alfa.org.uk

This is a talk that Cory Doctorow (from the EFF) gave the other day to Microsoft. He explains very clearly and very articulately why DRM is one of the worst ideas of the late twentieth century. You should read it.

Especially if you don’t know what DRM is.

Because it seems to be fashionable to declare your opinion one way or the other on this one, I Have A Theory™ about who Belle de Jour is.

Well, not really a theory, more a “I wouldn’t be surprised if that who it was”-type feeling.

I reckon BdJ is actually Anna. I have no real evidence for this other than:

• They both live in London
• I think Anna moved to London about the same time BdJ started
• Anna hasn’t been posting much lately - too busy writing a book? ;)
• Both clearly well-read - I can imagine Anna reading Private Eye (BdJ did a spoof E. J. Thribbs poem)
• Both not exactly technical - Belle struggled with an RSS feed, Anna has never had one on her site
• Something about the writing style rings a bell.
• Both excellent, excellent writers (and if it’s not you, Anna, you can take it as a compliment that your writing is as good as Belle’s…)

So there you go, that’s what I reckon.

Whilst considering this, I came up with another strategy to “out” Belle. I’m fairly convinced that whoever is Belle already has another blog - probably well-known to those in the UK blogging scene. So maybe some correlation could be done between posting times of Belle and other UK bloggers? Take some standard deviations of the differences in posting times and see what comes up? This relies on Belle and the other weblog being posted to one after the other… Possibly a good metric, possibly not. You could get some pretty graphs out of it and see which lines look suspiciously similar…

Today, my spam filter is catching spam where the From: header contains my email address.

So the stupid spammer is including the person he’s forging email from on the To: list!

It defies belief.

This is possibly the most annoying thing ever.

Spammers are vermin, as we all know. They use devious and evil tricks to deliver their spam, breaking laws in the process. One of these things is the forging of email headers.

I have just started getting loads of email bounces landing in my account. Some stupid spammer has started using my domain name in the Reply-To: header of their junk.

This means that when the spammer sends spam to a dead email address, instead of the bounce coming back at the spammer, instead, it lands in my inbox. Bastards bastards bastards.

And there’s nothing I can do. Well, apart from be more aggressive with Procmail to try and filter the crap out.

40 bounces in the last hour, and counting…

I am not worthy, Noah :-)

Noah Grey is back. It’s been a long wait, but worth it.

The Internet just became a brighter place :-)

Okay, let’s see if this thing is turned on…