isn't nearly enough; viruses steal names out of address books freely to
   spoof headers. Clued people like me can add header checks to spot they are
   really coming from their expected route or mail agent ... but those can
   change and when they do, your friends will be out of contact. Ouch. Also,
   mailing lists that are very open (hmm, do I know any of those? *wink*) are
   often targeted by spammers who hope their mail will hit many at once, while
   their traces are hidden by standard list-header mangling. The fact is that
   even the good guys need a little checking, and anyone who needs to receive
   mail from completely unknown people has to do something serious. Separating
   off how much checking to really do reduces CPU load for some cases, but that
   is where it gets a bit greyer. There's ASK and TMDA for making new folk at
   least  reply  before you'll talk to them. This greylisting practice is
   pleasantly sneaky, doing something similar but at the transport layer.
   Systems  run  by real people sending real messages really have to have
   mechanisms for trying again if a server's too busy, a little overloaded,
   maybe drop back and visit the secondary MX. But spammers don't have time to
   waste on all that - they've umpty squadzillions other suckers to mail. So
   greylisting responds with a temporary error condition, but logs who came by;
   at some vaguely random later point but within popular and reasonable human
   timeouts it will accept the mail from that server knowing it's a repeat
   call...  and  the  chances  that  it's someone utterly normal increase
   drastically. And even the spammers who follow normal protocol will be stuck
   hosting their own stupid mail during the delay, costing them resources
   instead of legitimate ISPs. The downside is not really getting instantaneous
   notes from your correspondents, but I'm sure this can be tuned a bit.

   Of course, you could always just take the classic techie's option - get a
   bigger  hard  disk.  With  all  that  I'm  up to in my development and
   experimenting, it looks like I'll have to do that. Hah. Watch me complain,
   twist my arm :) Now I should really figure out about backing up this stuff
   in  a  way that would be easy to restore if I have a problem... um, on
   something that doesn't take more space than the original does. Otherwise
   trying to clean up the house in general will have us wondering where to put
   all this. Gosh, laptop drives are getting better capacities these days. Much
   easier than dealing with tapes and discs, a mere 4G per disc disappears
   pretty quickly nowadays, worse if you're sticking with CDs.

   I'm about to attend a music convention; my crew's running an Internet Lounge
   at [95]Consonance. So all the older systems in miscellaneous condition are
   being brought up to speed and truly dead parts are finally being tossed.
   Wow. I'm starting to have shelf space in my hardware cabinet again. That's
   more like it.

   And of course, I've improved the preprocessing scripts I use to match the
   new stuff we have going on here. So I'm pleased to reintroduce the TAG in
   threaded form. Thomas did nearly all the work marking it up (for which we
   can thank his Ruby scripting talents) but the layout tricks are still mine.
   Let us know if you find any dust that still needs cleaning out of 'em. Have
   a great month, folks.

   Readers with good Linux answers of their own, in local mailing lists or
   published to netnews groups are encouraged to copy The Answer Gang their
   good bits if they're inclined to see their good thoughts preserved in the
   Linux  Documentation Project, by way of the Linux Gazette. Ideally the
   answers  explain  why  things  work in a friendly manner and with some
   enthusiasm, thus Making Linux Just A Little More Fun! If they're short and
   sweet they'll be in Tips, longer ones may be pubbed here in TAG. But we
   don't promise that we can publish everything, just like we don't promise
   that we can answer everyone. And last but not least - you can be anonymous
   if you'd prefer, just tell us when you write in.
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HTML script maintained by [96]Heather Stern of Starshine Technical Services,
                       [97]http://www.starshine.org/
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   Published in Issue 100 of Linux Gazette, March 2004

News Bytes

   By [98]Michael Conry

   News Bytes
Contents:

     * [99]Legislation and More Legislation
     * [100]Linux Links
     * [101]News in General
     * [102]Distro News
        * [103]Software and Product News

                Selected and formatted by [104]Michael Conry

   Submitters, send your News Bytes items in PLAIN TEXT format. Other formats
   may  be  rejected  without  reading.  You  have been warned! A one- or
   two-paragraph summary plus URL gets you a better announcement than an entire
   press release. Submit items to [105]bytes@linuxgazette.net
     _________________________________________________________________

                      Legislation and More Legislation
     _________________________________________________________________

  Jon Johansen

   As has been reported in previous months, Jon Johansen, the Norwegian man
   charged in relation to the DeCSS computer code, has been successful in his
   legal travails. Now, it has [106]been reported that he is going to attempt
   to turn the tables and seek compensation from the Norwegian white collar
   crimes unit.
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