Burrowowl

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.

You’d think that you wouldn’t have to tell a Wizard this, but it’s important to know what your magic spells do. If you select Illusory Wall when you really needed to cast Hallucinatory Terrain, your pointy-hatted spell-spinner may have a short adventuring career in front of him. Wizards of the Coast, every aware that the Dungeons & Dragons rules can never be written clearly enough to satisfy everybody, has dedicated seven webpages worth of clarification on spell descriptions. It doesn’t actually describe the spells, but rather goes in-depth into what kind of information you should be getting out of the spell description entries in the PHB and elsewhere. As we’re coming to expect from the Rules of the Game series, it is quite thorough, and I recommend it for anybody with a burning desire to be even more of a rules-lawyer than I am, or anybody suffering from insomnia. Enjoy!

It must be the season. With the 2004 election bearing down on us, I’ve been seeing Barry Goldwater quotes, references, praise, criticism, and such all over the place. Deguia.net recently quoted him. Repeatedly. Chris Matthews has been digging up his bones on Hardball almost every night. Even Mori has returned from a 10-month posting freeze to pontificate on the significance of Goldwater’s 1964 campaign. I wonder if he’ll get his own Saturday-morning cartoon by November?

Anyhow, State of the American Political Landscape is a worthwhile read.

As mentioned previously, there is a glut of moe anime hitting the television in Japan right now. One of which is a re-hash of a re-hash of a re-hash of the classic Go Nagai series Cutey Honey. The first remake emphasized the fanservice aspects of the title, the second tried to readjust the theme to better fit the Magical Girl craze of the mid-1990′s. This time around, in three 90-minute chunks of OAV glory, we see more of an emphasis on the seventies-nostalgia take on things. The magical-girl elements are still there, and it just wouldn’t be Cutey Honey without fan service, but stylisticly I must say that this one outpaces all previous incarnations of the title.

The story revolves around Honey Kisaragi, the perky daughter of Doctor Kisaragi. After his daughter died, the brilliant doctor created an android in her image. Now this android simulacrum of Honey Kisaragi battles the forces of evil, running around in tights with a sword, occassionally “transforming” into alternate forms. Mostly this involves her current outfit exploding off of her and a new outfit re-forming around her, giving her new abilities. The villains amount to a bunch of monsterous “bosses” and mobs of cookie-cutter henchlings that enjoy wrecking havok on Tokyo.

Add in an uptight police detective, a mysterious-but-charming man claiming to be a newspaper reporter, and a lot of bold, retro colorschemes and background music, and you have an enjoyable, if somewhat shallow 90 minutes of fun. Anime Forever is a group that is fansubbing it for us beigokujin.

Editorial note: at some point, the creators of Cutey Honey material started spelling it “Cutie Honey.” For the purposes of consistency, I am using the spelling I was originally exposed to.