technical, rather than a social or legal problem, is that it always bites you back. There are still small hosting companies in New Zealand who are having their customers' emails undelivered to Xtra addresses because Yahoo's system doesn't like them.
Even if you could fix email and be able to authenticate all sender addresses, you'd still need laws to deal with it. Just letting it get as big as it wants and hoping you can keep up is not a solution.
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I'm not entirely convinced that it's worth the trouble of passing a law (I've no idea what that costs - millions?) to catch a single person. Spam filtering technology seems to work (my Gmail is about 99% accurate). I'm sure it costs money, but isn't that a reasonable expense of doing business?
You're kidding. According to this year's report from Barracuda Networks, nearly all email is now spam; ie: 90-95%.
That's up from 5% in 2001. It's a grotesque theft of resources. Yes, Gmail is holding up fairly well (although I had to switch back to Ihug's smtp recently because Gmail kept failing on me), but if you want to run your own mail server, it's a crippling drain on your time.
Most times your ISPs email service fails, it's because of spamload. It's an expense that's passed on in your bill even if you're not using those mail services.
And then there are the false-positives you never receive or even know about. And the blowback spam because some piece of filth has spoofed your domain into a million email messages. The collateral damage when whole IP ranges are blocked because someone's detected an open relay. The porn spam your kids get when they check their email. The comments spam that means you have to make it harder for people to post comments on your site.
I don't think you can separate botnets and phishing from ordinary spam either -- it's the same people doing it. And legalising it ain't an option: that would really open the floodgates.
It not a matter of "one person" -- it's one person directing the dispatch of 100 million junk messages a day. That's what the suspect in this case has admitted to doing previously.
I also get a special kind of spam that's basically impossible to block -- except perhaps by maintaining some kind of ultra-anal personal filtering, which I don't have time for. It's PR spam -- not emails from local PR companies, but random messages from global IT flacks who have bought some list with my address on it.
I like what Chris Anderson at Wired did when he couldn't stop the PR spam coming: published all the source addresses.
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Just got this from a media organisation:
I've just sent a reporter around to what we believe is the master spammer's home address.
Bugger me if he doesn't have a NO HAWKERS sign on his door and a NO JUNK MAIL sign on his mailbox!
LOL.
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Actually, his super-hero costume looks more like this
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This blog commenting retardation I poses, I possibly one of my greatest strengths here at PAS. It's my point of difference, it defines me as an individual. I'v never read anyone else here talk about dyslexia. It's understandable considering that this is a social environment that consists almost entirely of words. I don't expect anyone to understand my enthusiasm for writing under the circumstances.
I've been aware of the effort you make Steven, and I admire and appreciate it. But I hadn't thought of it as a strength. Interesting point.
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Another great read. And I particularly like the "taking milk to the market" photo.
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