You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April, 2007.
I found this rather interesting paper on the rise of spam blogging and the suggested solutions to getting rid of it. It is written by Yi-Min Wang and Ming Ma from Microsoft® Research and Yuan Niu and Hao Chen from the University of California, Davis.
http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~hchen/paper/www07.pdf
There is more about the monthly rise in spam blogs on
http://fightsplog.blogspot.com
I find spam comments and high google rating for spam pages pretty irritating. To find out how these tricks work and that they are now are connected to the ongoing assault of our inboxes is intriguing, although also slightly worrying. Whilst I can see that advertisers and syndicators might have a hard time trying to find and associate with good content on the web, I see that they certainly have a hand in where the WWW will end up.
Ultimately I guess it is all our responsibility not to click spam links and thus not feed the problem.
Whilst I think the rise in the use of SPF (Sender Policy Framework) or SenderID will shift some of the work of fighting spam to DNS, this may cause an increase in DNS cache poisoning as spamers resolve to take over domains with access to certain widely used mail servers. Hopefully DNSSEC and similar technologies can fill the gaps in security.
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I went down to a fairly local pub for the monthly linux meeting. Much fun was had discussing linux issues and installing new linux distributions – Latest Fedora and Ubuntu 7.04 which has just been released. I also drunk some beer, and feel a bit tipsy right now.
This is my first post. I thought I might discuss is the upcoming release of the GNU General Public License. The Free Software Foundation have now reached the third draft and it is looking pretty good.
For those of you who aren’t aware of how the GPL works, the GPL seems to suggest that you can waive certain rights and maintain other rights when distributing creative works. Principally attribution in the work is maintained, but the freedom to copy and modify the work and source material is passed on to any person that receives (anyone who receives the work) and accepts the license. It is used primarily as a software license as source material may have little meaning in other areas of creative work.
There are new clauses on patent retaliation and TIVOisation, but I don’t believe the new draft license goes as far as prohibiting DRM applications.
[P.S. Perhaps I should have mentioned that the GPL version 3 was published on 29th June 2007.]
