Should I wear a helmet?

On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 21:42:07 -0500, Rick Onanian
may have said:

On Tue, 25 Nov 2003 23:25:41 GMT, Werehatrack
ISTR seing that Cox was using some filtering of their own. There may
be a flood that you are simply not seeing. Still, if the tactic's

Possibly, but it still receives nearly zero spam, while 3 of my 5
other cox addresses gather loads of spam. The other two have odd
names.

In other words, the three with "ordinary" names are getting hit by
dictionary attacks, while the two with "odd" names don't. That's
consistent with loads of experience elsewhere.

Some addresses I use from another host demonstrate the odd-name
theory even better; three have the format
while the third has a plural common noun (like
but relevant to my business) instead of a name. The names, all
three of which are common, get loads of spam. The plural noun gets
very little.

This follows a widely seen pattern; dictionary attacks result in
precisely this pattern.

In short english for attention-impaired and technophobes: Put
something weird after the @ sign; when this works, it prevents the
spam from getting sent. If you put weird stuff only before the @
sign, then the spam gets sent and wastes resources before it's
refused.

Yup.

Now, for my karma feedback: I bet I'll suddenly get deluged at this
address. :/

If you're not getting Swens galore, then there *are* filters in your
inbound stream...and they should continue to work.

--
My email address is antispammed; pull WEEDS if replying via e-mail.
Yes, I have a killfile. If I don't respond to something,
it's also possible that I'm busy.
Words processed in a facility that contains nuts.

On 25 Nov 2003 20:39:59 -0600, Tim McNamara may
have said:

Werehatrack writes:

A poorly-conceived anti-spam law is now on its way to the Senate,
having been passed by the House.

And a poorly conceived Medicare law, and a poorly conceived energy
bill, and poorly conceived tax cuts, and a poorly conceived war. What
else is new?

[sigh] Yeah. Hey, at least Congress doesn't seem to be trying to
pass any laws about bikes at the moment. Let's hope it stays that
way.

--
My email address is antispammed; pull WEEDS if replying via e-mail.
Yes, I have a killfile. If I don't respond to something,
it's also possible that I'm busy.
Words processed in a facility that contains nuts.

"frkrygowHALTSPAM" wrote in message
Hmm. Well, whatever I do doesn't seem to work, including a couple
attempts at munging. I'll admit, I need help. Instructional info welcome.
------------

saproxy does work pretty well, but I've had to add a fair amount of
custom scoring to get the spam down to an acceptable level. I'd be
glad to share the config file if anyone wants it.

your other option is to use a host that can enable spamassassin or
some other filter server-side to eliminate the download.
affordablehost.com for instance; I've had *pretty * good luck with
them for the last couple years for a fair number of accounts.

d

Rick Onanian wrote:

Carl, I'm _beginning_ to believe that I _may_ have been mistaken.
Between that example and your earlier suggestion that this thread
would rank high _and_ be seen first by a new user _and_ make such a
user want to reply _and_ make them want to overexcite their story
_and_ CF gets schittloads of new users...

Hey, what's with you guys?

I'm not Benjamin Weiner.
I'm not Carl Fogel either.

:P

--
Benjamin Lewis

A small, but vocal, contingent even argues that tin is superior, but they
are held by most to be the lunatic fringe of Foil Deflector Beanie science.

Werehatrack writes:

On 25 Nov 2003 20:39:59 -0600, Tim McNamara
may have said:

Werehatrack writes:

A poorly-conceived anti-spam law is now on its way to the Senate,
having been passed by the House.

And a poorly conceived Medicare law, and a poorly conceived energy
bill, and poorly conceived tax cuts, and a poorly conceived war.
What else is new?

[sigh] Yeah. Hey, at least Congress doesn't seem to be trying to
pass any laws about bikes at the moment. Let's hope it stays that
way.

Isn't TEA-21 up for re-authorization?

Werehatrack writes:

If you're not getting Swens galore, then there *are* filters in your
inbound stream...and they should continue to work

My ISP uses Postini which has trapped, by my estimate, about 10,000
SWENs so far. I get a couple hundred a day give or take. The one
downside with Postini is that you can't delete all the virus-laden
e-mails with a single click, whereas you can dump all the junk mail
with a single click. You can only dump the virii 10 at a time.
Someone was asleep at the design end on that. I've e-mailed them to
no avail, so now the SWENs just sit there and I don't deal with them.
Postini seems to expire them after a time.

(dan baker) writes:

"frkrygowHALTSPAM" wrote in message
Hmm. Well, whatever I do doesn't seem to work, including a couple
attempts at munging. I'll admit, I need help. Instructional info
welcome. ------------

saproxy does work pretty well, but I've had to add a fair amount of
custom scoring to get the spam down to an acceptable level. I'd be
glad to share the config file if anyone wants it.

your other option is to use a host that can enable spamassassin or
some other filter server-side to eliminate the download.
affordablehost.com for instance; I've had *pretty * good luck with
them for the last couple years for a fair number of accounts.

Server-side options are nice since they reduce the downloading of spam
and such. People should be pressuring their ISPs to deal with this,
IMHO.

Another option would be to get a mail client with built-in Bayesian
filtering, such as Mail in OS X 10.2 and above. A slightly different
and less self-adaptive option is a mail client with scoring that can
be set to score spam articles in such a way that they can be
auto-deleted. Gnus can do this (part of Emacs) but there are
certainly other options.

Rick Onanian wrote in message . ..
On 25 Nov 2003 16:06:44 -0800, (Carl Fogel)
wrote:
Either Rick was the victim of a hideous deception fostered
by the might shaft-drive oligarchy, or else some of our

Aw crud. Now the shaft-drive oligarchy is trying to give me the
shaft!

That's a pretty terrible bug if it's real, although it could be that
the message in question was written by a fake user that was created
for the helmet thread, and just used elsewhere [possibly to build
credibility].

Carl, I'm _beginning_ to believe that I _may_ have been mistaken.
Between that example and your earlier suggestion that this thread
would rank high _and_ be seen first by a new user _and_ make such a
user want to reply _and_ make them want to overexcite their story
_and_ CF gets schittloads of new users...

But it still seems fishy. Also, why would their admin censor this
thread unless _they_ thought something fishy was going on?

_Did_I_include_enough_underscore_emphasis_?

Dear Rick,

Actually, it was Benjamin who explained that cycling
forums can list the most popular thread first where
it would be seen by new users.

As I've been pointing out in another post that you
haven't seen yet, there are at least half a dozen
examples of this bug lying around in rec.bicycles.tech.

It's not a "terrible" bug unless you worship signatures
or leap to frankly absurd conclusions.

Which is more likely?

A bug in a nefarious scheme to put up a hundred posts in
a frankly largely ignored backwater like rec.bicycles.tech
(neither popular compared to cycling forums nor "scientific"
in even the loosest sense of the word)?

Or a bug in ordinary software trying to pass crap back and
forth from what I'm constantly reminded are not "chat rooms"?

(This, of course, is not a chat room, any more than
my nephews played with dolls. This is a newsgroup
without a trace of news, and those toys, I was assured,
were "action figures, uncle Carl!")

What seems fishy? That lots of people write in and
disagree with a few--well, let's call them overconfident
rec.bicycles.tech posters? "Overconfident" sounds better
than paranoid.

There may be people on the list who posted under fake
names, but where's any evidence? Where's any plausible
motive? Who is organizing this conspiracy? Pick a name
on the list and explain how the post connected from it
differs in any important way from yours or Chalo's posts.

A screwed-up signature? Aren't these the people that
you all despise as incompetent newbies?

A too-simple story? Again, aren't these the people that
you all despise as newbies? And they aren't claiming
to have scalps an inch thick on top, so it's amusing
to read Chalo's literary critiques.

They all come from a place that kept quiet before?
This sounds like Apple explaining why PC's can't
ever take over. It doesn't say much for the judgement,
experience, and analysis of the group claiming that
a wild astroturfing campaign is occurring that they
seem completely unaware that their little group is
vastly outnumbered. Frank's last post suggested that
he was still living in 1994, when rec.bicycles.tech
may well have dwarfed cycling forums.

As for the thread disappearing, I haven't heard back
from the sysadmin yet--and his answer might be a
polite silence, if he cut things off to get rid of
a lot of nasty assholes calling everyone from his
forum a pack of liars. That's what moderators do.

But it may turn out that there was some kind of
fraud going on. Or that the thread was simply too
large for a creaky system--they restrict searches
to one every 30 seconds over there, and various
options turn out to be disabled by the sysadmin.

What evidence of dishonesty in the thread is there
that you'd be willing have brand you as a liar?

Carl Fogel

In article ,
(Carl Fogel) wrote:

Ryan Cousineau wrote in message
...
In article ,
Benjamin Lewis wrote:

Carl Fogel wrote:

With luck, I'll be able to post from there to test
Benjamin Weiner's suggestion about buggy signatures.

Are you talking about me?

Either way, it's all about the Benjamins.

Dear Ryan,

It very nearly wasn't.

At one point during my sleepy typing, Rick Onanian
was almost accused of being Fabrizio Mazzoleni in a
note next to where Frank's email change was explained.

Rick, Ryan, you all start to look the same with a
sack over my head.

Charles Fogel

As a rule of thumb, computers should be treated like heavy equipment:
operate with proper training, and never while intoxicated or tired.

Information Superhighway joke goes here,
--
Ryan Cousineau, http://www.sfu.ca/~rcousine
President, Fabrizio Mazzoleni Fan Club

Ryan Cousineau wrote:
: As a rule of thumb, computers should be treated like heavy equipment:
: operate with proper training, and never while intoxicated or tired.

no way on all three points. in grad school i did some of my best work
sporting a nice guinness buzz. of course it required a once over afterwards
and it was fortran but the inspiration was there. tired? i was always tired.
i worked 80 hour weeks. that's what caffeine was for. proper training?
ha .. if i needed proper training to do my job i'd never work again. there's
no time to train people and not needing to be trained is a prereq job skill
in tech these days.

of course i'd tell my dad what you just said to get him off the phone so i
could get back to bed if that's what you're getting at.
--
david reuteler