“Bruce Schneier Facts”

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I love this extremely-tongue-in-cheek page I stumbled across today: “Bruce Schneier Facts: Things you might not know about Bruce Schneier“. Some of them (like this one) would only be understood by other people in the computer security field, but others are accessible to nearly anyone. I especially like this one.

(Bruce Schneier, for those who don’t know, is the cryptography and security expert that I’ve mentioned here several times before.)

(Update: The site has moved, so I changed the links to go to the new one.)

AVG LinkScanner Problem Solved?

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If you run your own website, you might have been following the brouhaha over the new LinkScanner feature of GriSoft’s AVG virus scanner.

I can’t find this text on the GriSoft website, but it was quoted in a comment on another blog I was reading today:

Following is AVG’s official response to LinkScanner concerns: We’d like to thank our web community for bringing these challenges to our attention, as building community trust and protecting all of our users is critical to us. We have modified the Search-Shield component of LinkScanner to only notify users of malicious sites; this modified version will be rolled out on July 9th 2008. As of this date. Search-Shield will no longer scan each search result online for new exploits, which was causing the spikes that webmasters addressed with us. However, it is important to note that AVG still offers full protection against potential exploits through the Active Surf-Shield component of our product, which checks every page for malicious content as it is visited but before it is opened.

Hopefully that’s really from GriSoft, and it’s the last thing we’ll hear about the problem.

GNOME-Do

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As mentioned previously, I’ve been using the Avant Window Navigator (AWN) program as my main launcher for the last little bit. But I’ve taken advantage of this holiday weekend to figure out another program I’ve heard really good things about, and after using it for a couple days, I’ve completely replaced AWN.

The program is GNOME-Do, and it’s a much better fit for the way I work. Graphical menus are indispensable for general use, but I was raised on command line systems, and I still prefer the keyboard over the mouse for a lot of things. Once I know the name of the program I want, having to navigate through menus to find it each and every time I want to start it is irritatingly slow.

GNOME-Do, apparently inspired by the Mac’s Quicksilver program (which I’ve never seen), is called up by a hot-key combination (the Windows key plus the space-bar, by default). When it appears, you just type in a few letters for the item you’re looking for, and it shows you the closest match. If that’s not the one you want, hit the down-arrow and you’ll get a list of the next-closest matches. Once you get the one you’re looking for, the second pane shows the most likely action for it (such as, in the case of a program, “Run”; press Tab to move to that pane, and you’ve got a pull-down menu of other options). Press Enter, the Do window vanishes, and that action is done.

You don’t have to type the first letters of the name either, the program is smart enough to match letters that are within the name, even non-sequential ones. For example, if I type “mssen” (accidentally skipping the first ‘e’), “Pidgin Internet Messenger” is the third item on the pull-down list. Instead of having to go back and correct my mistyping, I can just press the down-arrow a few times to get to the entry I want, and Enter to start it!

And it learns about the way you work, too. If you make that mistake a few more times, it will notice, and start offering Pidgin as the default item when you type “mssen”. Or, if you like, you can explicitly assign “mssen” (or “im”, or anything else you want) as an alias for Pidgin.

Do isn’t just a program launcher, either. Want to quickly open a web page? Type the URL into Do, it’ll automatically recognize it and offer to open it in your web browser. With the Firefox plug-in activated, it will search through your Firefox bookmarks as well. Turn on the “Files and Folders” and “Locate Files” plug-in, and you can type part of the name of a file, and have Do find, copy, move, or delete it, as well as just running it. Want to send an instant message to a particular person, or call them via Skype? Turn on the Pidgin or Skype plug-ins, and Do will recognize the names of your contacts from those programs and let you instantly start a call or IM session with them, or even change your status, without having to open the program separately. Want to play a particular song file you’ve got on your computer? Turn on the Amarok or Rhythmbox plug-ins, and you can start playing it with just a few keystrokes.

I couldn’t figure out the attraction of Do at first, because the version currently in Ubuntu’s repositories (0.4.1, I believe?) isn’t as useful. There’s no configuration panel in it (as there is with 0.5), and apparently many of the things that are optional plug-ins in 0.5 are always active in the earlier version, which can really clutter up the pull-down menu with items that aren’t relevant to you. The Launchpad version, which can easily be installed, is much better.

GNOME-Do is Linux-only, of course (apparently there’s another Linux program called Katapult if you prefer KDE-based solutions, though it’s said that Do will run under KDE as well), but if you’re using Windows, I hear that there’s a free (and also open-source) program called Launchy that does the same thing there. Give one of them a try, you might just find that you like the keyboard better than the mouse too. 🙂

Spam Problem Over?

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As noted previously, I rarely post about spam anymore, simply because there’s little new or interesting to post about. In fact, I rarely even see spam anymore, maybe one or two messages a day at most. This one is slightly interesting though, because it’s a perfect example of the contortions that spam purveyors have to go through to even have a slight chance of getting their messages read anymore:

Hej, VL Ia A G R VA 1) Open your browser 2) Enter http://www.capedyinlaxyz[IZ]com 3) Replace “IZ” with “.”

This is followed by the now-usual block of semi-random text that attempts to disguise the contents of the message from Bayesian spam filters.

Three items of interest:

  • “Hej”? A Scandinavian might read that as “hey,” one of the half-dozen standard greetings for such messages, but few native English speakers would.
    • <li>The "Viagra" text is on an orange background, and each letter has a separate different-colored background box on top of that. With the (deliberate) misspellings, it makes it kind of difficult to read, unless you already know what it's likely to say.</li>
<li>The HTTP address (which has been altered, slightly, from the one that I actually received in the e-mail) is random nonsense, and has to be decoded manually on top of that.</li>

    If this is the kind of thing spammers have been forced into, I think the spam problem is all but solved… at least, until the next evolution in computer science gives them a new way around the current defenses.