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10:52:16 PM

Darl is an anagram for lard

...and that, apparently, is what SCO CEO Darl McBride is building his company's long term strategy on--rendered pig fat.

McBride, who a just a year ago was pimping for UnitedLinux and hoping to use SCO's installed base to push Linux into the small and medium business markets in earnest, is now claiming that all his former friends in the Linux community of being orchestrated by IBM in their attacks on his "poison pill" strategy for profits from Linux.

As the "evidence" presented by SCO of infringement on its intellectual property starts to fall apart slowly in the light of day, McBride has resorted to dumping piles of press clippings on stage at SCOForum to prove how relevant the lawsuit has made SCO. And rumor has it that some customers are considering filing racketeering charges against SCO for extortion of licensing fees prior to proof of their case.

So the question is, just who is going to have to use that lard that Darl's throwing around to grease up and bend over?
2:16:25 PM comment[ so far]

spam-slinging websites from hell

I was the victim of some bizarre spam yesterday directed at my work e-mail account. Someone used the neo-con spin site NewsMax' article-forwarding feature to send me an article about how the Democrats in California were assaulting the Constitution, with the message, "Spam this f**kboy." I'm guessing the sender meant the author of the artilce and not me...or maybe they were referring to my anti-spam column?

In any case, the return address the culprit used was the e-mail for The Randi Rhodes Show,a "liberal" talk-radio show on ClearChannel's WJNO in West Palm Beach, Florida. I somehow doubt Ms. Rhodes herself sent me the message...it smells more like someone who'd want to embarrass her. Or maybe she's that stupid? I don't know, really, or care.

What's more interesting, or disturbing, to me is the potential for abuse of sites like NewsMax for spam attacks. While this one was pretty much a blunt-force approach, as far as I could tell, it wouldn't take an amazing piece of coding to create a robot that could be pointed at a site like NewsMax's article forwarding feature to churn out e-mails using harvested e-mail addresses for both the sender and target address. Some script kiddie could wack out something like that in Visual Basic in fifteen minutes, I suspect.

Stopping attacks like that would require webmasters to be able to link the source IP addresses of the spam, and not the sending e-mail address. Some straightforward code could limit the damage--say, limiting article forward requests from a specific IP address within a single day. (Also, having user authentication as a gateway to using article forwarding would reduce the likelihood of a spam engine assault).
10:33:22 AM comment[ so far]