once is chance, twice is coincidence...

About a week ago I got a form letter from one of my senators responding to my letter to him on the Darfur situation. The problem is that I had sent no such letter. But I've written to all of my representatives several times, so I assumed it was just a data-entry error and I got someone else's letter by mistake.

Friday I got a similar letter from my other senator. I hadn't written to him about Darfur either. So now I'm wondering whether some over-eager group out there has decided to send as many letters as possible, using whatever names and addresses they can get their hands on. It's one thing to mount a letter-writing campaign by getting other people to participate; that's completely legitimate. Fraud, however, is not.

The letters my represenatives send are always vague enough that you can't reconstruct the position of the original letter from them. Now in this case it's pretty safe to predict; I don't know of too many people writing to their senators saying "hey, we should join in on trouncing those people!" or the like. My guess is that 99% of the letters my representatives get on the subject of Darfur boil down to "make it stop".

But what if, instead, I'd gotten an unexpected letter thanking me for my comments on the Alito nomination? I would have no idea which tally had been fraudulently incremented, pro or con, and no way to correct that tiny bit of the record.

So while the specific situation is mostly harmless, I'm disturbed by the incident anyway because of what it could have been. Elected representatives don't read the letters we send, but they do pay some attention to the tallies their staffs keep of how much correspondence is coming in on each side of key issues, and I feel like I've been a victim of vote fraud with no audit options.

It's not the same as election-vote fraud perpetrated by governments, but, if I'm right about what happened, it's still a fraudelent interference with the process of governing, and it's one that cannot be chased down.

a funny gaming moment

Yesterday we played a game of 7 Ages (five players, three playing for the first time). There was one really funny moment.

Dani started the empire of the Huns. Their victory condition is vanquishing enemy cities, and they are one of the few empires that can vacate land (they don't have to leave someone behind to hold it). They're a rampaging force, not a landed empire.

So Dani brought them into play on the steppes adjacent to my peace-loving Chinese empire's capital, and then he moved his entire army in to attack the city. I asked him to clarify the rules of retreating, which are that -- if you are allowed to retreat, which isn't always the case -- you can move your units to an uncontested adjacent space that you own.

That clarified, I played an event card that said before a fight I can declare who wins ("that would be me", I said), and the losing army ("that would be you") is permitted to retreat and is destroyed if it can't retreat.

And that is how the Zhou Dynasty, with a spearman and an archer, destroyed the entire empire of the Huns in one fell swoop. Alas, the Zhou don't get victory points for destroying enemies.

quote, link, spam

Quote of the day: "[Pushing data from Perl to Excel is] sort of like when you've been trying to get two acquaintances to meet and talk to each other, but there's all these mishaps that occur, and finally, they talk, and get along pretty well, until one day one realizes that the other one talks too fucking much and segfaults in their face." (dr4b, here)

ISN: Clark defends domestic psi-surveilance program (by osewalrus).

I keep getting spam claiming to be my "last chance" for the offer du jour. I don't think that phrase means what they think it means. The amount of spam reaching my mailbox has gone down, but the amount that's trying to get there is up again after a dip for a few weeks. I have four layers of protection; since the beginning of Shabbat (two days) the statistics are:

• Bounced by pobox.com on my behalf: about 475
• Held by pobox.com as suspicious (all actual spam): about 60
• Caught by SpamAssassin as almost certainsly spam (score 7+): about 120
• Caught by SpamAssassin as probably spam but worth looking 'cause sometimes it catches legitimate mail (score 5+): about 40
• Made it to my inbox: about 50

Currently I skim the pobox bounce reports every few days because I toughened the rules a week or so ago, but obviously that's not viable long-term. (I check the "held" pile every couple days; that catches legitimate mail occasionally, but then I can whitelist those senders.) Some of the obvious spam that gets all the way through has low SpamAssassin scores (2 or 3); I'm not sure how they're pulling that off, but dropping the threshold that low would catch way too much legitimate mail. I don't know if better tuning of all the parameters is possible, but so far pobox is doing the bulk of the work and only rarely catching legitimate mail (in the "held" pile, where I can get it back).