[CLUE-Talk] interesting home business article - from slashdot

[G. Richard Raab]

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On Saturday 26 July 2003 01:41 am, Evan Widger wrote:
Do you code as well?
If so I have several projects that are most of the way done which I do not 
have time to do.

I created a "kitchen" program (KDE with Perl) that will actively translate the 
receipe program into multiple languages (create a receipe and it is seen in 
French, Russian, Chinese immeadiatly). Also have some interesting ideas for 
that one that can lead to a company.

An admin program for Linux. One of the problems with Linux is the difficulty 
of admining. There have been numerous attempts at it, but there is no common 
base. There is linuxconf, Webmin, Mandrakes nightmare,  KDE's attempt, and 
etc., etc. Basically, we have no single standard which is actually screwing 
us (one of the major areas that LSB should have created).
So I created a meta-admin tool. Basically, uses XML to describe various 
interfaces (cli, C call, simple file, etc), another level descibeing the 
logic, and finally a graphic XML description. From these, it is possible to 
generate various front-ends to various systems. Create the definition once, 
and then code gnerate LinuxConf, Webmin, Mandrake's GTK, or KDE's panels.
Interesting project, might lead to work at IBM or one of the distro.

I am most of the way done with a anti spam program. Basically it is a modifier 
for postfix (and can probably work with sendmail, qmail, etc). This one is 
close to being launched. As soon as I get a weekend, I will finish this 
project. The idea is different in that I generate ephemeral aliases for 
users. I figure that shy of writing the protocol correctly (not with MSN, 
Yahoo, and AOL doing it), we will never stop spam.

Here is the readme for it.

<PRE>
WHY:
	There are several ways to stop the spammers.

	1) Outside influence i.e. legally control it. The current US admin has 
suggested this, controlling users on the net, but it will simply move the 
spammers to other countries. To make matters worse, it is easy to see that 
this has no chance of working. This approach has its roots in other ideas.

	2) Try to determine spam at either the server or client level. I have 
suggested an approach for this to my current company (which we may do), but 
when you think about it, this is a losing approach. There will always be work 
arounds which allow the spammers an out.

	3) Change the protocol. This is being looked at in a number of different 
directions, but I doubt that it will happen quickly. In addition, the real 
problem here is that any new protocol designed by large ISPS will be used to 
try and control the internet and competitors. While this is the most correct 
approach, it will not happen quickly.

	So, that leaves changing the receipant. Some try to hide the accounts by 
embedding human filterable, but not easily machine filterable, substrings. 
This helps on mailing lists, but  does not pevent large portals from selling 
them (tired of being burned by a company that is too hot , or perhaps from 
yodeling?).  Instead many end-users create accounts on hotmail, Yahoo, AOL 
etc. and use them as temporary email addresses. This solves the issue of the 
companies selling your account, but it is a bad choice for everybody. So, 
what is the real work-around until a good (3) comes?

	Allow users to create temporary mail aliases that have time-based 
expirations, associated with a single login.

	

Design:
	provide an ephemeral alias. That is 
	1) time tracked with an ending date.
	2) has a varying policy per server (prevents spammers from determining legal 
users on a system).

</PRE>




- -- 
cheers
g.r.r.
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