Pan Admun Republic of Western Blog

After the Tremblant trip last week, I decided to do more snowboarding there before the end of the season.

So, I returned this week with a co-worker visiting from China. This week also is the Spin Symposium, we hang around by the super-pipe to see the female qualification round. There are also a lot of people doing big jumps like flips, grabs, 180, 360..... it's just fun to watch from the chairlift.



Big Air Jump
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So, they put up a billboard in Times Square at NYC that people can call and play video car racing game on it..... it's Yahoo! autos ad.

Wireless technology plus location specific service is starting to come into our live. In Europe, I heard you can buy pops using your wireless phone, simply dial and punch in the code. They charge you and the pop drop out of the vending machine. In Hong Kong, you can send SMS to your favorite singer live on TV and ask them questions or dedicate song to someone, with a small fee. Even in Ottawa, now there is a Bell mobility service that provide traffic condition on 417.

Developer will eventually find that "killer" app that get us all crazy about wireless here in North America, may that be a mobile game, information guide, real-time news, or whatever. With the integration of GPS onto the phone, content provider can determine the location and feed the user targeted information. This, couple with data service, sure can help drive the traffic and adoption of data. But cost of data Internet is still the biggest factor at this stage.

Video Gamers Race On Times Square Billboard

Alright, the Asus TV FM card finally arrived.

I installed it on my server, recomplied the kernel with some patches, download and install the Philips saa7134 driver. The driver is able to load now, but there seem to be some configuration problem that xawtv did got any channel..... hum, need more debug.

My plan is to get the server to schedule, record and compress TV shows, stream TV real-time over the network.

Cool, eh?

Damn, if I can get it works with digital cable that will be perfect.

[update]
So, I upgraded to Fedora core 2, which has the 2.6 kernel that include the driver. I was able to load it, but yet to try recording with it......
[/update]

!++0,1,Don't you love me anymore?,Yes,No,I do not care.....++!

I just upgraded to 2.5 CVS, where a lot of bugs were fixed. It includes the prev/next links and search functions.

It's cool!

Hello

So, it's been at least 10 years since the first spam appeared on the Internet.....

Yes, this topic has been beated to death so many times by now. But I thought I can used a summary on battling the lunchie meat.....

Email is transport on the Internet using a protocol called SMTP. Security is not a great concern in the design of SMTP. In fact, one used to able to telnet to the SMTP port (port 25) and send a email spoofing as someone else. Sendmail and etc fixed this problem now, but it demostrates the lack of authenication scheme in SMTP to verify the origination of a message.....

Than they open up the Internet for business, and spamming becomes an "industry" by itself. There just a "market" for it and cost is low. It invaded Usenet, violated the WWW, brutalized SMTP, and causing a lot of grief on the cyberspace.

In the early days, users were fighting back by complaining to the sys admin and most of the time it will be taking care of. This usually mean the offending party is warned and blocked off/suspended. But as spamming become overwhelming, most users get tried of it and stop complaining. It is futile to report 100+ spams on your mailbox everyday!

On the other hand, spammers become more and more evasive, they spoof with non-existing email address, use badly configured domain to relay their spam, and now even using virus/worm/trojan/p2p to create a distributed network of spam zombies to avoid policing from their ISP and lower cost.

As everyone is getting tried of the situation, many solutions are developed or proposed to battle it.

• Client-side mail filter that drops spam as they are downloaded from the ISP. Many difference algorithms are developed. (e.g. Bayesian, rules-based)
• Server-side email gateway software/managed service that inspect mails before deliver it to the recipient.
• White/Black list that only accept known good originators and reject bad guys.
• Regulation effort to outlaw spamming on the Internet.
• Challenge/response scheme, a challenge is sent to sender if a mail is received on a protected box. No mail delivery to user until correct response received.
• Fix SMTP with sender authenication (e.g. CallerID for email, SPF)
• Taxing the sender in some form.

We know none of these technologies are perfect. The mail filters work in various degree of success. The problem is that spam sometimes still slip though or false positive happens when real messages got dropped. It often need to combine with other techniques to improve the effectiveness. Also, the filter works on the recipient side in a passive manner. It does not cut down on the wasted bandwidth on the Internet.

The white/black lists need quite a bit of management, and it often blocked innocent server/domain. Furthermore, the solution required intensive processing resource.

The legistration path only work in a regional basis. ie. It won't works on all the spam from Taiwan I got on Yahoo mail. Also, policy-maker often not addressing the issue.

The root of the problem is that spammers are sending mails spooling as someone else. And there is no infrastructue in the MTA to prevent it.

To me, the CallerID/SPF is a good direction if it got deployed widely on the Internet. It helps MTA to detect whether a message is sent from a valid user/domain, and block all senders with unknown identity. I believed a lot of spams these days are sent by domain spoofing, which this technology should take care a big part of them.

More links:

• Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, The FTC and Spam
• The Economics of spam
• Comparing spam filters
• Filters that Fight Back
• Spam: The Phenomenon (A very good summary!)
• 82% spam on the net - more bad news