This post is old, but touches on a topic that’s near and dear to my heart — methods of stopping spammers from overwhelming a publicly-available e-mail address. It argues that posting an address in a somewhat-obfuscated form (like “myname AT spamtrap DOT com”) actually helps spammers, because it’s much easier to search for using Google …
Historically, the only three non-physical things that people will pay for are time, knowledge, and experience. Everything else can be broken down into one or more of those. For example, your average person working at the local Burger Shack or Wendell’s Widgets factory is trading his time (in the form of unskilled labor) for money. …
Two final articles, from different writers at The Register, on the Fukushima nuclear plant. I can understand why TV newscasts would do such a thing (for those living under a rock, they’ve tried to present it as a disaster of epic proportions, though in reality it was just a minor footnote to the true disaster …
Continue reading ‘“Praying for meltdown: The media and the nukes”’ »
I got tired of the nearly one thousand spambot “users” on this blog and mass-deleted any account that had never posted a non-spam comment and had no optional user information. I also added a confirmation-link requirement, and auto-removal of any account that doesn’t complete the confirmation within seven days. Apologies to any human users who …
I’ve talked about it a couple times before, but in early February it finally happened: the last free IPv4 addresses were handed out. Now things really start to get interesting…
After three months of near-silence, I’m back. Project M is nearly ready for beta (six months of work so far, and it’s still not quite usable… sheesh!), so I think I can spare the time to blog again. I may not write daily for a bit, but I’ll try. The first thing I’d like to …
Continue reading ‘One Hundred Fifty Thousand Spam Attempts in 90 Days’ »
I’m busy, so I shouldn’t be writing this, but it’s so funny I can’t avoid it. I got a call about an hour ago. The caller ID said “Unknown Name, Unknown Number.” Background noise of a busy call center, so I’m thinking a survey or a telemarketer. A survey I’ll just politely decline to take. …
…so busy, in fact, that I’ve decided to take a blogging hiatus. I’ve written a post a day for nearly two years straight, missing only a handful of days. I like that pace, and I plan to resume it, but not until I’ve got the bulk of Project M finished. That may be a few …
The amount of blog-spam that Geek Drivel has gotten recently is ludicrous. Since late June (when the statistics were last reset), my anti-spam software has blocked nearly 42,000 spam messages (of which I saw and had to personally deal with maybe fifteen — that software is good). Roughly 15,000 of them came in between then …
One of the first things GoddessJ complained about, when she got her new iPad for Christmas, was that the autocomplete kept adding a ‘y’ to the end of her name. I call her ****y, and her family; no one else is allowed to, and she doesn’t refer to herself that way either. I had to …