Morning adventure: ch-ching

Day got off on the wrong foot, but became fun anyway. Discovered that I seem to have lost my bank card, so instead of going to the ATM machine on my way to the T, I lugged my box of coins to the CoinStar machine in the Porter Square Shaw's. (I can't just sidle into my bank for a withdrawal because my bank is NetBank, and does not have any of your primitive hoo-man tellers.) This little box has sat on my fridge for the last eight months, accepting a mouthful of change from me whenever my coat or pants pocket grew too heavy with coin. And today was its day, at last! So it gave forth something over $130, all told, 8.5% of which went to the fine CoinStar folks. It's worth it, I think, and I'm relieved to have this unexpected safety net appear until I can get a new bank card.

(Only surprise: the machine has a rotten UI. I'm not sure how else they could have designed it while keeping the process jam-free, but inserting coins involves dumping them into a tray and then manually pushing them a few at a time into a long, thin slot at one end. It takes a long time (if you have $130 worth of change, anyway) and is actually kind of gross; the fingers of my right hand were black with grime when it was done.)

Bonus: had a few T tokens spat back at me. Relics from the past, worth 25 cents more than I paid for them! Will gladly use them today.

challenge-response considered harmful

Inetersting post from Brian McNett seen on the Perl Mac OS X mailing list, after someone's challenge-response program started yelling at everyone who sent mail to that list...

This has happened to me as well. Challenge - Response is not good for mailing lists like this one, or indeed at all.

As someone who works in the anti-spam field, I can tell you up front that C/R is frowned upon at all levels as bad and wrong. Several key C/R vendors are in fact spammers, and the leader in the C/R field is a lawsuit-happy outfit which is attempting to kill off all its competition. All C/R systems work by intercepting your mail, and one even requires you give them your POP3 passwords to do it.

See: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000389.html
Also: http://tardigrade.net/challengeresponse.html
and: http://static.samspade.org/spamarrest.html

Both SpamArrest, and MailBlocks collect the email addresses from responses to challenges and reserve the right to market to them in their privacy policies. SpamArrest has been widely criticized as spammers for having done so. For the record, there is no privacy policy anywhere to be seen on the Max Strength Software websites. They are not required to have one, but because they don't they can do anything with the information you give them (including your email address), and you have no recourse. Would you trust anyone like that?

To anyone out there using C/R, please stop. Please?

Boston Warren mailing list is back.

I just resurrected the Boston Warren mailing list. Took me long enough. It is for Boston-centric discussion of games by Looney Labs and other companies.

It uses the most excellent Mailman list management software now, so you can do all subscription, archive perusal, and other activities over the web, thus: http://jmac.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/boston-warren.

If you were subscribed to this list in the past, you probably already received email notification of your re-subscription. If you didn't, or you'd like to join this list for the first time, just visit that webpage.

(Sigh, just noticed that the archive link 404s. Will fix RSN.)

(no subject)

Heart nearly exploded, but I appear to have clawed my way back into 7-footer territory, after letting my DDR skills slide at the end of last year. Straight Cs!