It's a pity that all waivers aren't this straightforward (link from Dani). I particularly like: In other words, you guys won't sue us guys. We could drag this part out for pages, but you are racers, not namby-pamby whiners who sit up late at night watching TV commercials that have some lawyer telling you to call 1-800-SUETHEM.

dglenn re-posted a link to the spoons essay that attempts to explain living with chronic pain to healthy folks like me. It's a powerful anology that I've known about for a long time, but I wanted to (1) cache the link and (2) spread it.

Bruce Shneier on the new national ID card (link from goldsquare). Bruce has a lot of good things to say about why this is a bad idea. While I have some minor quibbles, I agree with what he's saying here.

I think I finally have my spam filters working reasonably well. (That is, as well as they can based just on SpamAssassin ratings and a few repeat offenders who warrant special treatment.) I occasionally get false positives, so I want to be able to glance through candidates, but at ~100/day that's tedious. It appears that sending messages rated 7 or higher to the bit bucket, while keeping 5-6 to inspect, will work. I've been using these settings for a week and during that time the "maybe spam" folder has only accumulated 80 messages (compared to 600 in "almost definitely spam"). Sadly, the spam that makes it to my inbox usually comes through with scores under 2, and much of my legitimate mail is that high, so I can't do much about that.

I just received phishing email that's a little more sophisticated than the norm. It didn't fool me, but I know people (who are not dumb) who might have fallen for it.

It claimed to be from PayPal, and "all" it asked me to do was to go to their web site to verify my billing information -- new verification regulations from the PATRIOT act, don't'cha know.

It used PayPal boilerplate text about being careful about phishing, complete with a PayPal email address to report problems to. Too bad fraud@paypal.com isn't the address PayPal publishes. (That would be spoof@paypal.com.)

The URL it provided looks perfectly reasonable, because instead of saying "click here" they actually put a real PayPal URL in the text, complete with "https". Pity that that's not where the anchor really goes. Never trust HTML-formatted mail; read the source.

There weren't a lot of bogus headers like there often are; it would be easy to miss the originating site, which isn't PayPal, amidst all the legitimate headers.

Actually, the first suspicious thing I noticed was a simple grammar error (in an otherwise-well-written message). The second thing I noticed was the absence of my name in the greeting, which PayPal always uses. I had to go to the (real) PayPal site to spot the bogus fraud address.

PayPal's tips for detecting fraudulent email are here.

Lately the humidifier in the basement has been pulling 2.5 to 3 gallons of water a day out of the air. (It would probably do more, but it doesn't do its thing when the tank is full and awaiting emptying.) I realize that's only about 1.5 toilet flushes or a quarter of a shower or something, but I still find myself wishing for an easy way to feed the collection back into our water system. (Not for drinking or cooking, though.)

The National Council of Churches is unwisely spamming people on a roughly-weekly basis. (I report 'em to SpamCop each time it happens, but it hasn't stopped the messages yet.) They should work harder on demonstrating values consistent with their presumed beliefs (like the golden rule).

Speaking of losing points by spamming, an anti-Bush group calling itself BushFIlter has been spamming me every few days. SpamCop reports have been more effective there; it's been a week or two since they've successfully gotten through. But I imagine that there are people out there who haven't thought about the election much, aren't going to, and are annoyed enough by spam to let it sway their vote; the spammers are making a mistake by discounting that effect. It's really only different in degree, not form, from sending out lots of spam advertising your competitor's URL. (Hmm... nah, I don't think the Kerry folks are that weasely.)

What is the derivation of the word "asshat", which I have been seeing increasingly in the last year or two? It seems to be a synonym for "asshole", but I'd always assumed that if you had to make that word more "gentle" or "polite", it'd be the first syllable you'd have to modify. What gives?

The connection to my graphics card is apparently loose, and things have degenerated in the last day or two. Tomorrow night it's time to pop the case and find out what's going on in there. (The symptom is sporadic change in the color balance -- mostly I've been afflicted by random pinkness, but as I type this my monitor has a bad case of jaundice.) I think it's a loose connection because rapping lightly on the side of the case often changes the state. I hope it's just loose, because I wouldn't have a clue how to buy and install a compatable graphics card.

Quote (from a protected post, so I won't identify the author): "On a personal note, I'd just like to add that any bedroom tip that starts 'make sure you are properly grounded' is somewhat suspect to me."

I get a fair bit of spam addressed to Christians, but today is the first time I've gotten spam that asserts that I'm a Muslim. (Looked pretty offensive on a quick glance, too -- the first few lines said that as a Muslim I am clearly working against peace, and went on to chide me to "return to the path of Allah" before it's too late.)

This appalling discrimination from Virginia can't possibly be constitutional, but it's still scary. How did it pass? Bah.

Today I called Consumer Reports to find out why they had charged me for a second month of web access when I had cancelled 30 days after the initial 30-day subscription. "Let's see, it says here you cancelled on March 26." "Yes." "And you subscribed on February 25." "Yes. That's 30 days." "No, you cancelled on the 26th." "February doesn't have 30 days". (Pause.) "Oh. Right; we'll get that credit right out to you." I am completely satisfied with the support representative; their billing system might need some tweaking.

I hadn't seen this spammer tactic before: send a message faking one of those "spam-guard" services that requires people to confirm that they're real people (once) before their email addresses get added to a whitelist. I'm on enough mailing lists that it's possible I might have fallen for it if the sender had put my address, rather than a bogus one, in the "to" line. (On the other hand, I might have been suspicious of any subject line that wasn't "Re: [one of my recent subject lines]". Now I certainly will be.)

Quote from the lawyer defending the first people charged under the "Can Spam" law: "No one's done this before. It will be fun -- not for my client but for me professionally." If my lawyer publically called my case "fun", I might wonder if I had chosen wisely. :-) (Granted, the one time I hired a litigator he was excited about the case, but not because it would be "fun". It was going to be precedent-setting. I'm all for having my lawyer be motivated to do a good job because of the potential journal articles. :-) )

One of today's pieces of (physical) junk mail was from the "food fulfillment center" at some anonymous post-office box. I figured it was probably a charity looking for money, but I was curious enough to open the envelope. Yup -- Feed the Children. I wish I could deliver two clues to organizations that send me junk mail: (1) if you're not willing to put the name of your organization on the outside of the envelope I'm not going to be favorably disposed toward you, and (2) any organization addressing a general problem but only for children is not going to get my money because that's just a sympathy ploy. There are hungry adults too, y'know -- and adults who get cancer, are disabled in various ways, and live in cardboard boxes, just to pick three more child-specific causes that showed up in the mail in the last month. (Lest you get the wrong impression, I do give to charity, and fairly generously. But not to organizations whose tactics I don't approve of.)

Last night I took a short highway entrance ramp from a dead stop (because sometimes Edgewood is like that) for the first time in the new car. Vroom! My old car was pretty good for that (best I'd driven, though all the other examples were automatics so that's not balanced), but my new car is zippier. :-)

Memo to Tony on 24, c. 8:58AM: you idiot! That is all.

I'm surprised no one has implemented this before now.

Spam-detection based on sender, message format, keywords, and analysis of headers has been getting harder; the spammers are coming up with new techniques faster than the good guys are coming up with antedotes. One thing that they can't completely disguise, though, is the web sites they're advertising. Enter the Spam URI Realtime Blacklist. That's just brilliant. My mail provider started using it yesterday, and it's already making a difference for me.

It's not a silver bullet; spammers will defeat it in time. But I like to think that maybe they're going to have to work a little harder at it than at finding yet another undefended relay or anti-Baysian trick or whatever.

Oh, and an interesting statistic: my provider is seeing an average of 10 pieces of spam per customer per hour, which is somewhat more than what I've personally been seeing (about 125 per day). They say soem customers get ten times that. Eeek.

More subject lines from the spam folder:
"airborne pontiff"
"inalienable abdomen"
"rabbi bacon"
"Reply to your post..." (ok, where'd that come from? Not LJ!)

Did the misguided lawmakers responsible for the "can spam" law notice the two opposing (in this case) meanings of the word "can"? That is, "can it, i.e. contain it" versus "enable". The former is what they tried to sell; the latter is what we're getting.

grifyn posted some links to ThinkGeek. Not only do they have a product category for "caffeine - drinks" where you can find Buzz Water (100 mg per bottle), but you can also get regular automatic deliveries. Some of the offerings under "caffeine - accessories" are intriguing, but I am disappointed to learn that the energy gel does not in fact seem to convey caffeine topically the way you'd think from its placement in their catalogue. I don't need to be "energized" on Yom Kippur; I need caffeine to offset the headache. :-) (Yeah, I know there would be other halachic issues to investigate.)

While I'm talking about grifyn, this saga of the job hunt made me laugh.

Scholar-in-residence weekend this Shabbat, with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. This should be quite nifty, and as a side effect, I don't have to cook for this Shabbat at all. Congregational meals can be quite convenient. :-) (Speaking of food, the day after the Purim gathering I realized why the balance of food on the table looked wrong, when I discovered the pasta salad I had deliberately made to use up chametz and then forgot to put out. Oops! I wonder how long pasta salad keeps; it's been refrigerated and there's no mayo involved, FWIW.)

It has been way too long since the last time I watched "Blake's 7". Yay for the new DVDs. I've only watched the first two episodes so far, but this is even better than I remembered. Cool.

My journal just received the anonymous spam that's been going around for Mel Gibson's new movie. The spammers are obviously doing some keyword-matching; the version I got was targetted at Jews. (I've seen this in other journals; particularly amusing was the case where the spammer tried to talk about a band he clearly knew nothing about.)

Here, isn't this quote special? "Some people, not really representative of Jewish people, but rather self appointed Jewish spokespeople, such as Abraham Foxman from the Anti-Defamation League, seem to have been attempting to denounce this film for months as being anti-Semitic. The news reported that they even stole the script last year! But here's what some Jews say (Jews who don't make it their job to tear apart other people): Protesting Gibson's Passion Lacks Moral Legitimacy by Rabbi Daniel Lapin." (There was a link here, but I'm not going to do this person's work for him after he barges into my journal and makes accuastions of theft...)

Yes, I know I can disable anonymous commenting, but that would block some legitimate readers of my journal and anyway, it's no real skin off my nose to mock the spammer and delete his comment.

Still, I welcome any insight any of y'all can offer on the traceroute output for our "friends" at 219.94.76.250:( Read more... )

You know what? There was a time when I would have considered going to see this movie (in the theatre), because while I utterly disagree with the message, I can still appreciate well-told stories that I disagree with. (I don't know if this one is well-told, of course.) But with the way its supporters have been behaving for the last year (this sort of campaigning is only the latest step), no way. I'll see the movie someday, probably, if I don't conclude that the apparently-excessive violence wouldn't squick me and if I get past my aversion to "movies I have to read" (I don't do subtitles), but if I do, I will do it in a way that does not contribute to a "blockbuster". It'll show up on TV eventually, after all. Or someone in my circle of friends might lend a DVD.

"baptist $23 trial pak - 6 doses! afeajqu"

Hey, LJ finally fixed the bug with ordering of memories. Memories are useful to me again!

Lately, a larger proportion of my spam is about enhancing body parts (primarily one I do not possess). The hot stock tips seem to be on the decline, though the various flavors of the Nigeria spam continue. I guess spammers weren't getting a lot of hits for investments in a shaky economy. I remain glad that I do not use a browser (or equivalent, like Outlook) to read my non-work email; spam is bad enough without flashing "porn porn porn!" in 72-point red letters while playing supposedly-appropriate background music. :-)

On Sunday Dani was arguing that we will have a mild winter because "tomorrow's weather will be basically like today's", iterate until done, and it was about 70 degrees on Sunday. I took the opportunity to mock him for this on Monday, when the temperature dropped nearly 30 degrees in three hours (and the day ultimately ended with snow). He's just got to learn the limits of simplistic logic. :-)

On the Mark is going to sound great at Darkover this weekend. Sunday's practice went very well. We have two surprises for our fans at the con, one positive. (The other is that we'll be taking a year off -- but we'll be back, so I don't want to call that "negative". It's just reality; people get busy and groups need downtime.)

Monday's choir practice was more focused than other recent ones. The director was keeping things on track, and a habitual "problem child" wasn't there (which I'm sure helped the director). I'm skipping the next several practices because I won't be at the next two performances (one in a week and a half and one in mid-January).

We went into last night's D&D game with a disagreement on the table about what to do next. I think one player is still convinced that we can do what three of us think is currently very foolish. The question was deferred last night, though, because one player couldn't make it, and we were not about to do something high-risk without everyone there to steer his own fate. So we got the outcome that I wanted, but not through the means I wanted. Once that was settled the game was a lot of fun. (My fun in the game is augmented by extra-game character-development activities, mostly achieved via email, private geeking with the GM, and the game journal.)

Conversation snippet:
Me: Does tartar-control mouthwash actually do anything useful, or is it just a marketing scam?
My dentist: It makes the tartar softer, which makes [hygenist]'s job easier.
Me: Hey, that's worth something. If [hygenist] is going to poke sharp objects at me, I'd like her to not be frustrated.

The salad bar has returned to the Giant Eagle across the street from where I work. And there was much rejoicing. :-) (Well, some rejoicing. In order to rate full-scale rejoicing they have to restore the yellow hot peppers.)

I almost had a chance to meet sanpaku, before he suffered car failure. Eventually I'd like to meet more of the people whose journals I read.

Welcome to LJ to zachkessin, an SCA friend who moved to Israel this summer. There is now a new SCA group in Jerusalem (he and kmelion are the people I know), and they're having their first feast tomorrow (Thursday). Good luck, guys! The parts of the menu I've seen look great. (No, no turkey, for anyone who was wondering.)