Brian Warner Conversation Notes

* Brian, is one of the developers of Twisted. He is the main developer of the PB ("Prospective Broker") which facilitates Remote Method Invocation with in the Python / Twisted Framework. The Divmod folks are going to be using Brian's next version of PB which has enhanced security infastructure to communicate between Quotient Servers.

* Petmail is a Spam filtering agent that is built on gpg (certificates) and Twisted and is written by Brian. Petmail controls spam by using the web of trust scenario where mail only from individuals who are identified (signed certificates) and authorized will get through. Petmail is not dependent on SMTP or any other specific transport mechanism for delivery (although it can use it).

* The next major release of Twisted will be available in roughly the next two months. The Twisted folks are looking at ways to separate out the various Twisted components to reduce the size / requirements need to use the individual Twisted features.

* Brian is in talks with the folks at O'Reilly to produce a Twisted tutorial book. As Twisted is a large framework with many components detailed documentation such as this will be a welcome addition.

* Spamassassin is a very good at handling content based spam filtering and is Brian's current spam solution. To paraphase Brian, "We can not prevent Spam unless SMTP is abandoned and more secure mechanism put in place."

* The future of spamming may lead to virus attacks on personal machines harvesting contact lists and hijacking local resources to send spam.

* Brian went in to detail about Twisted's asychronous event loop including how the loop uses file descriptors and the select() and poll() OS mechanism to determine when to fire event callbacks.

-- BrianKirsch - 21 Apr 2004