Spam on The Truth Imperative

Warning: This email has been known to cause stupidity by the State of California

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 13:36:00 -0700

I feel it is my moral duty to not let emails full of lies, mischaracterizations, and known misleading or untrue information go by without pointing this out.

When 61% of the country believes in the Noah’s Ark flood story _literally_, between 45% and 70% believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9-11 attacks, and 12% of Americans still think that Barack Obama is a muslim, it is clear that when things get written down and repeated over and over again, it has an effect of changing people’s minds so that they believe things that never happened or are clearly or demonstrably untrue.

SONY compromised?

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 14:50:00 -0800

I noticed that one of the throw-away email addresses I registered years ago for sony style product registration and accessories is now receiving spam. Was sony compromised or did they have an insider sell their addresses? Who knows… I know that I didn’t give it out to anyone…

Postfix Dspam 380 Ubuntu

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 13:13:00 -0800

I have been wrestling with my dspam configuration on Ubuntu for quite some time and think I finally got it set up the optimal way. It took building a custom modern dspam package myself, with the help of a kind soul who built a custom package for Debian etch.

I get tens of thousands of spam messages to my personal accounts each month. And there are many more going to other users at my domain. It has been getting worse recently. This primarily caused me to take more drastic action and implement realtime blackhole lists to block spam from even entering my mail system. It is absolutely stunning to see how much spam gets blocked vs. how much gets in now. I haven’t calculated the stats but on a cursory look at my logs, it is well over 70% that is being dropped on the floor now.