Boffoblog

Fight the Spam

Perhaps you have read a blog with comments inundated with spam from online casinos.  Perhaps a favorite blog has had to shut down, temporarily or permanently, due to thousands of spam comments and referrals.  Perhaps you are a blogger wrestling with the problem every day.

I thankfully have had to do very little of that -- as far as I can tell, Typepad has effectively filtered out the spam -- but the problem affects all of us directly or indirectly.

Netaloid has done a masterful job, and a service to us all, researching not just the origin of the online casino spam, but also the tools for us to fight back.  If you are a blogger beset by such spam, go sign his online petition.  Believe it or not, we in blogtopia have some political leverage over the spammers.  Use it!

Here are the relevant links over at Netaloid:

• Part I: Spammers Bet on Casino Affiliate Cash
• Part II: Voiding an Agreement
• A Related Story: If Tiger is the Spice, Spam is the Meal
• Part III: Please Sign This Petition

Fixing Firefox

I highly recommend Firefox to everyone who browses the web.  Yes, that includes you.  One of the selling points (if you can say that about something which you can download for free) is that it does not suffer from the security vulnerabilities of Internet Explorer.  Another selling point is that it is more faithful to the platform-free standards of the web.  Alas, not long ago the two came into conflict with one another.

It was found that by taking advantage of International Domain Names (IDN), which use non-ASCII characters in the URLs, a hacker could spoof a site, redirecting you to a pirate site without your knowledge.  Obviously, if that is done with, say, a bank's website that could be a serious problem.  IDN is not supported yet by IE, but is by the major alternatives, including Firefox.  The hitch is that it is not supported safely, yet.  Hence the security problem which affects non-IE browsers.

Netaloid alerted us to a fix posted a few days ago on tech.life which involves a minor hack of the Firefox profile.  For ordinary users that might seem intimidating, and it also is not permanent since the installation of extensions to Firefox will undo the fix.  The site provides a second fix which is easier and more permanent, and uses an extension which is one of the best reasons to get Firefox: Adblock.

Adblock allows you to block not just ads, but almost any annoying graphic that appears on websites.  Is your fave site slowed down because you have to continually re-load large and very slow gif files every time?  Just block them.  Want to universally block ads from a particular server, no matter where you surf?  Block them, too.  And, if there are some you want to let through, you can be selective in your blocking.  Lots more can be customized as well if you are hip to writing regular expressions, but most can be done simply by clicking a helpful Adblock button.  (In this way, it has much in common to that late great tool of web customization, Proxomitron.)  And as with everything Firefox, unlike IE it is in constant development, so feel free to suggest changes and report bugs.

Now, back to the IDN fix.  Turns out that by using Adblock, a simple regular expression will block the exploit.  This post on tech.life has the details.  Nothing to download and install if you already have Adblock running, and it is not platform-dependent.  Now, if only IE security fixes were that easy.  And so rarely needed.

Blogtopia is a Strange and Wondrous Place

Well in advance of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, Crooked Timber has one of the finest post + comment combos, well, ever.  And you should also check out the comments on Brad DeLong's post when he linked to it.

If that don't give ye a bellylaugh, me hearties, then my foc's'le's a yardarm!

Virtual Insanity

The LA Times reports that a $581 million effort to upgrade the electronic files for use by FBI agents, called Virtual Case File (VCF), is so hopelessly inadequate that it may need to be scrapped.  It has been known for years that -- contrary to what you may see on 24 -- the computing capabilities of the Bureau are very 1984 not in the Orwell sense but the 5.25" floppy disk sense.  This was an area of particular concern identified in the 9/11 Commission's report.

VCF is connected with an upgrade known as Trilogy, only one part of which -- an "automated workflow manager" according to Computerworld -- was on target for deployment.  The program, which is now being investigated by the GAO at the request of the House Judiciary Committee, was begun in the late 1990s, but overhauled in 2002, according to Government Computer News.  While it appears to have been beset with design flaws from the very start, the FBI's conception of the costs and challenges were fundamentally naive.  From Computerworld:

For example, according to the NRC study, the VCF system was developed without the benefit of prototyping and testing. In addition, the bureau had no contingency plan in place for handling "mission disruptive failures" that could stem from the bureau's planned "flash cutover" from the old system to the VCF system.

The FBI, according to reports, thought that they could make up for years of IT neglect by getting the whole thing right the first time.

Excuse me, did they ever try using Windows 1.0?  Word 1.0?  And I'm sorry Mac people, but the first Macintoshes -- while pretty to look at compared to PCs back then -- were finicky in the extreme.  And those are just simple desktop software issues, a far cry from what VCF is trying to accomplish.

These are problems the Bureau has been made aware of for a year now, as you can see from a series of articles in Federal Computer Week, though only now has reached such a crisis that they feel the need to reassess their approach.  So now they are going back to the drawing board and calling in consultants to see what, if anything, they can salvage from the half billion dollars sunk so far.  The idea that they may need to write a new software package from scratch is not all that far fetched.  On the bright side, according to Government Computer News, "GAO has found that VCF has good system documentation."  Score one for the gearheads!

If you wonder why the FBI continues to bungle terrorist investigations, and so feels the need to trample on our civil rights in order to compensate, here's part of the answer.

We're Number One!

In the latest tabulation of spammers by nation, the U.S. leads by a wide margin with 42% of all email spam originating in this country.  South Korea, which has among the highest rates of broadband access in the world, is in second at 13%, followed by China at 8%, Canada at 6% and Brazil at 3%.  More from the CIO Today story:

Despite such efforts as the CAN-SPAM act, which was passed in January, efforts to address the problem in the U.S. are having little impact, Gregg Mastoras, senior security analyst at Sophos, told NewsFactor. "The problem is poor legislation and a lack of interest among law enforcement agencies to pursue spammers," he said, noting that the U.S. topped the previous "Dirty Dozen" list issued early this year.

Canada, on the other hand, has taken more concrete steps and has shown results in stemming the flow of spam.  Just one of many things we can learn from our neighbors to the north.

Interesting that Japan and the EU countries don't make the list, not to mention that nice gentleman from Nigeria who keeps emailing me about his recent financial dilemma.  And then there's the Dutch fellow who's been contacting me lately.  Or at least I think he's Dutch; anyway, his English could use some work: "revollutionaary and new peenjs enlaargment devjce."

This is a good time to recommend Thunderbird to you, the email client companion to Firefox.  It's free and developed from the open source Mozilla project.  I've been using beta versions for months now and love it, and the official 1.0 release just came out.  RSS support, spell checker, many extensions available ... but the reason I bring it up is that it has a built-in adaptable spam filter which has worked quite well for me (the Nigerian and peenjs enlaargment spams I dug out from the "junk" folder where they're sent automatically).

They hate us for our freedom.  And our ample supplies of Vioxx.

Like Our World, But Different

Check out this well-crafted spoof of CNN -- now! -- before their lawyers force the page to be taken down.

Alas, all the Canadians did was serve him Alberta beef.  They're definitely much too polite.

Still in Beta

James Fallows has an excellent, commonsense column in today's New York Times about electronic voting.  Here is a snippet:

A columnist in The Washington Post recently suggested that nostalgia for paper ballots, in today's reliably computerized world, must reflect a Luddite disdain for technology in general or an Oliver Stone-style paranoia about the schemings of the political world.

Not at all. It can also arise from a clear understanding of how computers work - and don't. The more you know about the operations of today's widely trusted commercial computer networks, the more concerned you become about most electronic-voting systems.

He makes a clear argument why electronic voting is not ready yet, both in terms of the technology and the regulation.  It may not have tipped the presidential election this time, but we don't know for certain that it did not make a difference at the local level, nor that absent further testing and scrutiny it wouldn't the next time.

Fallows also makes a case along the way for open source software, which gives me reason to point you to the link on the left side of the screen for Firefox.  It is one of the gems of the open source movement.  For those of you working on a Windows machine and using Internet Explorer to read this, you're sitting on a ticking time bomb.  For your sake, beat the hackers and the spyware makers by switching.  I recommend Firefox, but Opera would be a big improvement, too.  (Don't get one of those shells for IE like Maxthon/MyIE2 because those are just bandaids.)

Crank Shaft

It's only my second day doing this and I've already noticed a tendency.  I wondered why so many blogs end up sounding like cranks and bellyachers, and there I was on my first day doing the very same thing.  Something about the medium and the fact that there is this ill-defined audience for it out there (and I realize that I use the word "audience" loosely at this point).

There are a couple of alternatives.  I could do one of these sites that is really just a series of links interspersed with a little commentary.  How about . . .

• For those of you who wondered about the resilience of those annual Easter treats, check out the home of frighteningly thorough Peep Research.
• Is it the name of a porn star or of a My Little Pony character?  Take the quiz and see if you know!
• Or perhaps you'd prefer to ponder rocks shaped like shoes.

Ok, maybe not.  Another trope I've seen is the role of helpful know-it-all.  I could give household tips like:  Ever wonder what to do with that egg slicer living in the back of your kitchen drawer?  Does slicing mushrooms for your dinner salad get you down?  Well, the button mushrooms you buy in the supermarket fit perfectly in your standard egg slicer.  Pretty soon, you'll be a French-speaking mycophile, too!

Yeah, maybe not that, either.  So it's back to being a crank for me.  With the occasional link and CD/DVD review, too.

Did it start without me?

Sometimes I am ahead of the curve, but not by very far.  Oh sure, I spotted Bill Clinton as a hot prospect for president in '92 long before the primaries, despite his gawd-awful speech at the '88 convention.  And it was clear to me that Dean would flame out way back when everyone was going meetup-nuts over him.  I'm hardly alone on either count.  I've been a Pixar fan since Luxor Jr. and Tin Toy, but I never bought any stock.  Anyone who attended animation festivals in the late '80s would say the same, with the possible exception of the stock part.

My record is mixed.   I really thought Ted Knowles would pull out the Alaska Senate race against Lisa "Frank is my dad" Murkowski, and I didn't see the mobilization of the conservative evangelicals until after it was over.  I knew Wilco was a great band several years before Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but somehow their predecessor Uncle Tupelo was never on my radar.  I caught Freaks and Geeks at its very start, but that show -- one of the finest ever to grace American televisions -- didn't last even a full season (though it lives on as an equally remarkable DVD collection).

Now I find out that blogs are becoming just another journalistic enterprise, though one without editors, training, or -- frankly -- scruples.  Glad I'm getting in now.  Heck, I'm not even the first person I know with a blog, and I don't hang out in that tech-hip a crowd.

Well, better late than never, right?