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Month: December 2002

Spam: SpamCop Statistics: A Month On

December 18, 2002
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[Spamcop]Well, it’s now been a month since I commenced reporting a selection of my spam to Spamcop (see the results of my first week reporting).

My spam levels have been quivering between only about a dozen a day (usually at weekends) to the deluge I got yesterday of around 800 🙁 I tend to report each “unique” message to Spamcop (selected on the criteria of “To:” address and “Subject:” being different from the spam I have in my mailbox at that time – some spammers send around 20 mails to the same address with the same subject: only one of those gets reported).

Ok, a month and a day ago (yep, I should have done this entry yesterday) I purchased 25Mb of “Spamcop reporting” (paying for membership just adds a few fancy things such as ‘past reports’ and ‘amount of spam reported’ – it also removes a few ads and the “parse” time delay). I now have just 10.3Mb left. Yep – in a month, I’ve reported just under 15Mb of spam. My “average usage rate” is 5.53bytes per second or 14.3Mb per month or a massive 174.4Mb per year (that’s an increase of 50.5Mb per year since 3 weeks ago).

At the moment, I seem to be reporting more like 10% of my spam to Spamcop – therefore I receive around 55.3bytes of spam EVERY SECOND: that’s 4.5Mb a day. A month, that’s 136Mb. So – therefore, I receive in the region of 1.63Gb of spam a year.

The good news is that after the well known spammer Alan Ralksy was featured on a Slashdot article (referring to a freep interview) several Slashdot visitors decided to “turn the tables” on him. They’ve signed him up with practically every form of “snail mail” to his home address of 6747 Minnow Pond Drive, West Bloomfield, Michigan, MI 48322, USA. Of course, the other Slashdotters were happy to hear this 🙂

Ralsky was actually sued by the Verizon company and is barred from sending their customers spam late in October… Ralsky doesn’t, however, seem too happy about people taking photographs of his house – Rich Clark has received some threatening phone calls within 24 hours of taking some quite nice photographs.

Oh – and AOL also won a spam case against the spammer outfit CN Productions and owner Jay Nelson.

Are the tables turning against the spammers after so long? I hope so…

Game: Wrath II

December 17, 2002
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[Wrath II]By the same person that made “Lost Your Marbles“, there’s a largish Flash game (which includes Harvey from LYM in the loading screen) called Wrath II.

Starting off with the introduction of “And on the sixth day, God created man. By the seventh day, he’d realised his mistake. And “B—-r!” was the word.” should give you an idea of what you have to do. Still not clued up? Well, the instructions (from “Encyclopedia Satanica”) state: “What a bummer… You created mankind in your own image huh? Bit of a silly thing to do wasn’t it. So naturally, they’ve run amok, and really p—d you off, right? Sounds like punishment time”.

Yes: you finally get to play God! Starting off with just a lighting bolt, as you progress through the levels you get a Hay Bomb (a sort of time delay bomb), a flood, earthquake, “angel of death”, and a “bonzai volcano”. But it’s not so easy to kill those awkward humans, sheep and cattle. Angels, aliens and even the Lord Of Darkness – Satan himself – will try and stop you…

Search: Google Cache oddity

December 17, 2002
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[Google Pigeons]I’ve just noticed a slight “oddity” with my favourite search engine Google. Basically, Google has a cache facility which enables your to see what the page was like when Google indexed it using their Googlebot spider. Extremely handy if the site you are trying to access is unavailable for some reason.

Google also offer the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer users (a Mozilla version is also available) which makes available certain items such as “Search From Toolbar” (saving you going to the Google homepage) and direct access to the cache.

Now, here’s the oddity: Accessing the cache of my blog via the Google Toolbar gives me a URL in the format of http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fblog.rac.me.uk (ok, there are a few more parameters, but I’ve reduced them to “bare minimum”). That link currently shows my blog with the latest entry dated November 13 2002 at 12:31am (entry “Game: Fling That Cow!“) – however, performing a search and then clicking on the ‘Cached’ link produces a URL in the format of http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:QGa9rQIfcj0C:http%3A%2F%2Fblog.rac.me.uk – with a “last entry” date of December 15 2002 08:11pm (entry Movies: Films I’d like to see again) – just 2 days ago.

So: why has Google got two cached copies of the same page? Obviously the search system is using the “fresher” copy, but it’s still given me a reason to stop and think. And what does the QGa9rQIfcj0C bit mean? A bit of playing has shown to me, so far, that it’s a unique identifier for the page in Google’s cache: searching for other pages from my blog resulted in the code “OdxOQ8hwqvMC” (November 12th: Pick On George Bush). “Adjusting” the cache URL to read http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:OdxOQ8hwqvMC:blog.rac.me.uk still shows up the individual entry page instead of the front page (which you would have thought by the format of the URL). fEJraafpn4cC is the code to my Games and Fun category page

Someone else has noticed this at Webmaster World, but no useful information came from that discussion.

Oh well – if I find out anything more (it’ll be interesting to find out if the “cache IDs” remain static over time), I’ll let you all know 🙂

Movies: Films I’d like to see again II

December 17, 2002
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[Weird Al Yankovic Troll]Continuing on from Sunday’s post of which films I would really like to see again, here’s another couple of movies.

Basically, Weird Al Yankovic’s “UHF” and “Troll” are two movies I’d like to watch again: but there’s a slight problem. Both films are only currently available on DVD – NTSC Region 1 (US and Canada). These means that my Region 2 (UK and Europe) PAL players just will not play them. Therefore, thanks to the regionalisation of DVDs, the makes of those movies have lost a potential customer who would have happily paid shipping from the States to the UK…

Anyway, on with the rambling:

Continue ReadingMovies: Films I’d like to see again II

Personal: Thoughts about my GESF

December 16, 2002
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[Someone Likes You At Desk]*sigh* I’ve just been speaking on the phone to my GESF (Green-Eyed Southern Friend: see previous entries). Second time in two days and fourth or fifth time in a week. She really knows how to brighten my day – I just called her to see how she got on earlier today (she had to go for a Doctors checkup) and we chatted for around 30 minutes or so (yesterday we talked for around an hour). I was laughing most of the time at the things she was coming out with.

At one point I managed to steer the conversation over to the emails I’ve had from Someonelikesyou.com. A bit of background about SLY (good acronym really 🙂 ) As detailed elsewhere on the net, this service works by you entering basic details about yourself (name, age, hair colour/color, eye colour, email address) and then 5 email addresses of your friends who you have a “crush” (yuck!) on. They then get an email pointing them towards the site and have to enter in 5 email addresses of people that they think may have a crush on them – and so on. After entering 5 email addresses in, they get 1 clue – another 5 and another clue and so forth.

SLY therefore gets a whole heap of marketing data and a list of verified email addresses (as they send the emails to your potential “crushes” before giving you your clue: if the email bounces, you don’t get your clue). Very “spammy” way of doing business…

What’s this to do with my GESF – well, let me explain…

Continue ReadingPersonal: Thoughts about my GESF