I’ve spent a few late nights schemeing with people about the cool things that could be built upon a nifty tool like Vipul’s Razor. Unfortunately for our schemes, and the world who would have benefited from them, it appears that server component, razord, is a commerical product.

Some things we might have built with razor, if only…

  • A “Tofu” Fighter. Tofu is like spam, but its activist spam. A few key differences are: the emails are generally more targetted – however if you’re in the activist community you’ll probably get a dozen copies; the senders are generally very well meaning; and the spamming is often being done by hand, which means that it shows up not only in email, but on message boards, Protest.net event listings, IMC newswires, and anywhere else they can find.

    Because of these differences you need a slightly different tool. You need something which can accept feedback from a number fo cross medium trusted sources, not just email. You need to tune the heuristics for the smaller community. You probably want tighter control your trusted sources more.

  • Along similiar lines, build a system to deal with the massive amount of cross-posting that goes on by visitors to the IMC network. People presented with 80+ local IMC sites, decide that their particular message is relevant to all of them. A database of checksummed articles (or whatever it is that Razor has) would quickly put limits on over zealous cross-postings.
  • All sorts of other neat projects!

I might be wrong, I went looking for how to download it, and all I found was a post on razor-users, which is not very definitive, but no one corrected them.

PyZor: building a free Razor clone in Python

PyZor is a new project to build a razor-a-like, in Python. At first I thought this was a silly language holy war issue, but in this new light, it starts to look more interesting. In fact, PyZor mentions that it was at least partially started in response to the lack of a free Razor server. I worry, however, that they won’t have the deep expirence with the problem that Vipul and crew seem to. Well, I’m bummed.