Recent blog entries for StephanPeijnik

Feeding spamassassin with fresh spam cont'd

A few days ago I wrote about how I wanted to attract some spam in order to feed my spamassassin's bayes filter with a lot of 'known-bad' emails. However, until now this experiment has not worked out as I thought it would. Even though links to the page providing the email addresses which are meant to be spammed have been placed on quite a few pages not a single spam email has been received by my system.

I am wondering if I have done something wrong or if those nasty email crawlers simply haven't stumbled across my little page yet. Does anyone have something similar up and running and would like to provide me with some input or tell me what exactly I am doing wrong?

Feeding your spamassassin with fresh spam

Recently I set up a new mailserver and the spamassassin's bayes filter running on that machine has not been feeded with enough spam yet to be working properly. So how would one go about getting that little bugger some usable information?

The way I chose was setting up a special sub domain having both a web and mailserver running. The webserver does nothing but present a robots.txt which basically disallows all access from good web crawlers and for all other requests it presents the requester with an email address. That address is randomly generated and information about the requester stored in a text-file. An email to that address will cause the email to be stored in a special mailbox. A small script in turn issue 'spamc -L spam' for all new messages in that mailbox and so feeds the bayes filter.

I am curious about how well that is going to work, but actually it should attract quite some spam

 

The iPhone is out...

And DefectiveByDesign has sent out an action alert. On his blog Gregory Heller of DefectiveByDesign explains the problems that exist with the iPhone and asks people to take action.

Personally I believe the iPhone is not worth buying. Besides running proprietary software and implementing digital restrictions management it doesn't support UMTS and HSDPA, which are supported by nearly every other phone out there. One should rather call that thing iPodMobileWithTouchscreen if you ask me.

Updating from GPLv2 to GPLv3

As this question has come up earlier I think it's a good idea to point out how to do that.

Your own project

In order to update your very own project (ie. you are the sole copyright holder) the only thing you have to do is:

• Update the COPYING file in your source tarball
• Update references to 'version 2' in your license notices to 'version 3'

Release it - done.

I strongly recommend checking your dependencies!
Don't forget that the GPLv3 is incompatible with GPLv2-only. This means that if you have any GPLv2-only dependencies you cannot update. The best idea might be contacting the owner of the code in question and ask them to move to GPLv3 or 'GPLv2 or later'.

Oh, and by the way, if a license notice does not explicitly state a version of the license you may choose the version yourself - so there is no problem with that.

Other's code

Even though a lot of people don't know that, you may update the license notices and the COPYING file of other packages if they state that you may choose 'either version 2, or (at your option) any later version'.

Last but not least: I AM NOT A LAWYER. The information in this post should be correct though

Happy GPLv3 day to everyone out there.

Today not only GPLv3 is to be released, but the GNU stalkerfs homepage also went online at gnu.org/software/stalkerfs. Have a look and if you are interested in the project, feel free to ask questions on the discussion mailing list.

What proved to be useful for me was the GPLv3 compatibility matrix, which can be found at http://gplv3.fsf.org/dd3-faq. You might want to have a look at it, as it lists how all GPL and LGPL versions are compatible to each other and what has to be done in order to have clean licensing in your project.