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November 27, 2006
The spam avalanche: How I deal with the recent surge in spam
Spammers get smarter and smarter. Every day I see e-mails touting stocks, enlargements and the like reach my inbox, uncaught by spam filters that used to be doing a pretty good job.
In early summer this year, I heard Joshua Goodman from Microsoft talk about some of the techniques that spammers use to get around spam filters at a conference. And given that it takes Microsoft months to validate code before it is released, a small spammer can quickly figure out the next trick to fool the filter.
What they currently do is simple but effective. Spammers hide their message in one large picture (or in similar code), which is hard to "read" for a computer algorithm. Spam filters normally work by looking at the words contained in an e-mail. If they find something like "Penis enlargement", they'll keep the e-mail out of your inbox. But a spam filter can't "see" what is in an image - because to a computer, an image is a set of little colored dots, and not the letters and words and sentences that humans see.
So by "painting the message" instead of writing it, Spammers can send e-mail and get through. This is only possible because E-Mail clients happily present HTML e-mail, that is, e-mail that contains pictures and tables and most things a web page can contain. Microsoft were the first to make this kind of e-mail a common sight in their "Outlook Express". This function is of remarkably little practical value, but by introducing it, Microsoft has made spamming easy.
What to do about it?
Right now, the following trick does the job for me: I use a mail client (that is, something like Apple Mail, Outlook (Express), Thunderbird, etc.) that allows me to create my own filters for e-mails. I created such a filter that looks like this:
The trick is to look for senders that I have never sent e-mail to, and that aren't in my address book. E-mail from such people gets filtered out and put in a separate folder:
Once a day, I have a look at the folder and quickly read the false positives, that is, legitimate e-mail from people that I don't know, or automatic e-mail that I'm not so interested in anyways.
I can quickly delete everything in that folder, and that's it.
This way, I can keep my inbox free of low-priority stuff. After all, e-mail from people I don't know is all to often to ask me for (free) advice with some of my open source software, and mostly spam.
Posted by dr at 11:56 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 21, 2006
An Apple controlling a Mitsubishi Colt
This is what happens when I make my friends wait for me in my car. Being technologically keen, they upgraded some essentially bits.
Posted by dr at 12:24 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 17, 2006
A scrapped, boring and inconvenient blog entry about Al Gore.
Nothing new to see here. Move on.
If you'd like to see the draft of a blog post that was prepared and scrapped for lack of individual, newsworthy contribution, read on.
The other day, I saw the documentary about Al Gore and his campaign for a climate change, "An Inconvenient Truth". As Gore displays it, mankind is ignoring the facts and heading right for a global catastrophy that will ridicule the tens of thousands of deaths due to terrorist's aggression and the hundreds of thousands of deaths on the American tab. If you can believe the scientific evidence and Al Gore's presentation, even conservative estimates of the effects of global warming paint a picture of Manhattan, the San Francisco Bay Area and most of the Netherlands underwater and heat waves and hurricanes displacing millions.
Are the signals really that hard to see?
It's not news. Gore and film-maker Davis Guggenheim do not add anything to the debate. But they manage to reach out to new audiences.
It is not difficult to see how humans (and the universe) together form a form of conscious intelligence. But this global, intelligent ecosystem fails miserably where the individual would have to give up freedoms for the benefit of future generations and people far away on other continents. The result: No one is as dumb as all of us.
A few people may disagree about certain details of "global warming" - for example, how much of the increase in temperature warming we're causing with CO2 emissions, and how much of it is beyond our control. However, the risk of erring on the wrong side is associated with a tremendously high cost. We can't afford to make the wrong decision.
I suspect I've contributed more than my share this year, even more than the average American - flying in jets produces significant emissions. I'll see what it would take to offset carbon usage. Can we go completely carbon neutral?
Posted by dr at 8:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 10, 2006
Nightcycling. (A response.)
A night-time trip to Portobello beach, Edinburgh. (See also Swirley.)
It's a forgotten place for lonesome people, it seems. Neon light from city busses with idling engines, at the bus depot. Waiting for whatever, waiting for a the next stop. All of a sudden, I couldn't leave her, If I tried, slot machines, karaoke: a 50 year-old with a microphone.
I'll be 50 too. Too soon.
Where is the moon?
(Photos taken with a Canon EOS 30D, with my brand-new EF 50mm 1.8f.)
Posted by dr at 11:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack