Older blog entries for barryp (starting at number 63)

Troll Hiding

raph mentions:





FreeBSD Ports





Another way




Exim-Python local_scan








1 Sep 2002 (updated 1 Sep 2002 at 16:27 UTC) »

There's been a lot of talk lately about fighting spam, but I've been wondering lately about the problem of e-mail viruses.

At work we're getting a steady 200-300 Klez-infected e-mails a week, and it's been that way ever since it first hit. It seems like it's never going to stop - people just don't ever get a clue. And that's just one particular virus - as soon as a new and better one comes around, people will fall for it all over again.

Virus Relays

Maybe the thing to do is to start fighting e-mail viruses the way you fight spam - by identifying "virus relays" and blacklisting them. Eventually ISPs would have to implement virus scanning on their SMTP servers, and would push the problem back to the edges of the network where the actual infected machines would have to be cleaned up and better-protected if they wanted to ever send any e-mail.

I know that's pretty impractical, but I suppose you could still try identifying "virus relays" and periodically send them reports of how many infected emails were received from their system, and suggest they do something about it rather that just blindly passing the problem along.

I was intrigued by Bram's Python code for analyzing spam, and have been studying Paul Graham's article and raph's comment to it, but am still a bit perplexed at the significance of the values +-4.6, -1.4 and 2.2. Do they really mean something or are they just pulled out of thin air? 4.6 = log(100) makes a small bit of sense, but the other two I don't quite get.

Anyhow, had the idea that a possible way to have users submit mail for analysis/training would be to have them copy messages into special IMAP folders - which gave an excuse to play around with Python's imaplib library. Created folders named "Learn-Spam" and "Learn-OK" and had a script pull messages from there and remove when finished.

One thing I see is that you're gonna have make sure to do base64 and quoted-printable decoding of message parts, otherwise spammers could easily obscure their stuff from scanning.

For persistant storage of tokens, scores and such - tried PostgreSQL and found that inserting hunderds of small records per message took a *lot* of time. Tried a PyBSDDB dbshelve, which was smoking fast by comparison for this type of job.

6 Jul 2002 (updated 6 Jul 2002 at 20:43 UTC) »

Ugh..my TV just died this afternoon. I was watching it, and heard a short "squee" sound, and the picture collapsed to the lower-left half of the screen, about an inch wide. Must have lost something with the deflection coils.

Was vaguely hoping it would die, so I'd have an excuse to buy a nice new hi-def box, but was thinking in terms of maybe around christmas, when I was guessing the Samsung I'd been eyeing at Best Buy would be maybe under $1000. Be careful what you wish for I guess...

And it had to go just when the Tour de France was starting. I missed it last year when it went to OLN, but was psyched because they added that channel to our cable lineup last winter. Got to see the prologue this morning, LA sure didn't waste any time taking charge of the race.

2 Jul 2002 (updated 2 Jul 2002 at 17:38 UTC) »
jonathon :

How about a cube case for a mini-itx mboard. Haven't got one myself, but it's about the size you mention. I went with the super-slim ITX case that's even smaller (not really any room for a PCI card)


The boards are about $98 US, the guys I linked to above for the case also sell the motherboard. Another source for those boards and cases is www.caseoutlet.com, but haven't purchased anything from them myself.

26 Jun 2002 (updated 26 Jun 2002 at 18:38 UTC) »
chakie :







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