Month: February 2002

dslreports.com – Spam and web-visible email addresses. Bait a spammer and see the results A while ago, as an experiment, we buried a link in these web pages that would generate a unique email address on a blank page when visited. The reason the link was hidden was to reduce the hit count of the page to manageable proportions, so we could be sure that future email to this unique address could be uniquely matched to the IP address doing the scooping. [Privacy Digest]

Spammers don’t just harvest addresses from the web, though. I’ve had (at various times) Earthlink, MediaOne, and Hotmail email addresses. I never used any of those addresses for anything, and yet all of them received several times as much spam as my main email address (which I use on Usenet posts and hasn’t changed for years). If you want to avoid spam, it’s not enough to keep your address of the web and out of Usenet, you also have to avoid using a major ISP or “free email” service.

Mideast Violence Leaves Seven Dead. Palestinian militants staged a series of attacks Monday, leaving seven dead as Yasser Arafat praised a tentative proposal in which the entire Arab world would make peace with Israel in exchange for a total pullout from the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem. [AP World News]

The problem with this, and all other Mideast peace proposals, it that there’s no reason to believe that the Israelis will actually get peace in exchange for a pullout. On the contrary, there’s considerable evidence that accepting this proposal would only increase terrorist attacks.

Martina Wilson of the Los Angeles Newton User’s Group has created a Radio weblog.

Lipponen: EU must become a great power. Mr Lipponen said during his lecture in the London School of Economics that the EU must not develop into a military superpower, but should become a great power that will not take up arms at any occasion in order to defend its own interests, writes Danish daily Politiken. [EUobserver]

I guess he figures there’s no need for the EU to defend its interests when they can get America to do it for them. That way all they have to do is sit around being self-righteous and talking about how much they hate America.

nHTML, the tool I use for writing HTML on my Newton, has one weakness. As it stands. there is no support for entering entities such as < and >. Fortunately the source was released by the author, Adam Tow. It may be within my limited NewtonScript coding ability to add entity support. It’s worth a try, at any rate.

GM bug to tackle tooth decay. Scientists believe they have found a way to stop tooth decay using a
genetically modified bacterium in a mouthwash. [BBC News: sci/tech]

Certainly a novel use of genetic engineering! Of course, this means that dentists will now join the ranks of luddite twits whining about the evils of genetic modification.

“Miss Cleo” Sued by FTC, 9 States for Fraud – What Took So Long?. The US FTC and 9 states want to clamp down on “Miss Cleo’s” lucrative psychic hotline businesses, saying they are “permeated with fraud”: “toll-free” lines that run up hundreds of dollars; telemarketers who ignore “do not call” lists; and “tarot readings” that are actually read from a script. Well, that’s what I call cost-cutting. It’s kind of amusing that you can be busted for offering tarot readings which aren’t actually tarot readings, but you can’t be busted for offering “real” tarot readings. Both are fraud. Both play on suckers. Seriously, why is one OK but the other not? [kuro5hin.org]

I think it’s a First Amendment issue. Tarot card readings are a sort of religion, so they can’t be banned. Sure, they’re a fraud, but then religions generally are. It doesn’t matter, because people have the right to believe in whatever they want to, no matter how absurd it seems to others who don’t share those beliefs.