The easy half of the game is to have a system for generating lots of aliases - either of the form alias@yourdomain.com (or alias@yourusername.yourisp.net) or yourusername+tag@yourdomain.com are both standard approaches for supporting an infinite number of tagged addresses.

The difficult problem is getting your email user agent to be friendly about making sure that if you got mail from someone who knows you as alias123@yourdomain.com, your replies to them get sent From: alias123@yourdomain.com, and also making sure that if you're sending one mail message to more than one person (either with a mailing list, or separate To:/Cc:/Bcc:, that something appropriate gets done to send them mail with your different addresses. TMDA automates some of that; not sure if anybody's done Thunderbird bits for anything similar.

Unfortunately, part of that solution space is patented - Hall's 1999 "Zoemail" patent and a couple of following patents, though Yahoo has argued in court that they don't apply, at least to whatever Yahoo was doing, and that thy were invalid, obvious, annoying, etc.

If he's got the contract on his web pages, and the only way you can find out most of his email addresses you're targeting is by reading his web page, then you're presumed to have read his offer. If you're spamming "dan@danbalsam.com" that may not apply, because that's obvious without looking at his web page, but if you're spamming user34590438509348@danbalsam.com, you got that from his web page.

And maybe that's not a tough enough legal contract to force you to pay him $1000000 and your first-born child, but it should be plenty solid to get $1000 in small claims court.

It looks like he's especially trying to catch spammers who are doing business in California, since California laws are tougher than the US CAN-SPAM law. But it sounds like he's also catching people who are violating CAN-SPAM, and any US spammer who can't figure out how to comply with that law cheaply and easily while still spamming their way to Making Money Fa$t is too stupid to deserve to stay in business, and yet many of them don't bother. Obviously non-US spammers don't have to comply with US or California laws, but it's much harder to collect money from them so stopping them is Somebody Else's Problem.

One thing that's happened to improve algorithms, besides having people study Computer Science and take advantage of the work other people have done in academia and open source systems over the past few decades, is that computers are enough bigger and faster that you can solve problems that weren't feasible in the past, because you didn't have enough RAM, or disks were too small and you needed to use tape, or CPUs weren't fast enough to bother using some techniques, and having those tools gives you more choices of algorithms than I had when I was an undergrad in the 70s, or than my professors had when they were learning CS in the 60s and 50s. 640KB wasn't enough for everybody, and I remember a Star Wars funded research project at Princeton in the late 80s that had a VAX with 128MB of RAM crammed into it so they could study what you could do if you really always had enough RAM. (They didn't think 128MB was really quite enough, but it was a good start and they could get it funded, and it was still extravagantly large - they even had a 450MB disk drive just for swap :-)

• Claim 1 - Underwear
• Claim 2 - Generate announcement that you have stolen the underwear
• Claim 3 - ?????
• Claim 4 - PROFIT!!

Cool, thanks! I've got a lab where we evaluate firewall and intrusion detection products, and since we just got a new big VMware box, I'd like to be able to fill it full of well-behaved client VMs, evil nasty client VMs, etc., so a distro that's reasonably small and has reasonable features and convenient management is a helpful thing.

When George Bush declared North Korea to be part of the "Axis of Evil", it was doing Kim Jong-Il a favor, making both Kim and Dubya sound like bad-asses that their populations should respect. Kim may be following in his family traditions of bat-shit insanity and sociopathic disrespect for the people he's ruler of, but he's still playing mostly for a local audience, and secondarily for other world leaders playing for their own local audiences.

I'm interested in this for a VMware guest OS, as a possible alternative to m0n0wall. Have the authors thought about that kind of implementation? How much RAM does it need to run adequately?

Unfortunately, that was what they did. The point of satellites is that you're not dependent on ground-based infrastructure, but the reality was that governments could still ban using them except in wiretappable monopoly-price-supporting mode, which made them unusable or economically unsupportable.

There was a nice little multitasking OS for Motorola 6809s called OS9. Unfortunately its namespace got stomped on when Apple came out with version 9 of MacOS, but the 6809 was getting pretty obsolete by then.

I think the Mac in my garage is running some System 8.x version; I got it at Weird Stuff for $50 around 2000, since my mom was still using her Mac Performa 630 (pretty much the last 680x0 Mac.) She also had a classic Mac, which she was keeping around because some applications never did survive the transition from System 6 to System 7.

I've just started playing with Arduino microcontrollers recently - 8 bits, 8-20 MHz, 32KB flash, a couple of KB of RAM and EEPROM, and a serial or USB port depending on card version, and I2C would be a reasonable substitute for the S-100 bus. It wouldn't be very practical, but you'd get mega blog cred for it.

PDP-11s weren't my first computers, but they were the first ones I used that actually had an operating system as opposed to a plugboard full of wires on the side. My high school had a teletype that dialed up to a PDP at the university that we shared with a dozen or so other schools, and we ran various DEC flavors of BASIC on it. At one point, somebody learned the trick of using uninitialized virtual memory to find unerased disk block contents, and we poked around enough to find an old copy of the password file, which we used to hack into other accounts. It didn't actually get us much, because most user file storage was on paper tape, but it let us feel badass about it.

When MS-DOS came around, after I'd been using Unix for a couple of years, it was easier to deal with DOS's alleged friendliness by thinking of it as RSTS-11 with the useful commands missing.

I was a lightweight user of VMS, using it to get data from some data acquisition systems over to Unix where we'd do the real work, and while some things were annoying (like the file naming system that appeared to use a different syntax for every level of directory hierarchy, instead of / for everything), the versioning system was useful and the help system made it extremely easy to find most common tasks. It's not a substitute for Unix man pages, but man pages aren't a substitute for VMS help either.

My other exposure to VMS was as a VAX sysadmin; I occasionally had to swap the VMS disks on to the VAX to run diagnostics before calling DEC field circus, since they didn't speak Unix.

Ours goes up to 36 !

ObXKCD reference