flash_n_burn rom utils, /dev/bios ... resquest

Eric W. Biederman ebiederman at lnxi.com
Wed Apr 21 00:17:00 CEST 2004


"Chris" <linuxbios at rebel.com.au> writes:

> Hi
> 
> I am new to this group and currently in the lurk stage
> 
> but can I pass a comment/suggestion.
> 
> I get a huge amount of spam, and on a cursory glance a lot of the mail from
> this group "appears" spammy
> 
> I am not saying it is, just that when you view the subject lines they often
> appear like subjects designed to foil filtering systems

Subject lines are for humans the other headers are for machines.

> can I suggest a standard element be placed in the subject line such as I
> have done
> 
> that way it will be easier to seperate the linux bios mailings from the spam
> mailings

Look at the List-Id: that should be completely constant.  That is what
I filter by and it makes it trivial.  I filter not to get rid of spam
but to separate the LinuxBIOS mailing list traffic and the linux
kernel mailing list traffic etc.

If you want something practically spoof proof ask for the mailing
list to gpg sign messages.  Then you can be certain the message
at least came from the mailing list.  

I have not seen any spam come through this mailing list.  Or even
spoofed as such.

If you really want to stop spam.  Don't concentrate on the fact
that it is unwanted mail.  Concentrate on the fact that it is
bulk mail, and that it is generally fraudulent.  Detecting mail is
passing in bulk or that it does not have a legitimate source do not
sound like hard problems.
 
> I am also a member of the ASRG "Anti Spam Research Group" and they use a
> system that looks like this
> 
> subject: [ASRG] 3: description
> 
> the number is for pre-organised topics such as 0 = general 1 = new ideas
> etc...

Things like that get extremely ugly when you cross post,
or the mailing system does not recognize your Re: line
so you get things like:

Re: [linuxbios] Re: [linuxbios]
or:
Re: [linuxbios] RE: flash_n_burn rom utils, /dev/bios, ... resquest

And we have a diverse enough crowd we don't get consistent recognition
of the Re: line anyway.  Yhlu I think posts with Chinese character
set which makes things interesting.

Hacked subject lines just clutter up things up.

As for adding numbers for general categories that is just silly.  If
you want to describe what is going on feel free to add:  [IDEA] or
[PATCH] or whatever.  Enumerations with numerical values are just
silly when they are for human consumption.  The next logical step is
to progress forward to writing programs in machine code to give more
control so they are not susceptible to viruses.

Eric









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