Poser 4 or Poser 5? You have me highly interested in expanding my collection of George W. Bush doggie-style porn ...

Not quite the place, perhaps, but I bought a copy of Poser recently. (Windows version :( but that's my computing history driving things...) Has this interesting tool to put real faces onto the models, and how long before somebody catches out the press with _that_.

How are your virus-ridden mails going now? My SpamAssasin collected 40M between 9am and 6pm today and missed most of the 'bounces' which meant I was getting a few an hour through my inbox as well.

In much the same way that organic populations without genetic diversity are vulnerablee to disease, the Internet is vulnerable because the operating systems of over 90 pc of the computers attached to it come from a single vendor: Microsoft. And most users of Microsoft-based PCs use Outlook Express or Outlook as their mail client. A little more diversity would help to slow down the spread of such malicious code. If some Outlook Express users were to switch to Eudora (also available as a free download) and some were to switch to some other client, it could go a long way. It would be even better if some Wintel users were to switch to Mac or Linux.

Mid afternoon yesterday, we were trapping 2 per SECOND.

Somewhere north of 22,000 Sobig emails, I stopped counting. I'm using Pine's filters to kill them at the server.

Cory Doctorow peaked at 8-10 SOBIG-F per minute.

I haven't received many copies myself... but someone is emailing copies around with my e-mail address in the "FROM:" header. I have gotten two dozen bounce messages for undeliverable emails containing viruses. Needless to say, I didn't send any of those emails.

If I've gotten two dozen bounces, I wonder how many have gone through with my name on them?

Edited by author 08-20-2003 03:30 PM
This little sucker has been hitting me so bad that I've taken to stopping it via web email rather than downloading 10 to 20 100K pieces of junk per hour. Fortunately I'm running a Mac so it does me no harm, just sucks up time.

The oppressed rise up, and smite the foe:

<http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm...bsection=general>;

Well, okay -- perhaps this is a mere spit in the ocean but then again it might slow to a trickle the diluvian flood of spam... At least, for a while. (A guy can hope, right? ;-)

David

Charlie,

I've deleted 19 pieces of such items out of my inbox, from various sources rannging from Sandy Marlowe at Penny Publications to some guy in the U.S. Army Reserve Command (who I do not know).

I have opened no attachments. Have deleted all messages with extreme prejudice. Same with the spam in the Yahoo Bulk mail box.

Glad I checked your blog, else I'd have thought I was dreaming or something.

Respects,
S. F. Murphy
North Kansas City, Missouri. US

"Wicked screensaver" as a heading -- that's what I've been getting today, then. My ISP (actually, a third party) has been quarantining them, so I haven't had a real problem. Yet.

I've also been getting a lot of notices that messages sent from my address carry a virus.

It's almost certainly SOBIG-F, as described in The Register. "The worm is spreading rapidly". No shit.

Can't tell exactly without seeing your logs, but the big one now is W32/Welchia -- which is supposedly a "white hat" worm that finds machines infected with the blaster worm, patches it, and reboots the machine. But Welchia doesn't have an email vector. W32/Minimail is pretty common right now, it claims to be from admin@, or addresses like that.

On the Gates/Brokaw story, speaking of trivial, it strikes me as odd that the Register would mock CNN for covering a story that the Register was covering. Seems to me they can have it one way (this story is important enough to cover), or the other(left as an exercise for the reader), but not both. (The remaining main possibility that occurs to me is that the Register is taking the rather odd line of promoting itself as the news source with the slogan "We Cover The Boring And Unverified Trivia That CNN Shouldn't!")

Thanks for the polar bear story, by the way (and all the other typically interesting stuff, of course); picked it up for posting from you.

Charlie...seems like you're saying that you prefer misinformation now to reliable numbers later.

The day I first saw the banner on your site, I clicked over and checked out the most recent entry:

20Mar-03Apr - Nasiriyah - air raids
minimum: 226
maximum: 240

And they list the sources. In this case, there are three: The Christian Science Monitor, The Independent, and The Telegraph.

So I went ahead and tracked down the actual articles. Here there are, with the relevant sections quoted.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

"Doctors said they had treated 900 injuries in the past two weeks. They said US aerial raids had killed 250 civilians, all of whom had been brought to the hospital."

From The Independent:

"Doctors claimed that up to 250 people had died and that many had been temporarily buried in a park in the city, waiting to be interred in the holy city of Najaf when the road became safer. But a visit to the park revealed just 12 shallow graves, though local people said that up to 50 people in that area had been killed in bombing attacks."

And from The Telegraph:

"Doctors from the city hospital, who pleaded with the marines for protection, said they had treated 900 injuries in the last two weeks. They said aerial raids had killed 250 civilians, all of whom had been brought to the hospital."

I'll be damned if I can figure out how they got a minimum of 226 and a maximum of 240 out of these media reports. Any ideas?

And I suppose I understand them ignoring the reports in the Independent saying only 12 graves were observed and local residents mentioned 50 deaths. Doesn't it seem a bit strange that if the CSM had included that line, it would only then skew the body count figures to a minimum of 12 and a max of 250?

The problem isn't the reliability or unreliability of the media sources themselves, but of the secondary sources quoted within the media reports. All we have is "doctors said", none identified by name, none verified independently, and that's good enough for the IBCP.

Well, it's not good enough for me, and if you were interested at all in representing the facts, it shouldn't be for you. It's specious and disingenuous. And in this case, no information is better than disinformation.