Follow-Up:

Several folks wrote to warn me about the dangers of recommending “bouncing” spam back to the senders. To quote Roger Matus, whose company makes InBoxer anti-spam software:

Let me get his second point off the table, just because I disagree with it. Sorry! I just don’t believe that we’re talking about so much bandwidth as to make a difference. (There used to be an organization called the “Bandwidth Preservation Society” that offered suggestions like “do all your downloading late at night when demand is low” and other, similiar ideas. Silly then, silly now.)

But his first point has merit. As the owner of several domains, every now and then I see bounces coming to them — these are bounces caused by some spammer spoofing one of my domains. In other words, the junk looks like it’s coming from, say, whizkid.com, but isn’t. So I get the bounces. That seems to be a good argument against bouncing spam; half the time or more you’ll be annoying some innocent person.

But there is some merit to bouncing, just as there is some merit to that CAN-SPAM Act.

If you look through your spam (yes, that’s like the vet telling you to “examine the animal’s feces) you might notice there are two kinds. Type 1 spam comes from legitimate businesses that have deluded themselves into thinking they have a right to pitch you — maybe they’re the “business partners” of some store you shopped at. These are easy to spot: The subject line is plain as day, e.g., “Get your next car at the price you want!” or “Cheap cigarettes!” There might even be a working “unsubscribe” button and/or a valid postal address in the message.

Type 2 spam is the true, vile junk: Porn, generic drugs, and that ilk. These are the spammers I mentioned in my column that make their money just by your opening the message. These are the folks that hide their real mailing addresses, and that modify the subject line with random characters and other such things to try to fool spam filters.

There is no point in trying to bounce Type 2 spam (at least until someone comes up with a way of tracing the actual sender). It’ll just go to some unsuspecting schlub who’s domain is being spoofed.

But there is hope in bouncing that Type 1 spam. There’s a decent chance, as many of these are legit businesses, that your bounce will go to the right place: a machine that reads it and takes your address off the list, thinking that it’s no good.

So while the people who wrote to say that spam filters that bounce might not be a good idea are partially right, I think there’s a good argument for carefully bouncing your spam.

Normally I post something here at least once a day, but I’ve been busy with all the Holiday Season stuff and thus have been remiss. But I’ll resume posting again soon enough.

Errata and Such::

In my column, I envisioned theives roaming parking lots and scanning the RFID tags of items in people’s trunks. With current RFID technology, that’s not doable: The tags don’t work well through all the metal surrounding the trunk. Stuff in the back seat, however, is fair game.

The image in the column shows an RFID tag next to a quarter. An alert reader (whose name I will add as soon as I find it) pointed out that the picture showed a tag without the antenna. If you add an antenna, the whole package is close to the diameter of the quarter (but flat). That’s with today’s tags; expect them to shrink and shrink.

Coming Soon:

Another alert reader wrote to discuss the differences between various RFID technologies — different frequencies, ranges, etc. There wasn’t enough space in the USA Today column for it, but I’ll summarize it here soon.

So Toshiba unveiled a ‘coin-sized’ hard drive. Neat. But there are a couple of things worth pointing out.

The news articles report that it’s .85 inches in diameter — about the size of a nickel. Actually, it’s the platter that’s so small. The platter is the largest component of the drive, but it’s not the only one. It will still need a housing and thus be significantly larger. Still, it’s a neat accomplishment.

The disks are going to hold 2 to 3 GB of data. According to company spokeswoman Midori Suzuki, that’s enough for about 30 hours of music but not enough for movie-length video.

That’s not true. Methinks Toshiba is concerned about the movie industry — the idea that people could carry a full length movie in that small a space may not sit well. So the company says it’s too small. If you’re talking about DVD quality, that’s true. But people have known for years that Video CD (VCD) and Super Video CD (SVCD) offer VHS-quality video in a much smaller size.

Think of them as the MP3 of video. You can store about two hours of near-VHS-quality video on a single CD using VCD (and it’s playable on most DVD players). For true VHS quality, SVCD will store between about 45 and 60 minutes on a standard CD, including two stereo audio tracks and four selectable subtitles. (Wow.)

A standard CD holds about 700MB. That means Toshiba’s 2GB drive is more than twice the size — so yeah, it can hold a full-length VHS-quality movie no sweat.

For whatever reason, VCD and SVCD haven’t caught on in the States, although they’re huge in Asia (and you can buy videos in those formats). Then again, MP3 took a while to catch on, too.

If you’re CNN and you can’t get a proper news photo, what to you do? You go for “close enough”:

Get this. According to a CNN article…

1. This year’s flu vaccine is the same vaccine as last year. Thus, if you got a flu shot in 2002, waiting on line isn’t going to get you anything except another shot of the same stuff.

2. Your government at work: The drug companies were perfectly capable of making a vaccine to prevent the nasty Fujian strain, but they can’t do it in an FDA-approved way. Thus, no vaccine for the strain that’s infecting 75 percent of people.

Great news, huh?

From a CNN.com article:

“Delegates said that Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, wanted promises of aid if [the] Kyoto [protocol] spurs a shift to renewable energies like tidal, solar or wind energy at the expense of fossil fuels.

Jim Harris wrote to me today to point out an error in my Dec. 12 USA Today column. (Or at least something that needed clarification, depending on how generous you want to be.)

I wrote:

Mr. Harris noted that the black box was not a witness against Congressman Janklow. He writes:

I checked, and I was wrong — that’ll teach me to rely on a single source. It was in fact Janklow’s defense that tried to introduce his car’s black box, not the prosecution. So the box was a witness, just not a witness against him.

Sorry for the error! (Although it doesn’t detract from the story as a whole. Other people have had their car’s black box used against them in court.)

According to an article in USA Today, an Arizona middle school will be installing cameras to record everyone entering the building, then using software to compare their faces to a database of sex offenders and child abductors.

Laying the privacy concerns aside — and they are important, although as a society we seem to have decided that privacy rights don’t extend to schools — this is clearly done for political reasons, not because anyone actually thinks it will make a difference.

Facial recognition software doesn’t work — not with mobs of people in motion, certainly. It’s just not that good. Ask Tampa, Fla., which installed just such a system on some of its public streets. The city removed them two years and millions of dollars later because A) people who actually care about civil rights kept complaining, loudly, and B) there were too many false positives. People were being detained by cops not because they looked like felons, but because some measurements of their facial features matched those of some felon.

Someday cameras might be good enough and computers fast enough for this facial-recognition technology to work. But not today. So right now this seems to be the work of a county sheriff who wants to look like he knows what he’s talking about … but he doesn’t.

Sick today — not writing much. But I got my USA Today columns on the site — see the links at the top left of the home page.

Here’s my great idea for the day: single-use e-mail addresses.

They would work like this:

You sign up with a address company (e.g., “NoSpam.com”) that you give your real address to. When you need to provide a valid e-mail address on a site, you click a button and NoSpam would instantly generate an address — maybe “x43gti@akantor.nospam.com.” Ugly? Yeah. But who cares?

You could specify how long you wanted it to last — ten minutes (for one of those sites that sends a confirmation message), two weeks (for online shopping; it would last till your goods were delivered), or longer.

Let’s say you signed up for something at a site and generated an address — x43gti@akantor.nospam.com. You could set it to last for a long time and note where you gave it. If the address starts getting spam, you could turn it off…and not patronize that site.

(I do this already in a way, but giving out addresses that correspond to the place I’m giving it. For example, I used “nytimes@[a domain]” when signing up for the Times. If spam comes to that address, I know who gave out my address. But this is off the point.)

One-time-use e-mail addresses. You heard it here first.

Francis Heaney discovered that Carvel (the ice cream place, for those of you who didn’t know) has taken its old standby, Fudgie the Whale, and, er, “repurposed” him.

In an editorial yesterday (Dec. 8), The New York Times calls for “a paper trail for voters.”

Welcome aboard.

(Of particular note is that the Times is reminding people of Diebold’s CEO’s comment that he was committed to “helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes” to the President. The more often that creepy little comment can be repeated, the better.)

The new Battlestar Galactica is what I’ve been waiting for. This is it, finally: good science-fiction. Science-fiction that I looked forward to and that didn’t disappoint. Finally.

I learned my lesson from Starship Troopers. I was so looking forward to that movie — the Heinlein novel is wonderful. What did I get? Drek. Garbage. Flotsam. Ditto for Star Wars; once the Phantom Menace turned the Force into a blood disease, it was over.

So I don’t look forward to good sci-fi anymore. I take what I can get.

There just hasn’t been a great piece of sci-fi in quite a while — one with a great story, self-consistent plot, good acting, non-campy dialogue, effects that complement the story but don’t overwhelm it (are you listening, Mr. Lucas?), characters who work well together, and a sense of fun. (Lord of the Rings is fantasy, by the way, not s-f.)

Since Deep Space Nine went off the air, there hasn’t been an exceptional Star Trek franchise; Voyager was pathetic, and Enterprise is… well, it’s there, but that’s about all.

Babylon 5 had a terrific plot — the idea of a five-year story arc was wonderful — but suffered from horrible acting and cliché dialog. Still, I keep thinking that having an arc can make a series stronger. If Star Trek knew where it was going, it wouldn’t have to keep resorting to the Borg.

Stargate SG-1 isn’t bad, but it’s so darned campy. Cute, funny, but campy. And it’s hard to introduce a vast political-military enemy without some kind of arc to hold it together. (You can do an arc without commiting yourself to only X number of seasons; Buffy the Vampire Slayer had one story arc after another; that worked just fine.)

So I sat down to watch Galactica as a big fan of the original series (I was 13 at the time) who didn’t care if it was reworked. I wasn’t expecting much, anyway.

Boy, was I wrong.

This sucker is good. It’s the best sci-fi I’ve seen in quite a while.

The big stuff is good: the story, the acting, the sets. (Man, those sets are wonderful.)

But it’s all the little things they got right that come together: the right touch of Tom Clancy-ish dialogue (”Contact bearing 234-189, speed 7
decimal five, range 601 and closing”). Communications that sounds like it’s actually coming over a radio — warbled and static-y. Directional thrusters on the ships that fire when they turn; they move more like spaceships, not airplanes. Blood. Burns. (Contrast Star Trek, where the only way to know someone is injured is because he’s on a bed in sickbay.)

The writers — here’s a copy of the script — dropped some of the silliness from the old series. Seconds are now seconds, not “microns.” Years are years, not “yahrons.” And the pilots’ names — “Starbuck,” “Apollo,” etc. aren’t their names; they’re callsigns, like “Maverick” from Top Gun.

But there are plenty of tips of the hat to the old series. A ceremonial flyby is done to the old theme music. An old-style Cylon stands in a museum. The curses remain the same, too — “frak” is the classic. And my favorite: When the President refers to Apollo as “Captain Apollo” he replies, “Apollo’s just my callsign. My name is Lee.” And she says, “But Captain Apollo has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?” Well done.

There are problems, to be sure, but they’re small. The same two Cylon fighters seem to be doing all the menacing. When she’s flying, Starbuck seems to be the only one generating any radio chatter. There’s no explanation of how far the Colonies’ 12 world’s are from one another. And the ship’s designation is “BSG-75″ — the initials appear to stand for “Battlestar Galactica” when they should indicate the type of ship. (For example, “SSN” is the U.S. Navy’s designation for nuclear attack subs — “sub-surface nuclear.” So the USS Cleveland might have the designation “SSN-17,” much like Star Trek’s Enterprise was NCC-1701.) But these are minor flaws.

I write this just after seeing the first episode. There’s still half to go — plenty of time for screwups, clichés, hokiness. But after those first two hours, I have a little more hope.

It’s kind of hard not to think that either A) Mars missions are inherantly jinxed, or B) a race of undetected Martians is sabotaging our missions there.

Today, Japan finally gave up on its errant Mars probe “Nozomi.”

Problems with the probe caused it to fly off course, meaning that even if it did reach Mars it would at best crash into the planet. Add to this the loss of fuel and electronics damaged by solar flares, and the mission was scrubbed.

Mars has been a bugaboo for we earthlings.

In 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter burned up on entry because one set of engineers used metric measurements and one used English units. Later that year, Mars Polar Lander presumably crashed on the surface, never to be heard from (probably because of equipment failure). Now Nozomi never made it.

Ouch.

Next up, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express/Beagle 2 (December 26), followed by NASA’s two Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit (January 4) and Opportunity (January 24).

We’ll see.

Eew.

So I’m looking through my Web stats to see who (if anyone) is visiting, and I notice one of my top 10 visitors is coming from “wcs1-moffett.nipr.mil.”

Someone in the military is visiting my site repeatedly? Let’s find out who — or at least where. Turns out I can’t. “Nipr.mil” is apparently “not a single domain but a hush-hush web proxy that acts as a gateway for hundreds of U.S. military domains in order to hide their identities.”

Cool. I think.

So I look a bit deeper and do a search on just “wcs1-moffett.” I found some people associated with it: one David Connelly at “mcchord.af.mil” (Air Force?) in Tacoma, Wash. He posted a message to a site that records where you’re coming from, and it listed him as “wcs1-moffett.nipr.mil.” And Becky Lowe in Utah also came out of that nipr.mil domain. So I can assume that moffett.nipr.mil is out West.

None of this means anything, but I thought it was odd to see 1) that the military has this secret domain it uses to hide servicepeople’s real domains, and 2) that sometimes you can see through it, as with Connelly and Lowe.

The first hit on a Google Search on the term “miserable failure” brings up the White House’s page “Biography of President George W. Bush.”

(A search on “spectacular success” tops off with a ReliefWeb page on the anti-measles campaign in Zambia.)

The high-intelligence New York Post (and I remember when it was a good newspaper) has an article about how Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry used — gasp! — curses when talking about the President.

Says Kerry, “Did I expect George Bush to f–k it up as badly as he did? I don’t think anybody did.”

Twice in the article, the Post refers to Kerry’s “X-rated” language — e.g., it mentions him “attacking [the] president with X-rated language.”

Um… the F word ain’t X-rated. It’s barely R-rated these days — in Kerry’s context (that is, non-sexual) it’s pretty PG-13. Maybe the Post’s editors don’t get out a lot. (Further, he wasn’t exactly attacking the President. Sharply criticizing, sure. But attacking? Nah.

Just had to say that.

According to the Reno Gazette-Journal, the State of Nevada is concerned enough about problems with e-voting machines that it’s going to “enlist the expertise of the Nevada Gaming Control Board” to ensure the machines are secure and accurate.”

Good.

There are several key quotes, but here’s one:

This is an issue getting more and more attention, and that’s a good thing. Blind faith in your leaders or anything, as Springsteen said, will get you killed. Or at least disenfranchised.