Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

Habeas, an company who sells copyrighted x-header tags, known as “Habeas Warrant Mark” to companies who abide by their rules regarding spam, in return for avoiding spam filters (yes copyrights actually can benefit the internet community). It has a rather large backing from email providers and spam filters. Habeas has recently been under [...]

There’s a new blacklist in town.
Patch for SpamAssassin bug 2889:

===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/spamassassin/spamassassin/rules/20_dnsbl_tests.cf,v
retrieving revision 1.38
diff -r1.38 20_dnsbl_tests.cf
148a149,153
> # XBL is the Spamhaus Block List: http://www.spamhaus.org/xbl/
> header RCVD_IN_SBL eval:check_rbl_txt(’xbl’, ‘xbl.spamhaus.org.’)
> describe RCVD_IN_SBL Received via an exploit in Spamhaus Block List
> tflags RCVD_IN_SBL net
>

Go Me! Simple enhancement, should provide better spam filtering for all.

As the blogging community knows, MovableType (software that powers this blog) has been updated.
I upgraded this morning, and applied a little patch to replace characters such as & with their HTML entities (so the validator doesn’t bark).
If anyone notices an issue with the blog, please contact me and let me know. I don’t think [...]

Here’s my analysis of the new law:
1. More spammers will operate off shore. This means, even more spam, even the bad stuff (child pornography, scam’s etc.) will be out of US jurisdiction. As of now, at least some, comes from places within US law’s coverage. Now it will be less.
2. [...]

Worked way to late last night… well early this morning. Started at 6:30… finished 4:00 (a few minutes early).
It was a bad experience, and I’m not thrilled. I’m quite tired, but that nap I took helped a ton. Will take another later so I can watch South park. Then [...]

Sunday and Monday were great programming days. Got tons of bugs fixed on the MacVillage.net CMS. Started Indexing, that’s now done (partly). Also got some limited search functionality. And tons and tons of stupid bugs, and odd functionality fixed. More than I noted in my change log. A lot [...]

A little discussion with David Bienvenu today regarding spam filtering in Mozilla. Allow me to summarize:
I’m a huge fan of the SpamAssassin project. I use it, and love it. It’s not perfect, but does a great job. SpamAssassin, adds a header to all email it searches, known as “X-Spam-Status” It’s “yes” [...]

They better get the Do Not Call List working soon. Apparently there have been some legal issues.
I can’t stand telemarketers. They drive me nuts. Don’t want to buy anything from some con-artist over the phone. The fact that a company uses telemarketing makes it an invalid company in my mind. [...]

Finally got Net::DNS to compile and install on XP with Active Perl 5.8. Yea for me.
So I’m experimenting with DNSBL. Neat feature, seems to be working well. Still figuring out which lists are best (without slowing down mail to a halt).
Still can’t get sa-learn working properly. But [...]

I will get around to packaging SpamAssassin for Mac OS X one of these days. I got stuck a while back with some other issues with it, but I think they have been smoothed out now. So expect to see something soon. Note I won’t specify a date, but somewhere between now, [...]