Daniel Pallett

I stumbled across this trivial little fact today. It appears the techies at EarthLink have a sense of humour, as their two nameservers are named after The Simpsons show-within-a-show characters Itchy and Scratchy - take a look.

Personally I like the human touch better than a numerical or alphabetical system, it gives them character. It also reminded me that all my University department’s servers were named after Greek mythological figures (there’s a big enough list for them to choose from!). If you know of any other interesting/comical server naming conventions please post a comment.

After reading this article by the email and web security specialist company IronPort, it made me think. As spammers’ techniques get ever more sophisticated, is targeting or attacking the spamvertised sites (websites advertised through spam) still a valid tactic? According to that report, the turn around of links in spam is now on average less than 4 hours!:

In June 2005, the average length that a domain was advertised in a “spam” URL was 48 hours - allowing enough time for static URL “blacklists” to identify and block messages that contain these bogus Web links. Just one year later, the average duration of a spam URL has dropped to less than 4 hours. This means that by the time traditional block lists have identified and listed a bad URL, the spam message has already reached its targets and the spammer has moved on to sending spam using a new domain.

It also makes an interesting point on how this is made possible by the method they use to register domain names:

Spammers are also exploiting the domain name registration system by registering domains for a short period of time and then letting them expire before ever paying for them. In April there were over 35 million domains registered, 32 million of which were never paid for and expired after five days.

Therefore I wonder whether efforts to target those sites - such as Knujon, and the infamous former Blue Frog application - are going to be effective? I fear not. Which is rather discouraging, because using these methods gives the user an avenue to fight back and a sense of empowerment. That said - I am an advocate of those tools and have used them myself.

It’s a rather unsatisfactory conclusion I admit - and so in a future post I may take a look at some of the various email authentication standards which aim to target the problem of spam even reaching your inbox.

BitMeter 2 is an excellent little bandwidth monitoring program written by a guy who goes under the name of Codebox Software.

I run it all the time on my PC and have it start up automatically with Windows. It places an icon in the system tray which keeps you informed of the current upload/download speeds and can also display a compact box with a graph of recent usage. The great thing about this box is that it can be transparent (the percentage is fully adjustable) and has a feature called click-through which means it doesn’t register any clicks, but passes them on to what’s below. The colour schemes and most of the program’s many features are fully customisable.

I thoroughly recommend you head over to the website and have a better look, or click here for the direct download (1MB).

You often have many contacts on an instant messaging network, whether it be MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, Google Talk, Skype or whatever. Well it’s a basic fact that us humans tend to have certain friends who we’d rather talk to than others. There is a hierarchy if you like. Your closest family and friends - who you’d always talk to. Then people who you are happy to talk to most of the time. Then other people who you rarely talk to, etc.

I’ve found it is often the case that you block a fair number of contacts or change your presence to away, busy or even invisible. And all this to avoid the chance that someone who’s online, that you really can’t be bothered to talk to, IMs you. Quite possibly doing this whilst chatting as normal to other contacts.

It struck me that it’s quite a bit of hassle blocking/unblocking and changing your status. So I had a thought. Have levels of visibility. You assign a contact a certain level number. Then you set your current level. You will be visible to people at or above the set level, but contacts below that level will not see you online. For example, level 1 is the highest level. If your level is set to 2 then contacts in levels 1 and 2 will see you online, but contacts in lower levels will not see you.

You may not feel it would be more convenient or user-friendly, but it is a different angle of looking at the online presence model. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on it.

Freenigma is a really neat little extension for Firefox which allows the average Joe to encrypt their emails (and of course, the recipient to decrypt it!). Well cryptography has been around for a while and the technology is nothing new, however, Freenigma is clear and simple, taking care of all the public and private keys, which the user never sees. Therefore it is a great tool that allows everyone who wishes, to use cryptography.

It works with the major web-based email systems, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, however it currently doesn’t work with the newer betas such as Yahoo! Mail Beta and Windows Live Mail. If you’re concerned about privacy or you’re just curious I recommend you check it out.