Where Spam Comes From

The Center for Democracy and Technology has recently put together a report studying the methods by which spammers get your email addresses.

The report posted email addresses in a variety of locations, using different techniques for visibility (ie HTML encoding vs plaintext) and then watched what accumulated after six months.

They generated some interesting results into the methods by which spammers can track you (with publicly available websites containing your bare email address being the most popular method) and even some techniques to stop spam, such as HTML encoding your email address.

Posted at 19:10 | Comments (0)

Holiday Photos

One replaced and restored hard disk later........

I have now uploaded my holiday photos. This year I have been a bit more ruthless in selecting which ones to post, as a lot of the pictures look similar to those I took last year.

My particular favourite is of a clown fish coming straight out of an anenome to attack the camera.

I will be adding captions to the pictures over the next few days when I have got my notes together and can identify species and locations.

Posted at 10:54 | Comments (1)

Bummer

Less than ten minutes after posting the last entry, my computer died!!

It looks like the hard disk is trashed. The machine is usually left on 24 hours a day, but I turned it off while I was on holiday, so I suspect it is thermal shock that killed it.

I have a full backup (once bitten, twice shy) but I have to arrange obtaining a new disk first, so the uploading of the holiday photos will have to wait a while.

A whole week without touching a computer, email etc and this happens as soon as I do!

Posted at 09:47 | Comments (0)

Holiday Report

Back home from a week of scuba diving in the Red Sea at Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

The weather at the start of the week wasn't the best. Cloudy and windy, but hot. The temperature was in the middle to high thirties all week.

The diving was excellent! This year, as a fully qualified Open Water diver, I was allowed to 'do my own thing' (with a Buddy of course), which was a very liberating feeling, and made me develop my navigation skills!

Some of the picture I took are quite good (I will post them later this week). And I finally got to see an octopus in the wild!

David got his Open Water qualification and Leanne had a try-dive and wants to take the sport up. Jan and I made some new friends. All in all an excellent holiday and many thanks to Sublime Diving for arranging it all.

Posted at 11:20 | Comments (1)

My Plugin!

I have written my own plugin for Moveable Type and published it!

It is called QOTD which stands for "Quote of the Day" and generates a random quote for the website.

I submitted the plugin to the MT Plugin Directory website and they have published it here.

It's not much, but it's my first openly published software!

Posted at 23:25 | Comments (1)

April Fools and stuff

Well, I'm away in York for a three day networks conference/workshop organised by UKERNA, and so far it's been very interesting, as well as relaxing. It's nice to get away from the office now and then.

Today being 1st April, the usual crop of April Fools pranks are around. These are three of my favourites this year......

The Dalai Lama announces Yellow Hat Linux.

A RFC defining a new 'Evil' bit in the header of an IP packet. The RFC require all malicious programs to set this bit so that firewalls can filter them! (For those who don't know, RFC's are the documents that define how the Internet works).

A "George Foreman USB iGrill" for your iMac.

Posted at 22:34 | Comments (0)