The Computer Science department is strongly against rejecting email justbecause it might be spam (at least by default); enough people wouldrather sort through spam than risk rejecting legitimate email. Peopleare willing to have known viruses removed from their email (althoughnot executables in general).

(For clarity: the weekly spam summaries I do are not for CSLab's mailsystem.)

I once summarized CSLab's general rule is 'thou shalt not reject emailjust because it smells bad'. We can reject email

This week, we:

• got 15,188 messages from 253 different IP addresses.
• handled 21,573 sessions from 1,281 different IP addresses.
• received 238,853 connections from at least 71,848 different IPaddresses.
• hit a highwater of 10 connections being checked at once.

Connection and session volume is down a bit from last week . Day to day volume fluctuated up anddown through the week:

I've recently been doing some work on classes derived from list and tuple that fiddle with the behavior of __getitem__ , and ran intoa couple of surprises that I am going to write down so that I rememberthem in the future:

• for the simple ' obj[i:j] ' case, __getitem__ is not called ifthe class has a __getslice__ method. list and tuple both do,despite the method being labeled as deprecated since Python 2.

Consider various server push technologies, where things come to youinstead of you having to seek them out: email, instant messaging,voice over IP phone server, and even text messaging on cell phones.All of them have spam problems (generally growing).

This is not a coincidence. Any server push technology will get overrunby spammers, because server push inherently gives them access topeople and is thus very, very attractive. As a consumer of server pushtechnology, your only recourse from the onslaught is to hide

Long ago, when I griped about Slashdot's redesign ,Oscar del Rio left a comment suggesting that I use Firefox's minimumfont size setting to cut this off. This isn't an approach that I likefor a relatively simple reason: I'm willing to have some text set small,just not the main text.

I want websites to be able to set less important things in small fontsizes, but I don't want them shrinking down the text I'm actually hereto read

The Linux iSCSI project keeps itsdocumentation in a world-editable wiki. I should really say kept,because it's hard to find much usable documentation in the wiki at themoment; most of the pages are overgrown with wiki spam. Some pages havehad a thousand edits in two days , all of them spam. All of this makesthe project's wiki an unfortunately excellent illustration of why mostopen wikis are doomed.

The problem is that there are just more spammers out there automatingtheir attacks than most