Slashback: Pop-Ups, Books, Qmail

Slashback tonight is loaded with updates and addenda to previous stories on Bayesian spam-prevention, pop-up ad blocking, and celebratory picnics as well as an inquiry into the other side of visionary literature. Read on below for the details.

What's your idea of feel-good literature? A few weeks ago, an Ask Slashdot question was posed about the greatest dystopic novels, and quite a few people weighed in with their choices for visions of the post-nuclear, post-germ-warfare, post-natural disaster or otherwise blighted future.

Now reader itwerx wants the other side: "That "Dystopic novels?" Ask Slashdot was so darn depressing we need a counter balance! Let's hear what novels of utopia may not be widely known."

It's certainly widely known, but I'll start the bidding with Atlas Shrugged.

The best revenge is living well, and gluing spammers end-to-end. RealDhar writes "Hey, just thought I'd let folks know that, inspired by the recent article about Paul Graham's Bayesian spam filter work, I went and wrote one for qmail. Please check it out!"

What took so long? Pop-up ads are no fun. iVillage cut them out, AOL swears they're cutting back, and even Netscape 7 can be wrangled to block them. An anonymous reader writes "From the Associated Press (via Salon): EarthLink Inc. said Monday it plans to offer its subscribers software to block Internet pop-up advertisements as part of a wider campaign to set itself apart from competitors. The full story is here.."

Penguins and picnics go well together. ArtEnvironment writes "Besides today's 2nd California Linux Anniversary Picnic previously mentioned, there will also be PLUS, the Philadelphia Linux/Unix Symposium which is the 2nd annual East-Coast Linux anniversary picnic and more, including a bar night kicking off Friday the 23rd, a free computer/electronics swap meet and giveaway on Saturday the 24th, and of course the picnic on Sunday the 25th. Also included is one of the well-known PLUG GPG Keysigning parties. PLUS will be an annual grass-roots event, but it 'won't be big and professional like' ALS or LWCE. ;)"

I look forward to the final, triumphant mention of this :) Qbertino writes "The Blender Fund, established a month ago in order to buy the IP of the 3D Pakage Blender and, at last, GPL it, has accumulated 90K Euro (90K$) of the required 100K in less than 4 weeks. As it indicates on the Website, Ton Roosendahl, father of Blender, is preparing to release the sources which should happen within the next week or so. Time for a Blender icon on /."

Comments

Re:Utopian novels

[1010011010]

"The Number of the Beast," by Robert A. Heinlein

(heh... dirty old man!)

georouting as a procmail antispam rule..

[Greg@RageNet]

I have two procmail rules which work wonders in stopping spam. the first one is a fairly uninventive but nevertheless effective check of a really great RBL. The second is a bit more inventive. By pulling the 'Recieved' headers from the message and comparing the countries the mail was routed through using 'GeoIP' you can make some assumptions about the route. For example. if the sending machine is in the US, relays the mail through Korea, then the mail comes back to the US such an inefficent route can be safely assumed as intended to take advantage of an open SMTP relay... Enjoy!

procmailrc.antispam.txt

-- Greg

Bayes Rule spam implemention *and* seeding

[leto]

Eric Raymond has written Bogofilter that implements Paul Graham's idea. I've created a Badwords list for use with bogofilter seeded with my entire spam collection of four years.

Leto

Re:Panicware Pop-Up Stopper

[Verizon Guy]

I use Bayden PopupPopper. I've tried them all, and found this one to be the least resource intensive. When a site attempts a pop-up, you get a small transparent window that asks you if you want to add this domain to your friends list, blacklist it, or to allow/deny just that popup. It also has a cool feature that will block all popups if you turn on Scroll Lock (Finally a good use for the key, since like Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS, circa 1980s!) Oh yeah, free as in beer.

Re:Earthlink Popup Blocking

[plover]

Yes, you're a troll, but I'll bite anyway.

There are many people who don't know about popup-blockers. Joe and Jane SixPack, living in Farmtown, Minnesota, simply don't know anything different. "That's just the way it is, isn't it?" 500,000 usernames are subscribed to Slashdot. That leaves only 99,500,000 other internet users.

When Earthlink comes around and says "We promise no more pop-ups" this can actually awaken something within them that says "Hey, what a good idea. I'd pay for that." So they do.

Over 90% of the users have EVERYTHING default on their PCs.

A list of Utopias from my senior course...

[zoward]

As a college senior I did an independent study course on Utopias. Here's the ones I remember referencing off the top of my head:

Utopia - Thomas Moore
Dispossessed - Ursula K. LeGuin
Ecotopia - Ernest Callenbech (sp?)
Looking Backward - Edward Bellamy
City of God - St. Augustine
The Republic - Plato
State and Republic - V.I. Lenin (not a utopia per se, but an example of someone trying to implement one in the real world...).

There are a lot of utopias that are not central the book they're in, but are there nonetheless. An obvious one that spring to mind is the Lotus-Eaters in Homer's Odyssey. Mythology has an abundance of them: Shangri-La? Xanadu? Atlantis?

Many of these are a little more historical than the ones I've seen posted so far. In many of them what you're reading is the author trying to tell you that they've figured out what society should be like, and postulating that if we all ran out and implemented their proposed society we'd have heaven on earth. Half the fun of reading them is figuring out whether they will work, or why they won't.