Geeks are not immune to racism
Eric S. Raymond is a celebrity of sorts in the open source world. He is mostly self-aggrandizing, having to his credit a couple of books and two minor email utilities.
A side of him not many geeks are aware of is his frothing-at-the mouth diatribes such as this one. As a person of Indian ancestry, I was tickled by one of the more laughable assertions in this collection of racist and bigoted remarks, that the British somehow "civilized" India, which had highly evolved cities with refinements like sewers in a civilization that dwarfed Egypt 5000 years ago.
British colonialism had everything to do with the extraction of resources through the sheer application of violence (as in their invention of concentration/extermination camps during the Boer war, their ruthlessly efficient genocide in Tasmania, the Opium wars or the Amritsar massacre), not any Kiplingian post-facto rationalizations of a supposed civilizing mission.
I won't dignify the rest of his viscerally anti-muslim prejudice with comment, but this raises an interesting point. Raymond is a techno-anarchist libertarian, and a neo-paganist. As such, his profile looks very similar to that of the Dutch fascist Pim Fortuyn. There was certainly too much indulgence for Fortuyn's racist rhetoric and proposed policies simply because he was homosexual, a perfect illustration of what Bertrand Russell called the "fallacy of the moral superiority of the oppressed".
SMS spam
I just had the unfortunate experience of receiving my first SMS (GSM mobile phone text message) spam. If this happens again, I will have to ask for a phone number change.
10:54 - permalink
Cloudmark SpamNet goes commercial
Last Tuesday, Microsoft Outlook started behaving strangely, exiting silently a few minutes after starting. after a number of fruitless attempts to revive it, I finally realized my Cloudmark SpamNet beta was causing Outlook to exit, probably when checking for updates. I went to their website and discovered the program was out of beta, with a version 1.0.1 out. A less pleasant surprise was that using it now requires a $5/month subscription. This change has already raised quite a ruckus among beta-testers.
Cloudmark's original material did imply the basic SpamNet product would remain free, but I don't mind a subscription plan so much (although I would have preferred a yearly plan to the monthly one they are proposing). The program is extremely effective - when coming back to work on a Monday, I often have over a hundred spam emails waiting for me, and SpamNet will more often than not catch all but a couple or so. This 99% effectiveness is well worth $60 per year in my book.
I will probably not subscribe to their plan, however. What Cloudmark failed to realize is the effectiveness of the program is directly related to the number of users who participate in its distributed peer-to-peer data collection. If most of the beta testers decide to leave SpamNet, its effectiveness will be compromised and thus the value of the program dwindle.
I am experimenting right now with SpamAssassin and the bayesian filtering programs bogofilter (in spite of lead author Eric S. Raymond's racist and bigoted remarks), Annoyance-filter by John Walker (a co-founder of AutoDesk and author of the excellent Hacker's Diet, a.k.a. "How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition") and the Python-based SpamBayes which is available as an Outlook plug-in.
