Saturday, April 28, 2007

up town top spam ranking

a majority of spam i see is marked as spam these days and refiled into folders (to be later deleted) - in our case, spam assasin seems to be okish at catching most stuff so long as the rules are kept up to date.

so if i posted this spam (its in an MH folder) to a web page, say using mhonarc, titled (say, to avoid confusion) spam, linked off my home page, which is indexed by google, and i then also link to other people's spamhauspages, assuming i can pursuade people to do this, then I could use this to compare, contrast, and improve the spam rules of different systems. of course, there's a sort of equilibirum it would reach (spammers would use the rue sto build spam that would get thru the rules, but then we'd post the new rules next day and the filters would all update....i wonder what the stable level of spam would be if this was done?

reason i suggest this is that, curisoul, google's gmail spam stuff aint that good (it is NOT as good as my spam assasin config, either in terms of false positive or negatives) so maybe cooperative diversity is the solution (well a step, of course, there are no @solutions@ per se:-)

Friday, April 27, 2007

4G whither IP?

attended 4g forum in london today ... interesting panel session with lots of people making cool visionary predictions - but why, oh why, do people assume we have to make money:-) what if it was a public service as well as spectrum being a public good?

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

wireless internet causes cancer and attention disorder scare:-)

Someone had left a copy of yesterday's Daily Mail on the train open to an article by their "Science
Correspondent", Fiona Macrae, about the "possible health risk for pupils" of WiFi in the class room.

The article quoted several pressure groups, and some unnamed "scientists", and asserted that sitting in a room
with a WiFi station could be like being in the direct beam of a GSM Cellular tower at 300meters. This, it was
claimed, could lead to ADHD, Cancer and premature senility.

Firstly, the guilt by association simply by being "radio" annoyed me - WiFi uses the ISM (Medical and
Scienticic Instrument band) around 2.4GHz, not the GSM Cellular bands which means even the vaguest idea that it
might resonate with certain common energy levels in certain molecular links common in biological systems (one of the
pet theories about how GSM might be a problem) is wrong, because its a completely different
frequency/waevlenth. Secondly, its a completely different power level that the user is exposed to:
you don't hold the laptop to your head, and the laptop's WiFi card and the WiFi Access Point (AP)
are roughly symmetric in power terms, whereas a GSM cell tower is much more powerful than a handset.
Thirdly, there are on the order of 100M such systems in the
world, and if there was a significant problem it would have shown up (the article points to increasing levels
of ADHD - this predates WiFi in any case, and is strongly associated with people using computers whether they
have wireless nets or not, and is far more likely to be a symptom of the type of kids that use computers too much,
not of the idea that the computer (or the network) directly cause attention deficit disorders.

I get very annoyed by this sort of article, particularly
because the author has failed to seek any balancing view from an actual, named scientist
which simply smacks of lazy journalism, especially when a few seconds with Google and Wikipedia would find
plenty of information rather than hearsay and supersititon, and might elicit a quote from a neutral person who
has a clue.

By all means, have a further investigation (although there have, contrary to the article's assertion, been
checks on the problems with 802.11/ISM band health risks)....but unsupported allegations are not really
"science" journalism.

Sometimes, I get the impression that people who write these columns in those types of newspapers are
like the PE teachers who used to (in the bad old days) end up being landed with taking the geography O-level class.

Friday, April 13, 2007

wombling: wireless overlay multicast basic long-term internet next generation

plunderground, plover-ground, wombling free....how to avoid top-downitis in next generation architecture research? just don't fund it:)

Thursday, April 05, 2007

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misery me, there is a floccipaucinihilipilification (*) of chronsynclastic infundibuli in these parts and I must therefore refer you to frank zappa instead, and go home