Liudvikas Bukys

Tim Bray tries OS X “Mail.app” and Mozilla 1.3beta mail filters, and concludes that this easy availability of
good (learning) mail filters may represent a
Spam Inflection Point.

Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG): IRTF Charter:

The Anti-Spam Research Group (ASRG) focuses on the problem of unwanted email messages, loosely referred to as spam. The scale, growth, and effect of spam on the Internet have generated considerable interest in addressing this problem. Once considered a nuisance, spam has grown to account for a large percentage of the mail volume on the Internet. This unwanted traffic stands to affect local networks, the infrastructure, and the way that people use email.

The definition of spam messages is not clear and is not consistent across different individuals or organizations. Therefore, we generalize the problem into “consent-based communication”. This means that an individual or organization should be able to express consent or lack of consent for certain communication and have the architecture support those desires. Expressing consent is more straightforward on an individual basis; as the solution is moved closer to the source, it is more difficult to express a policy that satisfies all downstream receivers. The research group will investigate the feasibility of: (1) a single architecture that supports this and (2) a framework that allows different systems to be plugged in to provide different pieces of the solution.

Network World Fusion article

Wired News article

websiteoptimization.com: Web Connection Speed Trends – United States Users

Disobey.com::

Dave mentions that NetNewsWire has RSS 2.0 <comments> support in the latest downloadable beta. I sometimes forget how easy it is to add new display data to AmphetaDesk – all current versions of AmphetaDesk could have supported display of <comments> the second Dave rolled the idea off his tongue. Here’s how you do it with the default AmphetaDesk templates. First, open AmphetaDesk/templates/default/index.html with a text editor. Then, look for the following line (wrapped here for clarity):

to_browser(qq{ $item->{description} })
   if $item->{description};

Right beneath it, add one line (wrapped here for clarity):

to_browser(qq{ <div align=”right”>[<a href=”$item->{comments}”>Read the Comments!</a>]</div> }) if $item->{comments};

You can do this with AmphetaDesk open already – once you save the file, refresh your page, and any RSS 2.0 feed that uses the <comments> tag will give you a chance to go directly to any posted comments on that entry. Try it out on Brent’s (of NNW fame) RSS feed.

From Dylan Greene dot com – Blog Comments – XML button created via CSS, with one small addition:

<a title=”RSS 2.0″ href=”rss.xml” style=”text-decoration:none”><span style=”border:1px solid; border-color:#ffc8a4 #7d3302 #3f1a01 #ff9a57; padding:0px 3px 0px 3px; font:bold 10px verdana,sans-serif; color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#ff6600; text-decoration:none; margin:0px;”>XML</span></a>

The ‘ style=”text-decoration:none” ’ inside the ‘a’ element is needed to prevent Mozilla 1.0.1 (Linux) from underlining the text.

Polymer Tactile Sensors
“According to a short article
on betterhumans.com, the latest thing in android skin is the polymer
tactile sensor. Also known as “smart skin”, the sensor is an
inexpensive, flexible polymer material that can conform to the shape of
the robot and provides high spatial resolution and sensitivity. Robots
with smart skin will be able to build maps of tactile contact that can
be used to detect slippage of gripped objects and shape recognition when
touching objects. Research on polymer tactile sensors is being carried
out by Jonathan
Engel at the University of Illnois’ Micro Actuators, Sensors,
and Systems Group (MASS).”

Internet2 ListProc-WWW: Archives for I2-NEWS:
Washington, DC–February 21, 2003–The first higher education-focused Information Sharing Analysis Center today was established by Indiana University through an agreement with the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC). The Research and Education Network Information Sharing Analysis Center (REN-ISAC) operated by Indiana University will focus on the high performance network infrastructure dedicated to research and education. The “National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace” announced by President Bush last week calls for establishing ISACs to facilitate communication, develop best practices, and disseminate security-related information.

New tool puts lid on worms:

“With CounterMalice, information technology administrators can divide their organization’s network into cells and prevent worms from spreading from one cell to the next, said Stuart Staniford, Silicon Defense’s president.”

Spammers hiding behind students
“University networks already stressed by file-sharing programs, viruses and hackers now face a new threat: students who sublet their network access to spammers for as little as $20 per month.”

e i g h t – c u b e d . c o m – RSS 2.0 comment links
This is in support of aggregators that can use these links to post comments back to a site without leaving the aggregator.