Geek Drivel

In 1997 I set up an e-mail account to support several software products I’d written for my (now-former) company. Because customers and potential customers needed to be able to find it easily, I put it on the company web page too. Predictably, it became an instant spam magnet. I couldn’t trust automated spam filters (when dealing with customer e-mails, even a single false positive is unacceptable), so I went through every message and manually decided whether it was spam or not.

Before I turned the account over to a co-worker in 2004, it was getting several hundred spam messages each day. As you may imagine, going through these on a daily basis (weekends included) got very old.

So when my mother, my sisters, and one of my aunts each got e-mail access, and started forwarding good-luck/bad-luck/money chain e-mails and ridiculous hoaxes to me, I didn’t have a lot of patience with them.
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“42nd Avenue, of course.”

As the saying goes, you can find absolutely anything on the ‘net. I’d say that this site, featuring nothing but the sounds of cats purring and pictures and biographies of the “actors” (purr-tors?), pretty much proves it.

The full text of the news can be found here.

Baby may be feeling secure, but I’m feeling a bit creeped-out by them.

Why? Because the “traditional phrase ‘may be offensive to women’.” I agree with the (voluntarily-former) Santa trainee quoted there: it’s “political correctness gone mad.”

Oh, the irony!

Interesting interview with one of my favorite computer security writers, especially (to me) the part about how he handles passwords:

Q: How do you remember all of your passwords?

A: I can’t. No one can; there are simply too many. But I have a few strategies. One, I choose the same password for all low-security applications. There are several Web sites where I pay for access, and I have the same password for all of them. Two, I write my passwords down. There’s this rampant myth that you shouldn’t write your passwords down. My advice is exactly the opposite. We already know how to secure small bits of paper. Write your passwords down on a small bit of paper, and put it with all of your other valuable small bits of paper: in your wallet. And three, I store my passwords in a program I designed called Password Safe. It’s is a small application — Windows only, sorry — that encrypts and secures all your passwords.

I use KeePassX for the same thing, just in case, but I need certain passwords so often that I’ve learned how to memorize them. I’m surprised that Mr. Schneier hasn’t done the same.

These gift boxes, with fake products advertised on the outside, are priceless:

Awake to your next fire calm and refreshed with DigiPliance’s Peaceful Progression Smoke Alarm. Choose the perfect way for your family to wake up—from the peaceful sounds of the rainforest, to the celebration of Dixieland jazz, or the hot pulse of the Caribbean—because a fire doesn’t have to be a disaster.

I want all my Christmas presents in these from now on.

An interesting idea, but it’ll never fly. Presidential hopefuls aren’t even allowed to participate in unscripted debates anymore, everything has to be carefully coordinated by their handlers and PR people.