Its rolled up again. - out. Actually /. is a waste of fuckin time; make news or report news ?. Shit I think I'll make news.

Well attempted to post my first story as I was concerned that the /. hadn't started a thread on the recent EU expansion. But it didn't make the /. news.

Cool - for Europe that is !. /. community is technical of various kinds and now new common market has opened up which has an incredible diversity of peoples of various capabilities.

Given the billions of regional development funding if you cut code in the US, expect your jobs to be lost to not just Indian or Thai but now former Soviet block eastern countries who are now part of the larger new Europe.

Looks like there's going to be a new type of roadkill on the patch to democracy. US tech workers. If US Steel workers can do it, then time for US techn workers to put up those trade barriers :)

My wife mentioned that when she was at the pub after a work meeting, the others at the pub were quite convinced that Linux people were involved with the MyDoom virus.

She tried to present an alternative view but they were not budging from their (Media driven) point of view.

I know this group at this pub and they are typical of Middle-class working England. Great people but read too much in what the BBC or Telegraph tells them. They are the people that our own President Blair appeals to when he says 45 minutes to launch of Iraq ICBMs/WMD.

I guess we can all thank ....

Graham Cluley ( graham.cluley@sophos.com ) from Sophos for his opinions dressed up as press-announcements and,

Stephen Evans from the BBC for his diatribe dressed as a business commentary.

Opinionated gits. Thats my truthful opinion.

With respect to end-user SPAM that we pick up from pop3 accounts (not commercial SMTP connections) the following is proposed. Its a long solution: read on to the end slashdotters and don't just read this initial paragraph !.

Why can't ISP talk to each other and decide that certain traffic is SPAM. They then send cancel messages (I call it a cancelmaps (spam backwards)) that works like a cancel bot in Newsgroups.

I've since found its called email innoculation. I emailed the guys who are planning a RFC on this and mentioned my email quarantine/delay idea. Hopefully it'll segue into mindspace.

Thing is your mail reader has two tweaks;

Tweak (A) - "inbox delay". This is where emails have a variable delay before they are visible. Though initially I thought that the delay in proportional long according to the spamyness of the spam its also inversely proportional to the size of teh network of email inoculation agents.

Tweak (B) - "cancel maps trust". It has a trust relationship with your ISP or other sin a 'network' so that the cancels from the ISP or other network members are trusted enough to zap the emails from the inbox-waiting queue.

How it works: When a ISP identifies that one of its subscribers is spamming, or that their commercial anti-Spam service e.g. Brightmail, detects that this is SPAM, then the ISP sends to all spammed destination a cancel-maps message that effectively marks the message as spam.

The ISP doesn't have to store much: hash of the content plus other hashed details. Keeps this for a short while e.g. 1 month for each email message. Once spammer reported then the ISP simply sends out cancel-maps messages to all who were spammed.

The trick is to delay how visible email is in your inbox based on its spam metrics. Some email has perfect non-spamminess because the sender is in your address book or you have had outgoing email thats been sent to them. This appears at once. Other email has less quality until eventually its perfect spam. The more spammy it is or the smaller the network then the longer it hides in the inbox. The logic of that is once the commercial email anti-spam companies or the ISPs identify spammers/spam then the ISPs send cancel-maps to whoever got that spam and thus the cancel-map zaps the hidden spam before you waste time on it.

Well thats the basic logic of this. Won't get all spam but will help clean up inboxes at least over time.

Slashdot, like many other technology sites, is taking up too much of my time: stuck in a karma rut. Going to try dicing it out of my life.

If I throw a 1 on Tuesday 12:00N GMT 27th Jan then I'll change the password and delete my email account.

The other numbers: well thats for me to know. *** Big day today - Potentially last update.

Cool dudes: My karma's now excellent.

Whats after that ? Awesome ? God like ?.

Lets find out !.

Latest update - Linux 2.6.3 running sweet !.

Unusually my Linux machine running 2.6.0 kernel hung twice when doing its 4am checkups. Weird - don't know if its hardware or software. Found some interesting applications though: trying Sysstat to continuously monitor loading. See http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sebastien.godard/

Hardware is ABIT BP6 with dual Celeron 500. Its had hardware issues a long time ago with Power supply caps not being big enoiugh - replaced these OK and its been stable. Its on a UPS.

The sar utilities should tell me I hope - they didn't because I put in 2.6.2/2.6.3 and problems went away. I have no idea what the hassle was but 2.6.3 is perfect so far.

Someone from Siloam Springs School District likes me (AFAICG - As Far As I Can Google). Maybe because I've commented on schools agreements etc.

Just thought that why can't Slashdot send a soap or similar trusted message to web servers saving that they are about to be slashdotted ?. Do this when message gets pre-posted (subscribers-only).

If message was signed then this could prove to be a nice trigger for e.g. url re-writing and add an extra lightly loaded page with more complicated drilldown rules e.g. slowly send a GIF which has to be read and then re-typed in to get to the correct URL.

Only needed on slower sites. Just a thought.

I was bored with neutral karma and tried an experiment to be a bad. Basically when drunk, posted stupid thing that would be moderated down. It worked.

Interesting psychological side effects to karma=bad in that I then wanted to make it neutral/good again.

Posted a few nice comments, did some meta moderation and back to neutral. Ah the bliss of neutral karma.

printf("Sorry world.\n");

I don't know why my comment on the US Trade deficit was considered to be off-topic given its true and does cause jobs to be exported. I suspect this was given to me by someone who had a few moderator points to burn but didn't have the time. Alternatively they maybe just some US Federal paid flunky to spike any story on trade issues or the deficit off the agenda ! You know who you are.

Have bittorrented Mandrake 9.2 GPL edition - I now have got something back for my Silver membership. Roll on Mandrake 10 with the Kernel 2.6 and Samba 3. Now thats gonna rock.