Yeah, I know: I been away a long time. Why is complex, but house ( Read more... )

As mysteries go this was small change, but I stumbled across its solution earlier today: spam nominally from Facebook friends. I've been getting a recognizable species of link spam every day or two for a couple of months now. The From: field always contains the name of someone I know. The From: email address, however, is unknown to me and does not ( Read more... )

• Two people have so far written to request that I post photos of my rash. Ummm, no. You'd barf. And most of us take far too many trips to Three Mile Island already these days, Web discussion being what it is.
• And no, I'm not getting better. In fact, I may still be getting worse. But I do think it's time to dump what's in the Odd Lots file:
• While I ( Read more... )

Quick update: Either Classmates.com was hacked, or nobody over there is paying the least attention to user activity. Textual obscenities and dirty pitchers abound; those with strong stomachs may see it for the time being here.

I'm divided as to whether I should alert them to it. There are 17,000 Lane alumni in the system online, and I can't imagine ( Read more... )

Something very weird is going on here: I've gotten a scattering of emails in the last 18 hours from Classmates.com. Nothing new in that, except that these are obviously fakes, albeit very convincing fakes. The subject line for the first is:

"You are invited to the Naked Fest with Lane Technical High School."

The From: field contains a multi-word ( Read more... )

One reason we will not be rid of spam anytime soon is that spam is very well suited to massively parallel mechanisms. The recent uptick in my spam (and everybody else's, I suspect) is due to the fact that more bots are being knit into botnets, and they're better bots. Even Port 25 blocking, ( Read more... )

• Much going on here, and I may not be publishing Contra quite as often as in previous months. A lot centers on preparing materials for Lulu, which I'm going to be testing in a number of ways. I'm also testing a new scanner designed specifically for scanning books and ( Read more... )

• A study I hadn't seen before gives us strong evidence that people using cell phones while driving drive more dangerously than .08% drunks. This certainly maps to my recent experience. As a courtesy to others, I never make calls while in motion, and always hand the ( Read more... )

• In releasing free editions of the upcoming Turbo language products, Borland may be hoping to noodge people with six or seven year old copies of Delphi to upgrade. Many people stopped upgrading when Delphi 7 appeared, because the version got such bad press. I know a fair ( Read more... )

Still working here, and will be for a few days yet. However, this morning I received a spammer trick that haven't seen before. Little by little, "pump and dump" penny stock scams are taking over my spambox. It used to be easy to filter them, because early on many spammers used boilerplate ( Read more... )