Project Honey Pot: How to munge your address

A great set of pages on how to make your e-mail address hard for a spambot to harvest is, Project Honey Pot: How to Avoid Spambots. Project Honey Pot is also interesting at a higher level. They are encouraging website administrators to work with them to mount pages with fake addresses that let them track spambots.

Anti-spam efforts to this point have generally focused on the tail end of the spam cycle. In order to send out their messages, spammers must gather addresses, procure contracts, send emails, and collect money. Unfortunately, whether through filtering, authentication or enforcement, nearly every solution to this point has tried to stop spammers at virtually the last step: sending messages. Project Honey Pot is an attempt to move earlier in the spam cycle and identify the “King Pin” spammers who sit at the top of the food chain and spend their time harvesting our addresses.

The company behind this initiative, unspam.com has a great spam news ticker.

The Home Computer, Back Then

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Scientists from RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a “home computer” could look in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.

I noticed this intriguing image and caption up in a display in our labs and thanks to St?©fan Sinclair traced it to Matt Kirschenbaum’s blog where a comment then took me to Urban Legends Reference Pages: Inboxer Rebellion (Does Not Compute). Pity it’s a hoax – why wasn’t Rand thinking about the home computer back then? If you look closely the teleprinter is distorted and the suit is too short for the display, but the caption is so good it should be true.

Bloggers meet at the MLA

Thanks to a blog entry by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum I was led to an article in Inside Higher Ed :: MLA about “Bloggers in the Flesh” by Scott Jaschik that speculates on academic blogging and whether it should count to tenure.
An interesting point Matt makes is that you have to write assuming that your wife, chair or students might read your blog. Holding ideas in plain view can both make one cautious and lead to embarassment. I have, on at least one occaision, had someone tell me they scanned my blog to figure out what I am like as a person. So … just to warn you all … the author of this site is just a character and doesn’t resemble any living being, least of all me.

You No Touch It: Atwood’s Book Signing Device

Margaret Atwood has come up with a device for remotely signing books to save her the trouble of early flights and mini-bar food according to stories like, Online answer to writer’s angst, (The Guardian, Charlotte Higgins, Jan. 8, 2005.)
The company she has founded to develop this device is called Unotchit (U No Tch It – get it?) While having a video conference with an author followed by some personal message (spell checked, of course) faxed to me might be OK, I don’t see how this will substitute for book-signing which is about presence – being close to the authority. Hell, a book is mediated authority, why would I want more of the same instead of a moment of real presence?
What’s interesting is how gentle bloggers and journalists are being with Atwood. It’s a stupid idea that says a lot about Atwood that none of us want to consider because we like her writing so much.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is an interesting social web tool where you get a tool bar that lets you rate sites for friends or stumble to a site that others think you might like. It encourages serindipitous stumbling across things – something people have felt was missing from the IT world. Of course, there is commercial side to StumbleUpon – for a fee people can promote their sites, see the “Sponsors” page,

2. Purchase Promotion
StumbleUpon can deliver your site directly to interested stumblers. If you have a high quality site and would like to increase your traffic and get community feedback, you may Request Promotion of your content.

EPIC: Carnivore Documents

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Omnivore Source Code FOIA Document
Did the FBI build use text analysis for network-tapping? I found an interesting page on the Electronic Privacy Information Centre about Carnivore and Omnivore (its predecessor), two Internet monitoring systems created by the FBI. EPIC has a EPIC Carnivore Page with a summary and scans of documents recieved through Freedom of Information Requests. See also EPIC Carnivore FOIA Documents. The documents are fascinating given all the lines blacked out that you can try to guess at. There is a beauty to these documents with heavy black regions and “Secret” crossed out all over. Note how EPIC uses this aesthetic in their annual report.
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