I mentioned on Twitter that portionsof outlook.com are now on the SBL .At the moment there are two listings for protection.outlook.comhosts; SBL272953 from October 11th and SBL273948 from October 21st.Both spam samples quotes by Spamhaus show the signs of a null sender,so clearly these people are as entrenched as I thought . Microsoft also has a Hotmail SBL listing, SBL268930 , fromSeptember

One of the reasonably good weapons in the war against spam is nevergiving companies your real, core email address but instead creatingdifferent individualized email addresses for each place that requiresan email address from you. When email addresses inevitably leak orget abused, you can immediately finger the culprit simply by whatemail address the crud is coming in to. If you start getting spamemail to 'you.vendor1@...', well, you know who to blame.

There are a lot of ways to do

There's a lot of status reporting programs out there on a typicalsystems; they report on packages, on filesystems, on the status ofZFS pools or Linux software RAID or LVM, on boot environments, onall sorts of things. I've written before about these programs astools or frontends , where I advocated for writingtools, but it's clear that battle is long since lost; almost no onewrites programs that are tools instead of frontends. So today Ihave a more modest request:

Last week I asked on Twitter if anyone had a good replacement forswish-e for indexing and searching some HTML pages . Severalpeople suggested Apache Solr ;my immediate reaction was that this sounded too heavyweight forwhat we wanted. It was then asserted that Solr is not that heavyif you disable enough things. I had a number of reactions to that,but my instant one was 'nothing involving the JVM is lightweight'.Today I want to talk about that.

I don't call JVM-based things

I mentioned recently that even though I havea negative view of System V, it made its own contributions to Unix.There are a number of technical contributions, but one of theunder-appreciated things it did was simply that System V wasavailable .

The reason that Unix vendor after Unix vendor used System V is inlarge part because AT&T made it available for licensing. Myunderstanding is that it was even licensed on relatively generousterms; it didn't cost particularly much money to get a source license

I mentioned recently that I had founda PS/2 to USB converter that worked for my keyboard, but it mademy PS/2 mouse kind of jerky and stuttery. Over the past few daysI've discovered why that is so, which is unfortunately kind of badnews for me with this converter.

As you might have guessed from my sudden interest in Linux'smouse polling rate , my problemturns out to be that a PS/2 mouse that's run through the PS/2to

I'm behind the times, so I only recently discovered that USB micehave a polling rate, that this polling rate can often be adjustedunder Linux, and that you might want to do so. A good startingpoint for this is the Arch Linux wiki page on mouse pollingrate ,but it assumes some basic background that I had to think through.

The advantage of a higher mouse polling rate is not that your mousemoves any faster. Instead, it is that the mouse reports your motionchanges sooner (

I mentioned recently that I have a blind spot about System IIIand some cultural biases about System V . Well,calling them 'cultural biases' understates things, because it makesthe differences between BSD and System V back then sound like thedifferences between Linux and the *BSDs today. Unfortunately, thesplit was nowhere near that nice. In fact, I'm going to be blunt:for most of its life, System V was a fairly backwards system.

Do you like job control in your shell? System

In light of spammers exploiting outlook.com with null senderaddresses , one obvious question to ask iswhy they bother doing this. Well, that's not quite the right question,because the obvious answer is 'it helps their spamming somehow'. Myreal question is how it helps, and on this I have a few theories.

It's possible that anti-spam systems are more likely to let emailfrom null sender email addresses through than other email, but Idon't really believe this.