spam levels significantly down?

I've been noticing for a while that my spam traps are identifying less spam but this is not due to any ineffectiveness on their part -- the amount of spam that gets through has not increased. To check my memory I drilled some core samples in my reports from pobox.com. In spring 2008 I was routinely receiving 500-600 pieces of spam a day; over the next year it seems to have averaged closer to 350-400, still high, with a brief rise to 500-600 in April/May 2009. Then, starting in May 2009, the volume started to drop to about 250/day over the course of a month. Over the next year (to May 2010) it dropped to about 150. It has continued to drop slowly and now hovers around 100, but I've gotten several daily reports with two-digit numbers in them in recent days. Last night I was comparing notes with somebody else who has data available, and it's not just me.

This sent me to Google. I couldn't find the motherlode -- a graph of global daily spam levels over a 3-year period (or more; I'd take more :-) ), but I did find some reports from Symantec suggesting that there is something big going on. this announcement from Dec 2010 links to a report (PDF) that suggests a two-thirds drop in spam between August and December of last year, and this report for February-March 2011 shows a big drop just in that time. According to Symantec, in August 2010 the global spam level was about 220 billion messages per day; a month and a half ago it was about 30 billion. (I'm eyeballing charts, so some approximation has occurred. But you get the idea.)

Really? Wow. They attribute this to the shutdown of major botnets, and I saw other articles making that claim too (without citing data). Sure, there have been some big hits that evn made the mainstream news, but I didn't realize the effect of multiple counter-attacks on the spammers had been so strong. I feel kind of bummed that I didn't really notice a 90% drop in spam, but that's because the filters were doing their jobs and the volume was too high to make review practical.

Former email spammers have moved on to other venues, I'm sure. I assume that Facebook and Twitter get a fair bit. (I'm not on either, so have no direct observations.) We've all seen LJ comment-spam; I assume it happens to other blogging sites too. So it's still out there, but less of it is being aimed at our individual inboxes, it appears. Neat.

[SCA] music & dance event

Yesterday's music & dance event was a lot of fun. We knew we wouldn't get the usual contingent from the East Kingdom because of a dance event there (that we didn't know about in time), but a bunch of people from the Cleftlands came from Ohio and that allowed us to have some good cross-fertilization. It's nice when you don't know all the people in your classes, after all.

I taught "Reconstruction 201: Balli". 201 because it's more complex than Arbeau and Playford, but only 201 because it's not ultra-advanced either. Ordinary people can do this, and I was pleased to see people who had never tried to work out a ballo from the sources do so in the class.

There were seven students, including alaricmacconnal who I had specifically asked to come with a recorder. (The class was advertised for dancers and musicians, and I wanted to make sure there would be at least one non-me musician there prepared to play from the original manuscript.) There are some ambiguities in the notation for the dance I chose (Marchesana), which is one of the reasons I chose it, and Alaric picked up on one I hadn't seen and made it work. Cool! I don't know if his interpretation is right, but it works well with the dance steps so I'd say it's a keeper. (And because the students were mostly dancers and not musicians, we just breezed past some of the music-specific ambiguities like use of accidentals. At a basic level dancers don't care what notes you play if the timing works.)

I taught the technique that Rosina and I used when we reconstructed the balli for Joy and Jealousy: start by independently counting up how many tempi (measures, in modern parlance) of what misure (think time signatures, sort of) you think the dance and the music call for. Then compare and start reconciling, drawing on other manuscripts and translations as needed. We did not get all the way through the dance -- I find workshops really hard to plan, timing-wise, and I talked too long at the beginning before diving in -- but we got far enough that people seemed to be getting it and enjoying themselves. Several of the students were non-local and I failed to get contact information, alas, so I don't know if I'll ever hear about reconstructions they end up doing. I hope I do.

One of the visitors from Cleftlands, whose name I asked and have failed to retain (sigh), was amazing to watch on the dance floor. She had excellent posture, made eye contact, knew what to do with her hands, and seemed to always be aware of the room around her. I asked: she's a professional dance teacher. :-) Maybe next time she'll teach a class on these things!

(A class I would like to see, but don't know how to structure, would be something like "beyond the specific dance" and would cover things like that, using the space (constraints and opportunities), and adjusting your styling based on the instruments providing the music. This last is something that the Italian sources specifically call out as something to strive for, and I have only the basics of it.)

The choir performed a subset of our Pennsic concert and I thought it went well. There was somebody in the audience who was the perfect magnet for making eye contact; I hope we didn't all pick him. :-) (Ok, I did move around the room, but not necessarily with an even distribution...) The consort also performed, and the students in a choral class sang three songs. It was a good set of performances.

The food was tasty and there were more vegetarian-friendly dishes than I'm used to (yay!). The assorted sauteed veggies in which ginger and garlic (separately) were treated as full-fledged components rather than scant additions were particularly nice. :-)

It turned out that this was lefkowitzga's 30th anniversary of autocratting her first event, and her co-autocrat was a first-timer. Nice blend of seasoned and new there.