Every so often, people in my line of work are surprised when users andother people don't take security seriously. However, we reallyshouldn't be, for a simple reason: security is a pain .

Almost always, computer security means extra work that you have to doand things that get in your way; hoops that you have to jump throughbefore you get to what you really want to do. Is it any surprise thatpeople don't like it and avoid it when they can?

As a followup to my SBL rejection stats , hereare similar numbers for the XBL (which includes the CBL as well assome other sources). Like those stats, this is based on connection timerejections over the the past 28 days and change.

The basic stats are reasonably striking: over that time period, werejected 34,000 different IP addresses. 13,500 of them (over half) arein the XBL now. (They may or may not have been

The other day's entry on why Perl is not my favorite language produced an interesting comment exchange between me and a friendthat touched on how transparently Perl can embed data structures inother data structures. (In specific, that one can't transparentlyput aggregates, lists and hashes, straight into and out of otheraggregates.)

Why does this matter? Because every time you have a lack oftransparency with data structures, you have to be aware of the actualtypes that you are working with. Being aware