Some clarifications by Martin on the „new Mac OS X trojan horse“.

The Sender Policy Framework seems to be the solution we have all waited for for a long time. By simply adding a single DNS record (type TXT) to your domains, you can announce which computers are allowed to deliver e-mail from your domains. So it is checked by the receiving SMTP server before even accepting the content (also significantly reducing bandwith usage). While this is probably not the end to Spam in total, it might be the end to Spam as we know it today: coming in masses, forging your e-mail addresses, difficult to trace back, severely annoying.

The SPF guys have some excellent documentation material on their web site. There are some insightful slide shows as well: a detailed introduction teaching you the different scenarios, a detailed explanation of the anatomy of a SPF DNS record, a hacker‘s intro to What is spam? („spammers feared to develop weapons of mass destruction!!!) and more. In addition, you find a setup wizard makes setting up the DNS TXT record easy. The SPF Adoption Roll tracks popular domains for their SPF support. So far a bit more than 10000 domains world-wide have adopted SPF – but among them you find important major mail providers like AOL, Hotmail and others.

To round up the good documentation there is the SPF Wiki. Let‘s all support SPF today! It can make a difference.

Caption City is a cool site for on-the-fly picture mockups. See for yourself: Blinkenlights Rulez!.

Okay. I step back. This April 1st thing is cool: The First Annual March For Web Standards.

Yawn. The first of April has become the most boring day on the web, beating Christmas by a wide margin. And no, I am not going to present a list of the silliest stuff. I will make sure I won‘t to switch on my computer on at all next year.

I am not alone.

Some other possible solutions to the problem:

• Bring out AFML (April Fools Markup Language). Making it an XML Namespace, it might help introducing April Fool context to each news item. Possible elements:
  • JOKE: This entry is a joke and can safely read or ignored.
  • BAD_JOKE: This entry is a rather rude joke and might harm or confuse readers or drive them into installing viruses.
  • WISH: This entry is not true but somehow expresses something I always wanted to have but so far nobody was able to provide.
• News reader support. Add a „Mark all April 1st news items as unread“ or „Hide all April 1st news item“ feature to news reader programs
• Your idea here. Please comment.

Sigh.

Okay. Here we go again. I just registered myself for the next Berlin Marathon in September. This time I want to be significantly faster than last year. To be specific, I want to make the 42,195 km in less than 90 Minutes. So I call this Projekt Jäger 90. Let‘s see how it works out.

Maybe I will repeat the Real Time Tracking Project I did last year. But I‘ll need much better gear to do that as last time the batteries lasted only half the time and my backup GPS system lost track in the third quarter of the route.