News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
Ever wondered about the success rate of spam? Researchers hijacked a botnet and used it to distribute millions of spam email messages. The response rate was 1 per 12,500,000 emails sent. (By the way, what they did was illegal, even though it was in the name of research.)
Link: http://www.techradar.com/…
(via digg)
We’re all familiar with CAPTCHAs, those weird pictures with distorted numbers and letters that you have to copy when submitting an online form. They’re designed to ensure that a human, rather than a computer, is the one doing the submitting. So what’s honest spammer to do? Simple, just hire cheap labor.
Link: http://blogs.zdnet.com/…
(via Slashdot)
Cloud storage is “a way for enterprises to rely on a third party for their storage needs without having to build and manage their own data storage infrastructure.” Some businesses and individuals have turned to it as a cost-saving measure, or as a way to make data available from any location. The downfall of cloud storage, however, is that you’re totally reliant on someone else to protect your data. There are many ways to minimize the risk of data loss, the simplest of which is redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, but it looks like people in the linked article didn’t take those steps.
Link: http://www.networkworld.com/…
(via Slashdot)
All that time in medical school wasted…
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/…
(via digg)
Should you ever get into trouble with the MPAA or RIAA for illegally downloading copyrighted movies/music, the linked article will be very helpful.
Link: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/…
(via Slashdot)
Yesterday (May 3rd) was the 30th anniversary of the first internet spam message. The linked article has the exact text of the message. Interestingly, an interview with the message’s author reveals that it was very successful.
Link: http://tech.yahoo.com/…
(via Neatorama)
You’ve seen CAPTCHAs, even if you’re not familiar with the word. They’re those pictures with distorted words that you have to enter when registering or posting on some sites. It’s supposed to ensure that it’s a real, live human performing the input, instead of some sort of ‘bot. Well, the ‘bots are getting good at reading CAPTCHAs—so good that they can average one valid guess per minute on Windows Live Hotmail. This makes CAPTCHAs fairly useless, and I expect to see them get phased out for something better (whatever that may be). Chad’s News uses an arithmetic entry for anonymous comment submission, but even this has not stopped some spammers.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
System administrators, as well as anyone who understands how email works, will appreciate the linked story where a network admin had to figure out why emails would bounce if the recipient was more than 500 miles away. And in this case, statisticians turned out to be quite useful. (Note that he has taken some literary license with the story, as described in the FAQ, but the basic facts are correct.)
Link: http://www.ibiblio.org/…
(via User Friendly)
Back in the early days of the web, this man bought the pizza.com domain on a bit of a lark. He recently sold it for $2.6 million, and says he wishes he’d had the foresight to buy more domains when they were still available.
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
The linked article gives a good explanation of how JavaScript negatively affects one’s web browsing experience. I know that for me, heavily scripted sites such as digg.com significantly slow down my computer. Not only do they prevent the browser from multitasking effectively, but they peg my CPU at 100%. (Note: the WebKit product discussed in the article is part of Apple’s Safari browser.)
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Many companies send out bulk email with a bogus reply address, and it’s not unusual for that reply address to be <something>@DoNotReply.com. It turns out that someone actually owns the DoNotReply.com domain, and he gets some interesting stuff in his inbox—stuff that he posts on his website at www.DoNotReply.com.
Link: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/…
(via Slashdot)
The linked site converts your email address into an image file, which you can use in place of your email address, to keep spammers from harvesting it. On the downside, legitimate users can’t click on it to open a new message; rather, they have to type it in. The quick and easy method of obfuscating email addresses is to encode them as HTML character entities. Probably the best method, however, is to set up a submission form on your website–but this can’t be used in every situation where you want to publish your email address.
