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2003/04/30 01:09|re||Hardware|Lindows Laptop|<br>
The first notebook release from Linux windows software company Lindows is set to undercut similar products on the market by half.

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Lindows.com, said it will release the laptop at a price of $799 USD, about half the cost of similarly equipped notebook computers from Apple, IBM and Toshiba.
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The Lindows PC is equipped with comparable features to other \'ultra light\' notebooks, such as IBM\'s Thinkpad x30 and a Toshiba Portege model, both of which cost more than twice as much, the company said.
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The Lindows laptop is half the weight of the Apple iNote but boasts a hard disk double the size and runs a 933MHz microprocessor.
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2003/04/30 01:03|re||Internet|Tar Pit Proxy|<br>

<a href=\"http://www.martiansoftware.com/articles/spammerpain.html\" target=\"_blank\">Marty Lamb</a> has come up with an idea for spam busting called TarProxy that is so elegant, it may actually work. 

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The current method of using black lists, and the proposed use of legislation have serious flaws that undermine the nature of an open Internet. TarProxy has none of these flaws and works on the simple premise that we all want to cause spammers the same kind of pain they cause us.

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The current methods don\'t cause spammers any pain because the spammers are long gone by the time spam filters process an email message. 

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TarProxy targets mass spammers, beating them at their own game by filtering the mail while the spammer is still connected to the receiving mail server.

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Based on the \"spamminess\" (a number between 0 and 10 representing the probability that the message is spam), the server slows the connection accordingly. 

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This method allows all email to get through, but the throttling effect consumes the spammer\'s bandwidth, making the spammer business model non-viable. The more spam-like the message, the more it costs them to send it.

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Marty describes the effect as a tar pit, in which \"The spamminess of the incoming message affects the viscosity of the tar\". As the spam probability goes up, the socket speed goes down.

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If enough of these dynamic tarpits are in place (just a handful in the right places), the spammers\' mail software would bog down, reducing the rate at which they can send messages, in turn reducing the fees they can charge their customers. 

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If these tarpits were ubiquitous, they could completely change the economics of spam, creating a scarcity of bandwidth experienced only by spammers.
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