As a WordPress user I haven’t had much first-hand experience with MT-Blacklist (a system for combatting comment spam on Movable Type, though the data has been adapted for use on other toolkits), but it was enough to be suspicious when I found this in my inbox:
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Category: Tech
Double fill-in
I remember reading a post a while back where someone looked at one of those “personals” spams—the ones that claim some sexy girl has seen your profile and wants to *ahem* “meet” you, and the variations that claim the rendezvous has already been arranged. Whoever it was noticed that one message used four or five names for the same (probably fictitious) woman.
We get a lot of these in some of our spamtraps, and I would’ve just skimmed right by this one except that they’ve upped the ante with two temptresses named Erika & Julia. In fact, that’s exactly how they were referred to every single time, even the line about how you can “get a better look at her beautiful body before you head over.”
Wait a minute. “Her body, ” singular? I thought this was two girls? Are they conjoined twins? Do they psychically share the same mind? Is Erika&Julia sort of a Samneric thing? And why does the message quote someone named Janice? Is she trying to make her profile more attractive by making men anticipate attending to the needs of two women instead of one? I’m confused, and that spamtrap is going to be very disappointed. 😉
Perspective on the browser wars
At the end of a post on SSL/TLS and just how much security a “secure” site really gives you, Eric Lawrence of IEBlog posted an interesting thought:
The so-called “browser wars” have fundamentally changed. It’s no longer Microsoft vs. Mozilla vs. Opera et all. Now it’s the “good guys” vs. the “bad guys.” The “bad guys” are the phishers, malware distributors, and other miscellaneous crooks looking for a quick score at the expense of the browsing public.
We’re all in this together.
I’m not sure I agree entirely. It’s more like a second war has started, one in which former enemies are (or at least should be) allies. I do still think competition is necessary, as evidenced by Microsoft’s sudden reversal on updating IE once Firefox became popular—but more cooperation on security may be something MS/Moz/Opera/Apple should consider.
Opera 8 (The OTHER “other browser”)
Opera 8 is out, and their website is swamped so badly they replaced their home page with a stripped-down version pointing to download sites. That’s a first.
Unfortunately I can’t get the Linux download link to get me anywhere except back to the splash page, so I’ve only managed to grab the Windows version so far.
I used to be a big fan of Opera back in the days when Mozilla was still in beta, Netscape was obsolete, and IE was… well, a security hole waiting to happen and the dominant browser as a result of monopoly abuse instead of just making a better product. But then two things happened: Mozilla got a lot better, and Opera started to get bloated. And by bloated I don’t mean in code size, I mean in user interface. It was so cluttered that after a while it was just a pain to use.
I still buy new versions as needed (The reg code for 7.x seems to work fine on 8.0), and I’ve got active licenses on both Windows and Linux. But in the last few years I’ve mainly used it for testing (compatibility, small-screen rendering, etc.) and for keeping multiple accounts logged into the same website.
The 8.0 betas have been very nice, though. With all the extra toolbars hidden, I can just use the web. This is one of their selling points: their press release is titled “Speed, Security and Simplicity,” and states “The default UI design is cleaner, more intuitive and allows for easy navigation.”
I don’t think it’ll get me to switch from Firefox just yet, but I may find myself using it more often. And while it’s nice that I don’t have to pay for the upgrade, I wouldn’t mind it if I did.
Opting Out?
Going through the spam traps today, I noticed one message which was sent to 5 addresses on our system. Those addresses broke down as:
- 1 actual person’s email address.
- 1 long-dead account used to collect spam.
- 3 dedicated spamtrap addresses seeded solely by unsubscribing from spam sent to other accouts.
Is it any wonder that people don’t trust opt-out directions?
Title goes here
I’ll always remember a line from a play I was in during college. It was an original musical, and the composer couldn’t come up with a good line by the time he had to hand out the scripts, so he filled it in with “Come around and schmoo” just to keep the rhyme in place. Oddly, I can’t remember the line he finally replaced it with.
And of course, Firefox’s cookie preferences were labeled “Cookies are delicious delicacies” for so long during the beta period that by the time they wrote a real description for 1.0, someone wrote an extension to put it back in!
Well, sometimes dummy text makes it through “rehearsals,” so to speak. Jim Heid found live sites with various kinds of filler text. Not just the ubiquitous “Untitled document” (millions of pages), but samples of “lorem ipsum” filler and even ~250 hits for “this is placeholder text” (whoops, I’m gonna skew those results a bit.)
(via Scobleizer, who recommends using “xxxxx” exclusively for placeholders.)
Mandrake + Conectiva = Mandriva
Well, that was faster than I expected. Two months ago, Linux distributors Mandrake and Conectiva merged. Last month they announced the combined product line (basically Mandrake Linux with Conectiva’s own stuff merged in.)
Now they’re changing their name to Mandriva. I know the portmanteau is a logical choice from a purely linguistic perspective, but at least to my English-speaking ears it sounds like something out of a low-budget horror movie. Beware the Mandriva or Mandriva, the Terror from Beyond Source. Or maybe a fictional Central American country, the Republic of Mandriva.
Eh, I’ll probably get used to it. I wasn’t too enamored of Linspire, either. (Come to think of it, I still think that one’s a bit clunky.)
At least this should put to rest their long-running trademark dispute with the owner of Mandrake the Magician. Even if they started out with a penguin in a wizard hat, I still don’t think people are going to get a Linux distribution mixed up with a crimefighting comic book magician.
It looks like SuSE’s the only big-gun Linux company who hasn’t changed their name (if you count the Red Hat/Fedora spinoff), and now that they’re part of Novell, I suspect it’s only a matter of time. It’s probably the lack of corporation that’s kept the Slackware and Debian names intact.