Sander’s Weblog

Happy New Year everyone! Have a great 2007.

SpamAssassin’s Justin Mason comments on a talk by one Joe St. Sauver about the Spam Zombie Problem. Joe has some good points, but I’m afraid his proposed solution—a government-issued, free cleanup disk to be applied to infected PCs—won’t cut it.

Joe even contradicts himself in his slide show: first he assesses that the average owner of an 0wned PC does not have the motivation, or wherewithal, to clean up their infection, they are unwilling to pay to have this done and ISPs can’t be expected to help out their users since it’d take hours to properly clean up a zombie PC. However, a cleanup CD to me seems not only a hard sell to the general public, but it also looks like something easily obtained by the bad guys, who can then code around it. Malware can be updated in minutes through its natural distribution medium; good luck updating a stock of CDs sitting at every post office and library.

Nevertheless, Joe makes some interesting points such as:

• The vast majority of SPAM e-mail is now delivered through virus-infected PCs (zombies) owned by the general public
• Said general public has no compelling interest in cleaning up their machines
• The zombie PC problem is out of control
• This is a world-wide issue
• Something needs to be done

However, what can we do about this? I agree with Joe that rate-limiting e-mail from consumer PCs and cutting off their direct-to-MX SMTP path is not enough. I don’t use AOL, but I’m sure their widely advertised move to make antivirus software available to their customers for free is in their own best interest. The $250 tax credit Joe proposes seems to me merely a shot in the arm for Dell and Microsoft… especially the latter would love to see the masses upgrade to Vista forthwith. Speaking of which, what exactly does Vista bring to the table in this regard?

Rich Bowen remarks that he sees Apple Mail flip recently read messages randomly back to unread status. I am seeing this too and it bugs me.

I searched Apple’s support discussion forums and turned up a discussion on this very topic. It seems the Apple engineers blame the issue on ambiguities in the protocol standard, but one would expect that at least between Apple’s own .Mac mail the client-side and server-side interpretations of the standard would lean the same way.

Another interesting data point is the closing post of the thread, blaming the GPG plugin. I, too, have that installed. I may pull it and see if the problem goes away. I think Apple should support PGP directly in Mail.app anyway, right alongside S/MIME.

The Apache Community Site shows information on Apache committers, the projects on which they work and their approximate geographical location. When I entered my info, I didn’t want to point to my house for privacy reasons. I initially used my office in downtown San Francisco, but when that job went away and I started working from my home office, I needed a new location. And what would be a better place than the back deck of Sam’s Anchor Cafe?

So, that’s where you go when you call up my location and zoom all the way in. We happened to be there today for lunch and had a great time. Great weather (we took the convertible), great company (the Garrous, who have lived in town for a year now), great food. On a whim, I ordered the onion ring appetizer and they were delicious. How often do onion rings turn out to be soggy, over-fried, a general disappointment? Not these. They were sweet, crispy, with a crust that did not even taste of deep frying fat and a delicious blue cheese dressing for dipping. Yum.