Monica

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.

Serendipitiously, 15 minutes after seeing that scam I saw this excellent tutorial on password management by vonstrassburg. No, not the "how to choose a good password" hints you already know, but, rather, how to deal with the fact that that doesn't really work. I particularly like his suggestions for managing the database file.

From browngirl: Mordor or Iceland? Match the pictures to the source.

I have recently been participating in a small discussion of renaissance music notation... on a mailing list for Jewish worship. No, I didn't start it, but I could hardly let those comments just sit there... And now I have pointers to other editions of Salamone Rossi's music that seem worth investigating (Don Harran in particular). The edition I have is funky; the music is fine, but it's a transcription of a 19th-century French edition and Hebrew transliterated into French phonemes breaks my brain. I transcribe pieces from this book if our choir is going to do them. (What I really want to see is a facsimile edition...)

This tiny horse (link from anastasiav) gave me a serious case of the "aww, cute!"s.

Some iGoogle plug-in served me this cat picture, and all I could think was "yeah, I've had days like that". It's tempting to turn it into a userpic, but I don't know whose property it is.

Erik sometimes makes a squeaking sound now where I would have expected a meow to come out. He still has a full-voiced meow, so it's not like he's caught kitty laryngitis or something, but it's still odd. Embla's normal mode is a sort of chirp (I've only heard her actually meow two or three times), but this sort of thing is new for Erik. Weird.

I've got a lot of stuff accumulating in browser tabs on a wide variety of topics, so...

The (spam)bot wars heat up, by jducoeur.

I'm a little behind in my tech news. siderea posted a helpful summary of the news about cracking the DRM code on DVDs and the subsequent firestorm on Digg.

merle_ on the true reasons behind the bee population problem.

Why programmers should never become ministers, link from aliza250. Satan is a MIS director who takes credit for more powers than he actually possesses, so people who aren't programmers are scared of him. God thinks of him as irritating but irrelevant.

insomnia on the new military rules that significantly limit participation in blogs, mailing lists, and so on. I saw an article that quoted an anonymous military source saying "we didn't mean that; use common sense". I don't know enough yet to have a handle on what's really going on, but it bears watching.

South Park Mac vs. PC, link from bkdelong.

Unconventional greeting cards, like "your painful breakup has made me feel less alone" and "your cell phone ringtone is damaging your career". Link from thatcrazycajun.

In light of my recent post about kippot in synagogues and elsewhere, I found this post on hair-covering by katanah interesting.

Cached for later reading: Clay Shirky: A group is its own worst enemy. (He's talking about online fora.) Link from Geek Etiquette.

And, for those in the SCA, what looks like a thoughtful and fascinating conversation about staying in-period at events versus talking about your computer, and why people go to events anyway, and what changes we might want to make. This post by msmemory has an overview and links to several other posts I would have mentioned here but now don't have to.

sui66iy

That poll I posted on Friday got 15 responses in the first 20 minutes, three of them from people who don't openly subscribe to my journal. *boggle*

SCA: Woo hoo! A local clue-enabled couple won Crown Tourney yesterday. Nice folks; I'm really happy for them. The next 11 months should be lots of fun. (As ariannawyn pointed out, this might be the first queen who's won one of Yama Kaminari's fundoshi oil-wrestling contests, which, yes, is as strange as it sounds.)

Quoth some recent spam: "your woman wants a replica". Really? I have a woman? Please give her two messages, then: (1) she's late with her share of the mortgage, and (2) she can buy her own damn replica.

Around 6:00 tonight I got a phone solicitation from someone claiming to be calling from Jerusalem. So that would have been, what, 1:00 AM? That seems like a lot of effort to catch people at dinner time -- and that's just eastern time. (Though I'm told that Californians eat late compared to midwesterners, so maybe they just call them first thing in the caller's morning.)

Trope geekery: the torah portion I'm currently learning (fourth aliya of Bamidbar) has four munachs in a row (followed by pazeir, which itself is pretty unusual). I occasionally see two munachs in a row; I think I've seen three. Four? Weird. I had to look up what to do with that. (Munach is one of those symbols that has different melodies depending on local context.)

For the bar mitzvah I'm conducting in July, I've decided to read rather than chant the portion up to where the student takes over. I figure that this way I won't be upstaging the kid; while in many congregations it wouldn't be perceived that way, I'm not sure about ours and that family is already having to deal with deviation from the norm because they won't get a rabbi. I asked my rabbi if this seemed appropriate to him (and explained my reasoning) and he concurred. Reading without chanting is going to take some getting used to, though!

Hebrew class tomorrow night. I'm considering asking the teacher to move me to the next section for the ulpan (that is, one ahead of where the group I'm now with will be going). It's possible that this will also get me a different teacher, which is not a change I'd frown on. But mainly, I figure that if it's too advanced we can fix it on the first night, but if the class is too basic I'll never be able to jump up.

Today's mail brought a membership appeal from "Toys for Tots Christmas Club". Oh, let me count the ways in which they have missed their mark... no, on second thought, let's not. :-)

I've spent the last month being a registered Democrat for tax purposes. (I'll fix it after the mayoral election -- err, "primary".) It should be fascinating to see what that does to the makeup of my junk mail.

A question occurred to me while contemplating a conference in England that ends on a Friday (not that I'm expecting to be allowed to go, but): If I get onto a west-bound plane shortly before Shabbat, and at no point during the trip am I in an area where it is already Shabbat, is that kosher? (It might not be smart, of course, as one delayed connection can ruin one's whole day.)

Note to anonymous coworker: if you only get the error after you've edited the code, and you can't produce it from the checked-in version, it is not my bug. :-)

Speaking of phrasing, it might be in poor taste to use the word "deadline" when talking about a hostage situation. Just a thought, CNN.

The spammers have found a mailing list I own. It's a moderated list, so they are inconveniencing me a bit but not getting to the subscribers, but I still wish they'd stop it. I wonder whether things would get better or worse if I had Majordomo reject the messages. Would that be treated as bounced mail, or seen as a human being present? I assume the latter.

I heard back from the folks at HUC about internet access (check), and I have found someone to borrow a laptop from for the trip. Yay; I won't have to face a week and a half's worth of email all at once. :-) Aside: Mapquest seems to be broken; today it informed me that Pittsburgh to Cincinnati is a 3.5-hour drive. Um, not under current traffic laws! (I was looking at this so I could supply a highway starting point to get local directions.)

aliza250

eclectic_1

The stereotype is that smart people (including anyone whose job title implies serious analytical skills) don't get picked for juries, but I'm beginning to wonder. I've been called three times and picked twice, and our engineering director is currently away from work because he's on a jury. Do they just sometimes miss in the screening, or are the lawyers not really screening for this sort of thing after all?

A Texas judge has ordered that a person convicted of animal cruetly must post pictures of the animals she starved in her jail cell. Good for the judge! This is similar to the local story some months back of the hit-and-run driver who is required to carry a photo of the person he killed in his wallet during his probation. Such orders do no harm (it's hardly "cruel and unusual") and serve to put a human (or animal, in the one case) face on the damage done by these people. More, please. (And remember, we're talking about people convicted of criminal charges; I am not advocating haunting those who accidentally cause harm and don't try to hide it with such sentences.)

Do spammers really think that people still open messages with the subject line "URGENT"? Or that most of us think we even might know a sender named Brittany? Ah well; it doesn't fool the filters.

At my most recent physical my doctor called for a routine test that kicks in for women at age 40. (Am I being sufficiently delicate?) No surprises there; the surprise came when I called to schedule and the person said "oh, and no caffeine for two days before". After I moved from incoherent blubbering to actual words, I explained that this posed a difficulty and she relented. It turned out to be advice, not medical necessity. Don't scare me like that!

apod

I found a large display of half-price Easter candy in the grocery store today when I went to get lunch. We were hard-pressed to find chocolate bunnies in a different store Tuesday, and decided then to settle for chocolate chicks for the annual bunny melt. So I picked up a couple bunnies today so we can be all proper about it. (The bunny melt involves the ritual slaughter of half-price bunnies followed, soon thereafter, by fondue. My friends are delightfully twisted.)

I used to file spam complaints, but it became clear that talking to the originating sites is a bad idea and the independent services required too much work, usually cut-and-paste into browser forms. Now that my mail provider is using a blacklist based on SpamCop, I decided to reconsider them. I figure it's in my best interest, as well as being a community service, to report spam that makes it past SpamAssassin to the organization that's producing our blacklist. Much to my delight, SpamCop now accepts forwarded email for reports. Unfortunately, you then have to go to a confirmation page when their auto-responder confirms receipt; this is apparently part of an effort to keep the spammers from attacking them with DOS attacks. (They also require a real email address.) It's not onerous, though, and it does let me see what information they distilled from the spam (along with running commentary like "yum, this spam is fresh!" if you send it in promptly).

Why do car speedometers compress the useful part of the scale so much? My current car uses about 300 degrees of a circle to display 0-160. More than half of that represents speeds I will never reach. It would be much more useful if they gave me more space for the lower part, either by a graduated scale (if the mechanics behind the dial permit it) or by truncating. In my previous car, the 12:00 position represented approximately 50 MPH; in my new car, that's 80.

This Pesach I sampled three different sorts of (identifiable) store-bought macaroons. The results: Manischevitz chocolate: good (thanks siderea). Rokeach almond: ok. Shabtai almond: yes!! (thanks lefkowitzga). The orange peel adds a lot to the flavor of the last. Pity I didn't find these earlier, but I'll know for next year.