Iraq's weapons of mass destruction:

Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction
: Here is Tony Blair’s paper detailing evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

Spam, another solution
: I’m sure someone will tell me what’s wrong with this but I come to think we are all attacking spam from the wrong direction.

We are trying to make lists of spammers and their tricks so we can block them.

We should instead be trying to get ourselves off the lists of email addresses the spammers are using.

How?

I want someone to invent an email function that lets me easily and manually bounce email from spammers so they think I don’t exist and so they don’t want to waste time and money sending me spam and so they take me off their lists.

Surely, this can’t be hard.

I mark a bunch of email in the morning and direct my email to send bounce messages to all of them.

The program sends a (faked) bounce message via my mail server.

The spammer counts this as a bounce and takes me off the list.

And that’s one fewer spams I’ll get the next morning. One by one, piece by piece, we kill the cockroaches.

Make sense?

: Update. Gotta love this Internet. Within minutes, I got an email from Danny Jobe pointing me to Mailwasher, which does what I want and for free. The key description from their web site:

MailWasher works directly with your email server, exactly like your email program does. But there is one important difference: you can tell MailWasher to delete a message at the server, without downloading it – or you can bounce an email back to the sender so that it looks as though your address is not valid.

Bravo!

So much for the future of journalism
: Here’s the list of luminaries Columbia’s president appointed to a commission to rethink the future of Columbia Journalism School and thus journalism itself.

Don’t hold your breath for anything new to come from this.

Though there are unquestionably some smart and capable people on the list, the cast as a whole is quite predictable.

And you will not find any emissaries from the future of any weight, experience, or credibility. I could nominate people here in blogdom but that would take on the air of blogrolling for the sake of aw-shucks links back to me; you make the list. I could nominate people who have changed journalism and reporting and commentary using the tools of this new medium and the new relationship with the audience they create, but what’s the point.

Too bad. Opportunity lost.

: See also Columbia J’s interim dean, David Klatell on Romenesko, responding to Michael Wolff‘s excellent column on the future of Columbia J and journalism. The guy completely misses the point and the point misses him. Wolff was writing about a new vision for journalism education and media study; the temp dean whines about Wolff not listing the school’s name-brand alums. Forest, meet trees.

Google news
: Google’s automated news is cool but Nick Denton points out the fatal flaw in how it works.

Missed opportunities
: Old blogging pal Thomas Nephew gives me the punchline I should have gotten myself (I’m so ashamed!) for the HAL Internet-connected refrigerator post below: