Cory Doctorow on "What to Do About Spam?"

Dear Reader,

Cory Doctorow takes issue with comments made by Bruce Sterling in his talk at the recent O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Cory believes that technologies such as Vipul's Razor will succeed in eliminating spam, a view that Bruce challenged in his speech at OSCON.

Here's an excerpt from Cory's message, which he originally posted to the Silklist mailing list:

"I think the world of Bruce, and I have some deep disagreements with him. He's wicked-smart, and that makes those disagreements all the more enjoyable. He's challenged my thinking on this, but I'm still unconvinced (though I've come around on some points).

It comes down to this--to a certain extent, Bruce and I are both techno-determinists, except that, in my opinion, I'm an optimistic determinist and he's a pessimistic determinist."

Read the complete message presenting Cory's views on spam-killer technologies in What to Do About Spam?

And if you want to read the unabridged talk given by Bruce Sterling at the Open Source Convention, we've published his speech in its entirety. His views on open source will at once surprise and humor you, and quite possibly get your ire up as well.
A Contrarian View of Open Source

Also this week, Dru Lavigne shows us several ways that we can increase the security level on a FreeBSD box.
Securing FreeBSD

How much data are you logging? Jacek Artymiak shows how to improve the security of remotely logged firewall logs and how to calculate how much storage space you'll need to keep a reasonable amount of logs for convenient analysis.
Securing Remote PF Firewall Logs

And in Part 1 in a multipart series on IRIX binary compatibility, Emmanuel Dreyfus details the IRIX binary compatibility implementation for the NetBSD operating system. This article covers creating a new emulation subsystem inside the NetBSD kernel as well as some reverse engineering to understand and reproduce how IRIX internals work.
IRIX Binary Compatibility, Part 1

Finally, the authors of Practical VoIP Using VOCAL discuss why VoIP (Voice Over IP) is on the verge of taking off, and how their book and VOCAL, the open source software that enables a core network to support VoIP, are helping the community to grow and build VoIP applications.
Speaking About VoIP

Thanks for reading,

Tara A. McGoldrick
tara@oreilly.com
Web Editor
O'Reilly Network

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