Bugs, bugs and spam

I'm clearly failing come up with items that I feel are worth posting on their own; many of the things I say just seem too short to bother having a separate database entry and comment thread for -- so I of course try to come up with longer entries, but I never finish writing them, so it looks like I'm just not saying anything for weeks at a time.

Screw that; instead, I'm going to collect unrelated things into batched entries. So there.

• Bug: Mac OS X users, you need to go get the latest security patch now. An understandable but nasty bug is in your system which could allow someone to delete all your files just from you clicking on a web page in just about any browser. No, seriously. Apple's (finally) released a patch, though, so go get it.
  
  
• Cicada carnage: I work in an industrial park, and I saw my first cicadas as carcasses all over the parking lot; several had obviously come up nearby and not made it to a tree to suck some sap and become strong. I saw a couple climbing the poles of traffic signs; sorry dudes, you probably just doomed yourselves.
  
  By the next day, the ground crew had swept most of them up.
  
  They're pretty impressive bugs; JenB has some in her yard that are doing much better than most that I've seen. Also, look out for the hell-hound in her back yard.
  
  I try not to think about all the millions of cicadas in recently-developed areas that are struggling to crawl up through layers of pavement and will never make it (if they weren't already dug up during construction). <shudder>
  
  
• Spam spike. >3500 spams yesterday, >2000 so far today. Fewer than 15 real e-mails so far today (and half were from lists), so I'm looking at roughly a 100-to-1 noise-to-signal ratio. This is truly bogus.
  
  My current belief is that the biggest source of them is the domain-name-record system, which people sell to each other legally on CD (and which I get advertised to me through spam...). I manage several domains, so I'm all over that database. And I'm sure that having my e-mail address on some of my web pages is a big source of the problem.
  
  Eudora-Pay's junk filter is working well for me, but it's still maddening to see 'Fetching: 2472 e-mails...' and waiting for the whole sorry mess to be transferred just to be deleted shortly after. Often I just ssh to Pair, open pine and hold down the D key to scroll quickly through the obvious ones, so as to reduce the pointless transfer of crap and clogging of bandwidth.
  
  Sigh.