Better code for killing spam

MORE FOOD FOR THOUGHT from readers around the world...

P4Man makes a good point about using individual email addresses for each site - it's a system I use myself and is very effective (tho god knows how spammers got hold of the email I used to register on the securityfocus.com website!!!)

I don't know if you've decoded that javascript in the article: but it's simply the ascii values of the email address converted into it's url escaped form. (i.e. very little protection from robots since its trivial to convert from &#nnn back to ascii since the nnn is just the ascii value.

A year ago I wrote a program (Open Sourced) to do a much better job (in response to a commercial offering), which offers the same as the tool in your story as well as a much better javascript driven version which stores the encoded email address with characters transposed so even smart robots will fail to get it.

Have a look at: this

Source code, plus working code is available so you can generate the encoding online without needing to install any software.

Regards,

Paul

I read the e-mail obfuscation code today. What a horrible way to go about it. I have a much better solution using this JavaScript function I wrote:

<script LANGUAGE="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
/* decloaking email addresses*/
function decloak(CloakedEmail, subject, name) {
// Magic to replace # with @ and $ with .
var thing
thing = CloakedEmail.replace('#','@').replace(/$/g,'.')+ '?subject=' + subject;
thing = '<a href="mailto:'+ thing +  '" class="MyClass" title="Had to hide e-mail links from spambots!">' + name + '</' + 'a>';
return thing;
}
//end of decloaking//
-->
</SCRIPT>

Then, whenever you wish to insert an e-mail link, you use this code:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
document.write( decloak('email#domain$com','Subject%20Line%20for%20e-mail&body=Dear%20Recipient,','This Pops Up'))
</script>

It's easy to use, and is versatile enough to re used with any address, subject line, body content, Tool-tip Text and is utterly uncrackable by Spambots.

All you do is replace @ with # and . with $ in the address, and make sure that spaces in the Subject Line, and Body arereplaced with %20

Hey Presto.

Kind regards,
Chris "Mobius"

Hello I am a daily reader and I just thougt I should give my 2 cents on how to fight spam. I have like many others tried custom rules and various other spam fighting methods. Then one day I stumbled across an article written by Paul Graham called "A plan for spam" http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html, which talks about using statistical methods to tell the diffrense between spam and regular mails. Paul lists quite a few tools that now implements theese mathematical functions on your mailstreeam, and this is how I came across the free anti-spam tool Spammunition found at http://www.upserve.com. Let me tell you, I get about 300 messages per day of which about 50% is spam and now as I have trained my statistical filter it filters away more than 98% of all spam without me having to do anything!

Thanks for a really good news-site!

Best regards
Fredrik

yes, at this time eMail harvesters (spiders) are that "stupid". They don't recognize addresses like "me at mydomain dot com".

But you don't have to be a visionary to predict, that harvesters WILL become more intelligent.

And it becomes even worse...
BEST point of attack in this case would be automatically scrambled eMail-addresses, created by tools like the one P4man mentioned in his letter!
Any decent programmer would extend an eMail-spider within an hour.
OK, make that one day.

Yeah, you're save.
Now.
But for how long?

bis die Tage...
Mathias

P4Man's suggestion of using MailWashers bounce 'feature' is a horrible one. Ask anyone who has ever admin'd a mailserver at an ISP or such, with customers who
use Mailwasher. The bouce message that MailWasher creates never reaches the
spammer around 99% of the time. And guess who it bounces back to? The ISP's admin who happens to have a customer that runs MailWasher with that 'feature' enabled. That program pisses me off for that reason alone.

A tool I use (in fact, it's my email client) at home is Turnpike. What I like is the ability to use regular expressions so I find that a couple of rules bounce masses of spam. There's the obvious - block yahoo and hotmail :-)

But I also block all recipients with more than six characters in the name (like the person I've quoted, I control a domain). And I block all senders with four consecutive digits in the name :-)

Then I've got a couple more trap rules, but those two regular expressions seem to kill a hell of a lot of spam. And then, the stuff that gets through, if I do end up reading it, because Turnpike is an SMTP-based client I just hit , which makes it delete the mail and generate a 550 DSN.

Cheers,
Wol

huh? "synthetic benchmark" refers to the first meaning: artificially made so as to resemble a natural product. that is, an s bench is not a natural application, but intended to behave similarly to one.

sandra is a s bench, but spec is not (since it's comprised of real applications). 3dmark03 contains both, though, so I suppose it would have to be considered synthetic as well.

One other problem in the benchmark field is that people get so busy testing how well a product performs 3 or 4 subsystem tasks compared to other products, that they forget the whole idea is to see how well *systems* perform with those products.

Case in point - Anand's (second) test of a preprod WD SATA 10,000 rpm drive, and my point will be made comparing how well the WD drive did against an IBM Deathstar 180, *as reported in the review*.

In a batch of tests, the review showed the WD had a much quicker access time, much quicker transfer rates, and in another bit of testing, showed an advantage of 24% and 45% respectively in I/O Operations per second in CC Winstone 2003 and Business Winstone 2002. Anand called it "The World's Fastest Desktop Drive".

Problem - If you looked at how well the WD *system* did against the IBM *system* in the 2 Winstones, the WD system's score was eight-tenths of a percent higher in CC Winstone 2003 and six-tenths of a percent LOWER in Business Winstone 2002. All those fancy-dan access times, transfer rates, and Ops/second didn't mean Jack Shit to the actual performance of the PC, and an honest evaluation would be that the WD and IBM drives are equally fast when installed in a desktop system, since .8% and .6% are much smaller than the normal error of the benchmarks.

So much for the "World's Fastest Desktop Drive".

[I suspect that the serialization/deserialization of the SATA data stream, particularly the deserialization part, are time delays - latency, as it were - that are not measured by the HD tests.]

John

I agree with you totally about benchmarks (especially the misleading Excel graphs you showed). Most people don't realise that unless there is a significant difference between two pieces of hardware (eg 20% or more, like the difference between PAL and NTSC) then you're just not going to notice "in the real world" (quite how something on a computer is the real world is beyond me).

Reading the article you linked to the other day about a reviewer fretting that the new VIA drivers caused him to lose 0.001% performance and 2 nights' sleep was typical tunnel-vision journalism. We don't buy cars (well I don't anyway) based entirely on the 0-60 times - our decision may be influenced by the amount of doors or seats it contains, or what equipment levels it has. Price is also a factor - as a Yorkshireman getting good "bang for buck" is pretty important for me. I can live with having 10% less performance from a graphics card if it saves me £70.

Also, although it sounds obvious, benchmarks measure just one specific thing, eg a PI calculator benchmark measures your computer's FPU capabilities. Once the numbers get very big then the speed of your memory may also be an issue. It doesn't necessarily mean that it will render complex 3d Studio scenes any better than the next computer. I don't suppose a Cray computer would give a very satisfying game of Quake 3, but it's sure handy for predicting the weather (then again, so is seaweed and that's a damn sight cheaper).

Remember the Byte benchmark which Apple droned on and on about? They managed to find a benchmark which didn't do anything useful but it did run nicely on the G3 CPUs which had a larger L1 cache than the Intels did at the time. It didn't matter that the Macs got stuffed on their home territory (Photoshop, Pagemaker etc) all that mattered was that WE COULD PRODUCE A NICE BIG GRAPH SHOWING APPLE TROUNCING INTEL!

Many moons ago there was a benchmark about the Village people (well, it was called Villagemark I think) which was created to show just how efficient the PowerVR graphics cards were at doing certain things. Now, PowerVR cards are not exactly cutting edge technology (to put it mildly) but they smack the electronic crap out of the latest and greatest nVidia or Ati cards of today in that particular benchmark. Of course, they get humiliated in everything else. If the PowerVR zealots want to "play" VillageMark all day long and score 25.3fps more than my card then I'm more than happy for them to do so. But when a "journalist" writes a review about the Via 4-in-1 drivers (which incidentally were released free of charge, fix a couple of problems but are not forced upon anybody, and still perform almost identically as the last version) and then is too busy looking at the wood he misses the trees then I begin to lose hope in humanity.

Well, almost.

Some of us have been regularly cleaning out computers that live in our homes regularly. The best motivation for doing this is when you need to upgrade your RAM, hard drive, CPU, or just anything that requires you to open the case up. A corollory to this is that if you need an excuse to clean your computer out, go out and but a
new bit of hardware for it that you've been putting off for some time.

Most pieces of hardware, be the cars, planes, boats, or something else, benefit from regular maintenance, even if it's just a good cleaning out of all the crap that builds up inside. If you want to put filters on the intakes of air, consider making the surface area you want to filter significantly larger than that of the intake. If it isn't obvious what's involved here, if you had a box with 5 perforated sides and the other open, the open end would be attached to the pc and other 5 would be covered in some sort of filter material and be the "collectors".

That said, most PC cases "leak" dust through other orifices, such as floppy drives, CD-drives, the gaps between your CD drive and the case, gaps between the metal that makes up the case, unused ports on the back of your computer and so on.

Is the die of the Pentium M really smaller than that of a Pentium 4?

I believe that the former has approximately 70 million transistors (with
1MB of cache) whilst the latter has about 50 million with 512kB. Of these
processors (at 0.13µm) the Pentium 4 3.06GHz HT is the better performer. I
would not like to make assumptions about yield, but the transistor count
would indicate lower productions costs for the P4.

Pentium M is more likely to find it's way onto the desktop in niche
machines - a lá Apple - where size, aesthetics and noise are a primary
consideration.

Regards,
Fergus

I would like to point out just a couple of mistakes (I guess) concerning an otherwise good read by Jack Russell. The creation of communist China with Mao's lead seems to me to have been based more on Mao's self serving human nature. Just like Fidel to our south. Nobel, self-righteous proclamations against evil exploiters, in the end only to exploit and suck it up for himself.

It wasn't like the Chinese people came to a vote (ha ha) to rebel against western ideals. It was a revolution - remember history? Enough people bought the workers' paradise ideal and the great illusion took control. The only reason capitalism was not adopted was because of raw elitist power, period. And of course, communism was a relatively new and effective answer to brainwash the masses. Thus the creation of a new system, yet continuing to maintain an utterly backwards and isolated country, sustained from slave-like labor and rigid authoritarian control. Never mind morphine, just control the mind and spirit with freedom from western evil. Praise Mao, or go directly to Chinese hell (literally.)

What's also bothersome and possibly misleading is the lack of interest to properly define any fundamental reason why China is now becoming prosperous. Their "drive towards modernization" is because of...what? That's right, good old western capitalism. So far, they are effectively accomplishing what Gorby could not. They've been opening their doors with know-how, created and based on the very principals that were once rejected, for their very survival in a modern world.

In the last part of the article, Jack is right...and big time! Now the power of our own wealthy, giants because of the fruits of our system, are selling us out. We do need to fear, but we've become apathetic and, for some, perversely diluted in thinking some kind of enlightened socialism (still authoritarianism) may be the answer.

Is it because of the evils capitalism...nope, but because of amoral self-serving human nature. We've lost our convictions for right and wrong - Chinese leadership and for the time being some western big businesses must be quite content, thank you very, very much.

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