via ted leung it seems that Paul Graham has a new article about spam. it's called Filters that Fight Back and is about making spam filters that proactively increase load on spammer's servers and try to give good reason for them to knock it off. - ted leung writes, "Basically the idea is to turn spam messages into a Denial of Service attack against spammers by making spam filters pound any URL's embedded in messages determined to be spam. I love it." - (james warns that ISPs may not be so fond of this idea.) - an excerpt from Paul...#

"Would that kill spam? Not quite. If auto-retrieving spam filters become widespread, spammers will make sure to include working unsubscribe links in their mails. It will be the only way to get these filters off their backs. So spam would still get sent, but only to people too clueless or too lazy to to use auto-retrieving (and thus auto-unsubscribing) filters. Since this is exactly the audience most spammers want to reach, the end result, ironically, would be to transform spam into one of the more precisely targeted forms of advertising."

james a robertson has ideas for improving aggregators, specifically his, one idea - "Add a discuss this! option that takes you off to an IRC channel or newsgroup. The question here is, which one?" - there's already a 'commentsUrl' in RSS (something) right? I ponder if the !(Atom/Pie/Echo) thingy will have a 'chatroom' - irc://irc.freenode.net/#je_apostrophe anyone?#

madpony - "taking an apartment "as is" means also accepting a dryer that will never work, footprints on the walls, and burritos left in the microwave by the previous tenants. and i won't even mention the tube of ky jelly. oops." - are bachelorettes of the weak#

carly - in high school she wrote soap operas with the new vocabulary words she had to learn - i used to write really terrible poetry and send it to my pen pal - and in regards to her question, i hope not!#

don park is a great imaginist, this time it's about a "Living IRC Server" - "Living IRC Server is an IRC server enhanced with AI and designed to strive for survival. For a server to survive, it must be useful. To be useful, IRC server must encourage participation, enhance user experience, and market itself using allowed mediums like web pages, feeds, e-mail, IM, etc." - currently #joiito has some need stuff, like the "jibot heraldry", but i think service bots like that could be made much more useful - how you ask? - don't ask me i just blindly support the smart guys, ask don.#

russell is very bad ass - " I just ordered my absentee ballot for the special election. If somehow you've gotten all starry eyed, please remember that all Republicans are lying sacks of elitist shit including Arnold Schwarzenegger. " - "Nice to know that the Republicans are still the "dirty tricks" and lies party. Amazing. Since Nixon to Clinton's impeachment to the vote in Florida to finding some 100 year old law to recall a democratically elected leader to redo an election that didn't go their way. These people are vicious. Worse than worms and more rabid than dogs. They're fucking scum all of them." - yess!#

moxie's aunt is the diva of drama - "I waiver frequently on my diagnosis of Aunt Helen's condition. One day is spent wondering if she's a drama queen, the next day if I'm being insensitive and she's veritably ill in a physical sense. Using that tired old idea that anyone living is indeed dying at any given moment -- I've concluded it is the former. [-] I'd say it's Hypochondria but this impending sense of doom spills over onto other family members. " - hypochondria is a bitch#

philip greenspun on driving and hybrids - i find this interesting for two reasons: i want a hybrid, and i hate stop and go traffic so i try to crawl a consistently along so i always feel like i'm moving. - "Traversing a few miles of I-80 here (the Bay Bridge) took 2 hours, longer than flying over the entire stretch of I-80 that traverses Utah (from Wyoming to Nevada). No accidents; just a normal flow Sunday around noon."#

tom coates on journalism and weblogs - the difference between professionals, unprofessionals, and sharing the world between them - "The other difference between weblogs and established mainstream journalism is in terms of the brand - and more importantly the mechanisms that are supposed to lie behind that brand. The trusted brand is supposed to reflect an organisation that makes sure its journalism conforms to good standards of fact-checking, that it is guaranteed to be professional, that it asks the questions that its readers want answered and that if it is not there is a space and a process whereby redress that can be made."#