Spam, and 2008

It amazes me how sophisticated spam is getting. I just deleted a comment on the official Mandriva blog. It was a response to a post I wrote about the latest newsletter being released. It seemed to just be a straightforward comment about the newsletter saying how much the guy liked it. Only problem - it mentioned two things, a Q&A section and 'reader interaction' - which don't feature in our newsletter. The URL of the submitter was an obvious spam site. So obviously the spambots (as well as being able to work around our captcha) are able to scan the post they're responding to for certain key terms ('newsletter'), and post a message which makes sense in context. Scary.

Lots more good stuff going on for 2008. Some more things on the tech specs have been checked off - migration to the XDG spec for user directories is complete, as (mostly) is migration to using upstream pci.ids and kernel modalias tables for hardware detection. We have Compiz Fusion 0.52. Also, I have temporarily made the experimental 'avivo' driver the default free driver for all Radeon X1xxx series cards: this will be the case for beta 2. This is in order to hopefully get feedback on which cards work well with this driver and which don't. Unless the feedback is more positive than I'm expecting I'll probably switch back to the 'vesa' driver as the default free driver for these cards in the RCs and the final release, with a few specific exceptions for cards that are verified to work well with the avivo driver, but this will help generate more testing and information. So if you have such a card, please try out Beta 2 when it's released (should be early next week), use the free driver (not the proprietary one), and tell us how well it works.

I'm still catching up with Bugzilla mails from the last week - only another 1200 to go...sigh.