Raw Matter

Christian, I used to block quite aggressively (essentially blocking all IPs sending me spam for a few months) and remember seeing free.fr very, very often. Apparently this was before the block outgoing port 25 policy — I just had a grep through my log and see almost no spam coming in from free.fr. So, as I've said just recently, this is a note to all ISP: please, please, please block port 25! (ISP who don't offer unblocking will obviously lose the techie clients, but that's their own thing to decide...)

It has been mentioned very often, but xkcd captures this idea perfectly: face to face meetings help. (This is no comment on any conversation that might be going on right now, it's just the most recent cartoon.)

Watched De Grønne slagtere (great black comedy even if it moves a bit slowly. I think if you have to chose you'd better watch Adams æbler with which it shares writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen and a big part of the cast).

And this just has to be said: I can't believe anybody could call eXistenZ “quite a good see”. One of the worst movies I've ever seen, on a level with “Tweed” (a late 90s Bond parody I distinctly remember having seen but can't find on imdb right now.) I agree with Adeodato's assessment of Billy Elliot, though.

For once, the the action of an otherwise stupid ISP, namely blocking port 25 outgoing, was probably the right thing to do. Yes, in comcasts case, it apparently was communicated badly, and of course you have to be able to get it unblocked easily, but I think if all big providers would either block 25 outgoing alltogether for their consumer offerings or would block it for hosts they see spamming (pattern: smtp connections to more than 20 hosts within one minute perhaps?) the world would be a better place.

OTOH spammers are already reacting: the percentage of spam I'm receiving through regular MXen (as per reverse DNS), including Yahoo and Google, (but not gmx so far, interestingly) is increasing markedly these months.

Errors were encountered while processing:
 debian-policy
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

(I haven't looked closer yet, but I had to laugh.)