Spammers don a friendly mask

Spammers don a friendly mask (excerpt)
Stefanie Olsen, ZDNet.com, April 12 2002

...Dan Birchall, executive director of advocacy group the SpamCon Foundation, suggests that recipients contact their Internet service provider to see if it is using proper filters to help stop the forgeries.

"You have to be a little bit skeptical," Birchall said.

(Addendum: I was referring to being skeptical of forgeries, not of service providers.)

No Subscription for Spam Relief

No Subscription for Spam Relief (excerpt)
Joanna Glasner, Wired News, April 5 2002

...In many cases, replies to spam end up going nowhere because the address from which the message was sent has already been shut down, said Dan Birchall, executive director of SpamCon Foundation.

"The odds are very good that at the beginning of their spam run, it'll get reported by someone who doesn't like spam," Birchall said.

He added it typically takes few complaints for an ISP to suspend or cancel an e-mail account.

Intelligence Risks of E-mail Auto-Responses

 (As published in Risks Digest Volume 21, Issue 16)

For some time, I have been associated with organizations that maintained e-mail lists for communication with customers. Each customer mailing generates some quantity of e-mail responses to the mailing address or a specified reply-to address. Heuristic filters handle the most frequent types of responses, generating automatic replies or redirecting mail to appropriate addresses. There are, though, always some messages which the filters can't adequately handle, so my involvement tends to involve eyeballing them.

The workload is by no means immense - for every 6,000 outbound messages sent, I manually handle one response. Some are questions the filters didn't catch, which I pipe to various scripts. Some are bounce messages. Some are chain letters - I grep those for From: headers and bounce them to the appropriate administrators; nothing to spread holiday cheer like a corporate policy smackdown. A good many are auto-responses.

Risks of using HTML Mail and HTTP proxy "censorware" together

(As published in Risks Digest Volume 21: Issue 5)

Summary: Unseen things in HTML mail may trigger HTTP censorware.

First, the data points:

1. Many workplaces, including mine, have HTML-"enabled" mail software on the desktop.
2. Many workplaces (though not as many), including mine, make use of HTTP proxy "censorware" to catch employees trying to access "bad" sites (porn, hate sites, hacking sites, etc).
3. Those sites, like many others, tend to use 1x1 GIFs for spacing and the like.
4. Users who read HTML mail rarely view the source.

Now, the risk:

Hooked on Cellular

Hooked on cellular (excerpt)
Vicki Viotti,  Honolulu Advertiser, July 14 2000


...You'll have to forgive my philosophic meanderings. I find myself between cell-phone contracts and in a mild state of techno-deprivation. It has given me pause, although one of my news contacts out there, a Palolo-dwelling programmer named Dan Birchall, wonders what I'm fussing about.

"My cell phone is probably one of the things I just don't really think about or, when given the chance, try not to think about, anyway," Birchall wrote via e-mail.

Easy for him to say. And Birchall only recently acquired a cell phone, so he may not have had time to develop a full-fledged addiction.

Linux Web Server Clusters Emerge

Linux Web Server Clusters Emerge (excerpt)
David Orenstein, ComputerWorld, August 16 1999

...Brisbane, Calif.-based TurboLinux Inc. is bringing high-availability cluster traits like load balancing and fail-over to basic Web serving, said Dan Birchall, a beta tester of the company's TurboCluster technology at Web hoster Digital Facilities Management Inc. in Haddonfield, N.J. Birchall implemented a cluster that he said has performed well and cost about $7,500 compared with a $75,000 commercial Unix cluster.

Linux To Gain Features For Both Notebooks And Servers

Linux To Gain Features For Both Notebooks And Servers (Excerpt)
Mitch Wagner, InternetWeek, August 11 1999

...Vendors at LinuxWorld introduced add-ons to Linux. Among these was TurboLinux, which introduced its own support for Linux clustering. Any TCP/IP application can be clustered using TurboCluster software by running one copy of the application of each node of a Linux cluster, with TurboCluster handling load-balancing and failover of nodes, according to the company. No theoretical limit exists for the number of nodes that can be managed; the application has been tested with up to 20 nodes.

Web hosting company Digital Facilities Management uses the software on a two-node cluster, and the company is pleased with the costs savings compared with a Unix system, said Dan Birchall, a consultant to Digital Facilities Management.

"It gives us complete redundancy and does it for a tenth of the price of anyone else on the Unix end of things," Birchall said. The company priced SGI and Sun Microsystems clusters and found they would be priced at $30,000 per node; a server running Linux does the same job for less than $3,000 per node for a single-processor Pentium III server running at 450 MHz, with 250 MBs of RAM and 10 GBs storage on each box.