I didn’t let Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas sit on the shelves very long before I picked it up, and I’ve been joyfully soaking in Los Santos and its surroundings for days now. As will previous incarnations, this title starts briefly in Liberty City, but quickly cuts over to the Compton-inspired streets of Los Santos, where CJ learns that his old street gang is on the decline, and his reputation in the ‘hood is ruined.

The most important thing in GTA:SA is to be down. Sometimes you need to keep it real, but mostly you need to be down. A state of downness can only be achieved when properly strapped. One can be down in a stolen minivan, BMX bicycle, or tricked-out pimpmobile with slammin’ rims, but you must be strapped to be properly down. If you are insufficiently down, you cannot call upon your homies to roll with you for a drive-by. If you think you’re down, but you aren’t strapped, you’ll find yourself wasted or busted, and quickly realize that you weren’t really down to start with. Talk to Emmet if you find yourself not-strapped, keep it real, and you’ll be down again in no time.

Additionally, it’s important to remember to eat in GTA:SA. Don’t eat too much, or you’ll get fat. Not phat, just fat. You’ll still be down, and you can still keep it real, but you don’t want to be fat, do you? Spend some quality time at the gym so you can be strapped, down, ripped, and keep it real. Make sure you’re showing the Grove Street colors at all times, so everybody else can properly assess how down you are.

Don’t hesitate to use a bicycle if you need to get somewhere tricky; when properly motivated, CJ can scale extraordinarily-steep slopes on a bike, and is less likely to get himself killed by hitting a telephone pole than on a motorcycle. Riding around town on a bike can help keep up your stamina (handy for chasing down punk-ass ballas) and prevent you from becoming fat. The only real downside of the bicycles is that you can’t get three Grove Street homies to shoot random passers-by from the stunt-pegs on a BMX.

According to a report in The Register, Motion Picture Association lawyers succeeded in getting Icelandic law enforcement to crack down on twelve internet users that allegedly were distributing copies of movies through DC++. After the raids, Iceland’s total ‘net usage dropped by about 40 percent. Wow. We knew that the internet was all about porno and piracy, but this is just plain silly.

Unsolicited Bulk Email, pernicious blog comments, and solicitous private messages have been on the rise for a long, long, time, and a great many people have put a lot of thought and effort into creating effective countermeasures. These have had varying degrees of success on an individual basis, but when combined, it is possible to lead a reasonably spam-free life on the internet. Here are some of the countermeasures I personally use:

• SpamAssassin

  This is what amounts to an advanced procmail filter that tests all incoming mail against a known set of spam characteristics. All headers, as well as the body of the message itself, are considered in these tests. SpamAssassin has had a big hand in reducing the overall quantity of spam delivered to customer inboxes at my ISP.

• MTA Filtering

  Another server-side countermeasure used by my mail host, testing all inbound mail against a variety of blacklists keeps mail from known sources of spam from even being accepted in SMTP. These include the MAPS RBL, the SBL, and others.

• Thunderbird’s Junk Mail Controls

  Thunderbird, the stand-alone Mozilla mail client, has an excellent junk-mail system that is easily trained to scoot anything that slips past the server-side filters into a little junk bin.

• MT-Blacklist

  A handy plug-in for the Movable Type package that I use as my CMS on this and a couple other sites. MT-Blacklist scans through recent comment submissions and looks for addresses that are known to use comment spam to generate Google-juice. A lot of online poker sites have been polluting my comments lately, so I’ve introduced a little regular expression to kill any comments that look like a casino.

• Windows XP SP2 Firewall

  Not the be-all, end-all of computer security, but it keeps casual probes the heck away from my system. It is extremely easy to configure, and unlike some other software firewalls, it actually turns off when you tell it to. Microsoft has a lot of work ahead of itself to build any real public trust in regards to computer security, but this is a step in the right direction.

• Hiding behind NAT

  It’s a lot harder to catch you if they can’t find you. Various messenger programs are susceptible to random announcements from spammers. This way they’re sending the spam to a router, not my computer screen. It also helps me feel a little more comfortable with only the SP2 firewall as my software protection.

• Maintaining a spam-trap mailbox

  I don’t go out of my way to hide my real email address, but I certainly don’t need every webforum or internet vendor pummeling me with what they think are legitimate, opt-in advertisements. I check this mailbox when I’m expecting a receipt or registration confirmation.