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Subject line (slightly expurgated) from a spam this morning:

Wow MILFS can f*** like mhrotefucesrk!

My first thought was, “like what?” Then I realized it was an anagram. Not unlike the naked sushi spammers, just taken a bit further to the point where it took a few seconds to realize it wasn’t just gibberish. And of course, if you think about it, the statement isn’t entirely logical.

Actually, the rest of the message is rather bizarre. I’m not sure how much I want to actually paste here, though. The footer is safe enough, if odd:

Showing us the beautiful light,
The chalice holds what quenches thirst
Not for me, while I stare at the cold moon

They missed the chance to make the last line an unsubscribe link, and the text is different in the plaintext part, so it’s clearly just random poetry bits.

The website clearly uses a wildcard name, and one of the links is to horrible.bl******.com (with a few extra letters)—not exactly enticing.

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I’ve started installing games on the new computer, some of which I haven’t played in over a year.

Arcanum seems to work fine, and maybe now I can actually play it. (It stopped working on the old computer, so I moved on to other games.)

Heroes of Might and Magic IV installs fine, but Game Update can’t find the server to grab patches. I assume that’s because 3DO doesn’t exist anymore. If I’d been able to just download the installers and save them locally, I’d be able to run them. So I’ve got a fully-patched copy on a computer I’m getting rid of, and I can’t install it on the new one. This is a major problem with download-on-demand software updaters.

Arcomage, the card game embedded in Might and Magic VII, which was later released stand-alone, and is a fun puzzle game to while away 15 minutes…refuses to install on Windows XP.

And now the good news. Since Ubisoft bought the rights to the Might and Magic brand, I went there looking to see whether they had picked up support of any of the older games. They do have the patches… and I just learned that Heroes V is in the works!

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We finally replaced our 4-year-old Windows Me computer with a new Dell (I’d had enough of building computers a few weeks ago) and it arrived yesterday. Katie had already asked me to upgrade her Mac while she made pizza for an office party. I had planned to finish installing Tiger first, but once you get past a couple of options and the EULA it’s all a matter of waiting for it to finish.

There’s something oddly exhilarating about simultaneously setting up both a Mac and a PC.

Of course I spent the next few hours registering the pre-installed software and updating everything. Run Windows Update. Reboot. Run LiveUpdate for Norton Internet Security. Reboot. Run Office Update (twice). It’s nice that Dell will pre-install stuff for you, but given that the computer is built to order, you’d think they could apply the updates before shipping.

With today’s hostile internet, it would greatly benefit not just new computer owners but the world at large if Microsoft (and Apple and Red Hat, while we’re at it) would take a cue from SuSE and Mandrake and tie their update systems into the setup process.

To Microsoft’s credit, Windows XP setup gives you a chance to turn on automatic updates, and recommends it to the point of “Well, if you really want to turn it off, you can, but you’ll be sorry!” And I’m reasonably certain Windows Firewall was turned on by default (i.e. it’s on now, and I don’t remember turning it on), though Norton supersedes a lot of its functionality. Depending on the default firewall rules, that should mitigate the impact of any worms that happen to pick your IP address before you run Windows Update.

Correction: It seems Windows Firewall wasn’t on as I thought. Norton Personal Firewall kept asking me whether I wanted to disable redundant rules (makes sense) or disable Windows Firewall entirely (I told it no—twice), so I assumed it was running. I hope it was only off because Norton was pre-installed.

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Making the rounds this week: IO Error’s critique of “nofollow”, the link add-on that was supposed to stop comment spam, but hasn’t even slowed it down. He suggests that it was never intended to: it was simply a sneaky way to lower blogs’ rankings in search engines.

Now, I don’t have a problem with the idea of being able to tack a note onto a link and tell Google not to treat it as an endorsement. But the way it’s been implemented in most blog software—blindly applying it to all links in comments—is overkill. Legitimate, useful, interesting comments should factor into the resource’s ranking, for all the reasons IO Error provides.

Where rel="nofollow" does help with comments is in devaluing the spam that slips through your filters overnight. If a search engine bot happens to crawl your page between the time the comment hits and the time you see it and remove it, nofollow will at least make the spam less effective. Of course, you only need it active for a day or two (depending on how often you check). Once you’ve cleaned the junk out, you want what’s left to get the rank boost it deserves. I’ve been using the No Nofollow plugin to do this since March.

In short, I don’t think that rel="nofollow" is a bad idea in itself. It’s just being used the wrong way.

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Q: What happens when you break up/fire your web browser-developing group with years of experience, and later hire an outside firm to build your next product?

A: Netscape 8.

IEBlog has an amazing report—which I’ve just verified. Netscape 8.0.1 disables IE’s XML rendering. So if you try to load an XML document—say, an XSLT-styled RSS feed like the feed for this blog—using Internet Explorer or Netscape 8 with IE’s engine, you’ll see either a blank page or an unloaded-image icon.

Apparently every time Netscape 8 runs, it trashes a registry entry that defines how IE displays XML. At this point the only way to fix it is to uninstall Netscape 8 and delete that entry (directions at the above link).

This raises two questions:

  1. Why does Netscape 8 alter an Internet Explorer registry setting?
  2. Why can Netscape 8 alter an Internet Explorer registry setting?

I’ve said it before (though possibly not here), but Mozilla is much better off now that AOL isn’t calling the shots.

Update June 20: Netscape 8.0.2 fixes this problem.

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I just can’t figure out what this message is supposed to be. My first thought was that someone was replying to spam that used a forged sender, but it scored 11 points in SpamAssassin for forged headers (it claimed to be from Yahoo, but wasn’t), a date stamp from the future, and Bayesian analysis.

From: Stock Advisor <probably fake address>
To: Stock Advisor <target address>
Subject: Go where?

>Go Away!

To top it off, it showed up in several spam traps with different subjects and senders, but the same two-word body. Maybe it’s a probe of some sort?

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Class Dis-mythedPhil Foglio once again illustrates the Myth Adventures universe in the next book in the series: Class Dis-Mythed.

I don’t know how much of it is Jody Lynn Nye’s influence and how much of it is just Robert Asprin being re-energized about the series, but since they started collaborating the books have improved drastically. The new ones have much more of the feel of the early series, before Asprin burned out on it and spent a decade working through writers’ block.

(via the Studio Foglio newsletter.)