I was curious why an email the subject line of which is “Watch these girls flash their racks for each other” got through Popfile, my Bayesian spam filter. Popfile is remarkably accurate at sniffing out the spammers. In this case, though, the message consists of a small graphic (“sg-titties-graphic”) — with my email address encoded in the link so if I click on it, they know I’m alive and horny — and some invisible text that says:

beefer segregates intrust yardsticks strangles RzneXfrysRzneXrivqrag.pbzRzneX ethel myrtle cruxes ceremonies disbands cooling computable hotly autopilots interrogating commencements halters clarified incidence cavern

I’m assuming that those words are rare in pornospam and thus successfully fooled PopFile. It’d be nice if PopFile recognized invisible text as invisible…

6 Comments »

Richard Smith, who tracked down the Melissa virus creator and caught the hands of Microsoft, RealNetworks and DirecTV in the privacy cookie jar, now has discovered that the Blair administration has been lying about how its Iraqi WMD info got, um, adjusted. The background, from Richard:

Back in February 2003, 10 Downing Street published a dossier on Iraq’s security and intelligence organizations. This dossier was cited by Colin Powell in his address to the United Nations the same month. Dr. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, quickly discovered that much of the material in the dossier was actually plagiarized from a U.S. researcher on Iraq.

As Michael O’Connor Clarke writes:

As you’ll probably recall – when it was revealed that the dossier was a work of creative cut & paste, the response of the PM’s office was to feign ignorance of the source, bluster, obfuscate, blame the spooks, and generally wash their hands of the whole thing.

The Blairies posted the document to the Web as a Word file. Smith looked inside and saw that Word had automatically tracked the changes made by four named users. As Michael says: “…as Richard’s excellent digging reveals – far from being the spooks, it was people very, very close to the PM who pulled this thing together.”

Michael’s done his own detective work on a different topic. Having noticed several sites that babble like a brook, he decided to check who owns them. He finds links to Scientology. Yikes.

This reminds me of the shortwave radio stations that do nothing but read lists of random-sounding numbers.

3 Comments »

Clay Shirky has posted his seminal keynote at the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference:

I want to talk a pattern I’ve seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.”

So I just posted my comments from the same conference which were in some ways a response to Clay’s presentation:

I want to suggest there’s a reason why we keep making the mistake that Clay specifically points to: the failure to adopt a group “constitution.” It’s not because we don’t learn. It’s because of the importance – in even the most vocal groups – of the unspoken.

3 Comments »

Alex Vallat has useful little utilities, many of them freeware, on his site. I’m using CopyPath that copies to the clipboard the full path of the currently selected item in Internet Explorer.

Be the first to comment »

The federal Do Not Call registry is open and accepting phone numbers you want removed from the clutches of spam dialers. It is remarkably easy to register. Nicely designed.

2 Comments »

Step-by-step instructions:

1. Re-install Outlook for the 43rd time

2. Open an email from someone not in your contact list.

3. With the cursor in the person’s email address, select “Add new contact”

4. Type in a business phone number

5. Click out of the business phone number field

6. You will get a window called “Location Information” that will ask you for information about your current location. Click “Cancel.”

7. You will get a window called “Confirm Cancel” that warns you that failure to enter information into “Location Information” may result in the auto-dial feature not working.

8. Because you don’t dial from Outlook, follow the instrucions and click “Yes” to cancel the “Location Information” window.

9. In “Location Information,” click “close.

10. Go to step 7.

11. Repeat until your fingers are nubbins.

11 Comments »