Commavee

Spam Levels and Trends

Posted by John Minnihan - 02/06/07 at 08:06:07 am

Based on what comes through my inbox, I am seeing a firm trend away from malicious, designed-to-destroy-your-hard-drive-virus-laden messages. The payload of spam today is focused on money, through use of one of these two techniques:

1. Getting the recipient to take action that results in confirming an address (a click-back indicates the address is valid, a human read it, and clicked on the payload – this is a golden address and is worth more to the list sellers), or,
2. Getting the recipient to actually make a purchase. Though this second goal is seemingly more difficult, real people (unfortunately) really do make purchases as a result of Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE).

And bulk it is… we all saw news of the arrest last week of the spammer who is alleged to have sent billions (that’s BILIIONS) of UBE’s a day from his apartment in Seattle. It’s a numbers game – more messages means that the small percentage of fools who click through the messages turns into a really big empirical number. 0.5% of 10Billion per day makes it the modern example of the grocery store model. The margins are painfully small, but with high enough volume, you can still make a lot of money. The model isn’t exactly the same, but you get the idea.

So what about the trend claim I’m making?

I run Mailscanner & spamassassin (SA) as my anti-spam tools. Part of what Mailscanner (MS) does is categorize spam with regard to the SA score, a number representing the likelihood that the message is spam based upon results of various tests. Using these scores, MS then provides this nice, high-level summary of the mail it has processed. Take a look at this report:

Notice that there have been no viruses detected. This has been going on for quite a while. It simply struck me this morning that this isn’t merely anecdotal – it is indicative of what email is really now being used to accomplish. Destructive viruses may continue to be developed, but the new gold mine – volume of delivery & subsequent action – necessitates new techniques.

Viruses are far too easy to detect when included as direct payload, making them easy prey to the many anti-virus programs available. Not so easy to discard is a simple message; though heavily disguised (spoofed address, bogus text, stock-scam embedded gifs in HTML…), the message itself is “clean” in the virus sense. So it gets through the anti-virus hammer-of-death.

There’s no money to be made in discarded messages, so rest assured that the trend I am now noticing has been discussed and planned by the big-time spammers months ago.

Tags: spam, virus, email

Popularity: 1% [?]

Yum … not the restaurant company

Posted by John Minnihan - 30/04/07 at 08:04:45 am

I found myself explaining Yum recently, and thought that it would make a good posting. What is Yum and why do I want to use it instead of RPM? The short answer is you use it with RPM.

Yum is Yellow Dog Updater – Modified. It can best be described as everything you wish RPM was, but never got around to becoming. See here for more about Yum.

Yum’s key strength is that when you attempt to install a package with it, it will determine the dependency chain, fetch all the dependencies, and build & install them in the right order prior to installing the package you originally attempted to install. Packages are fetched from a Yum repository, which you point to in your local Yum configuration.

RPM, while very useful, generally does nothing to satisfy dependencies. It will simply report that you have a list of dependencies, that when installed themselves from RPM may have their own dependencies, and so on… this is known as RPM Hell.

You can avoid RPM Hell by using Yum.

Tags: yum, rpm, configuration, package management

Popularity: 1% [?]

Collabnet Purchases SourceForge EE

Posted by John Minnihan - 25/04/07 at 11:04:08 am

Today Collabnet announced an agreement to purchase SourceForge Enterprise Edition:

http://biz.yahoo.com/e/070425/lnux8-k.html

Let the consolidation war begin.

Continue reading Collabnet Purchases SourceForge EE…

Popularity: 1% [?]

Nationwide Blackberry Service Outage

Posted by John Minnihan - 18/04/07 at 08:04:18 am

As of 7:42am PDT today, Wed April 18, 2007 Blackberry is confirming a nationwide (U.S.) service outage. No ETA for service resolution (as of 7:42am today).

This outage appears to have been first reported as early as yesterday at 8:24pm PDT.

Update: Service is being restored  “…an overnight outage that left millions of users without service”.

Popularity: 1% [?]

AJAX Logfile Tailer & Viewer

Posted by John Minnihan - 13/04/07 at 01:04:11 pm

Recently I had a need for a simple logfile viewer for use in some stuff we have planned at Freepository. But this log file viewer had a few requirements that made it unique: it had to get the log file contents from the server in small chunks, not tie up the browser (such as an old-style synchronous request would do), and refresh in the browser without reloading the page.

I thought I could easily find one that someone had already written, but Google was not my friend. I found nothing even close, so I wrote my own. Here it is.

Working example:  https://freepository.com/ajax-logtail-viewer/ajax-logtail-viewer.php

Continue reading AJAX Logfile Tailer & Viewer…

Popularity: 100% [?]

Twitter & Instant Demographics

Posted by John Minnihan - 27/03/07 at 10:03:11 am

While commenting on Paul Kedrosky’s post about Twitter, it occurred to me that my opinion of Twitter was changing right then – at that moment.

Continue reading Twitter & Instant Demographics…

Popularity: 1% [?]

Fix for Treo 650 Random Resets

Posted by John Minnihan - 25/03/07 at 02:03:46 pm

Until yesterday, I had been experiencing multiple random power-offs and hard resets on my Treo 650. It would power-off the phone without warning, without any apparent pattern: while I was on a call, while I was using the browser, or while it was simply sitting on my desk. If I didn’t see it power-off, I would go for considerable periods with it off. Not good, and I began to hope that it would last long enough to get naturally replaced when I purchase (probably…) an iPhone in June.

Continue reading Fix for Treo 650 Random Resets…

Popularity: 1% [?]

Tech Tip: Publishing iCal Calendar in Multiple Places

Posted by John Minnihan - 13/03/07 at 04:03:37 am

Recently I had a need to publish a calendar in more than one location. Simple, right? Just use Google calendar, Boxes, or one of the other free services. Not quite. I don’t want to manage any users, nor give anyone direct access to an account that is hosting the calendar. I want to publish, not provide direct access to, the calendar.

Continue reading Tech Tip: Publishing iCal Calendar in Multiple Places…

Popularity: 12% [?]

Real Configuration Management

Posted by John Minnihan - 12/03/07 at 09:03:07 am

Software engineering professionals find me in Google when they’re researching Release Management, and often they will email me questions about how to approach a specific issue or challenge they are facing.

Continue reading Real Configuration Management…

Popularity: 1% [?]

Beer tossing fridge

Posted by John Minnihan - 07/03/07 at 09:03:46 pm

Now this is an amazing use of techn^H^H^H^Mwaste of effort, and should be condemned:

When John Cornwell graduated from Duke University last year, he landed a job as software engineer in Atlanta but soon found himself longing for his college lifestyle. So the engineering graduate built himself a reminder of life on campus: a refrigerator that can toss a can of beer to his couch with the click of a remote control.

“I conceived it right after I got out,” said Cornwell, a May 2006 graduate from Huntington, N.Y. “I missed the college scene. It embodies the college spirit that I didn’t want to let go of.”

Read the full article here: http://feeds.sfgate.com/~r/sfgate/rss/feeds/news/~3/100121745/article.cgi

Tags: beer, duke, fridge, technology

Popularity: 1% [?]

• @n3wjack The issue I was trying to resolve was UX, so I'll attack it from another angle. Thanks. # 1 hour ago

Search