Category: Technology

Yahoo likes to talk
a lot about its oh-so-cool tools to fight spam, but just how effective are they? I
have a yahoo ID that I use only for instant messenger chatting. Of course it has
its own mail account too which I stopped using a few years ago. Of late,
however, Yahoo has started letting a lot of obvious spam through its
"protection".

Don’t believe me? Here’s a screenshot of my in-box the last time I checked
mail on the yahoo account.

Apart from the first one which was legit mail (I’ve blurred it), the other
messages are clearly spam. They aren’t even the more deceptive ones that have
benign subject lines like "hello", "how are you doing", or
"I forgot to tell you".

Yet Yahoo fails to classify them as spam. They need to tweak their algorithm
a bit, I suppose.

(And before somebody asks, yes, the "SpamGuard" option is
enabled on my account. I checked twice.)

BSNL, our wonderful government telecom
provider, has of late been putting out big newspaper advertisements touting its great new
broadband service called DataOne. These ads are remarkable in that they contain
absolutely no information except that they’re introducing a new service. That,
and their web site URL is all.

A couple of weeks ago, there was absolutely no information on their web site
either – all very perplexing at the time. Today, there was yet another ad about
DataOne, but once more no information about plans or cost. After today’s ad, I
checked their site again. Now they even have an FAQ
about the service.

So does it help? Nope, that’s basically a page about what ADSL
is. The two most important things you need to know are completely missing: available
throughput and pricing. Here’s what the page has to say about it:

How about Broadband Plans and Pricing?

These will be declared very soon. Meanwhile you can fill up the
registration form so that we can work out the logistics for your connection.

They even have a
form you can fill up to get a connection even though you don’t know what
you’ll get and for how much. (The form is an image. Wow!)

It contains the helpful clarification:

* Tariff will be most competitive in the industry

** Data rate of 256 kbps and above

That sure tells you a lot, doesn’t it?

According to Kingsly, who has spoken to some
BSNL folks, they have yet to decide on download speeds and tariff, and the
service is supposed to launched only around 15 January. So why on earth are they
wasting money on advertisements if they haven’t worked out any of the important
details yet? Who knows? Somebody on the india-gii list thought that it was
because they wanted to use their ad budget in this financial year. Ah, that
explains it all, doesn’t it?

I’m waiting to be pleasantly surprised by BSNL giving us a 512 Kbps unlimited
connection for about 2000 bucks a month. I’m currently on the Touchtel
Airtel Broadband 128 kbps DSL
plan which costs approximately Rs. 1450 per month with all the fine print
charges included. It’s already saving me about 5000 Rupees every month, but I’d
love to have some higher throughput. That 128 Kbps is called
"broadband" in this country is downright shameful.

These spammers are a relentless bunch. The more spam-prevention measures you add, the smarter their bots get. For instance, Movable Type’s spam prevention for email addresses was merely changing the “@” to its HTML entity code of “%40” and has long been circumvented by spambots. Even installing MT-Blacklist only reduces your burden; it doesn’t eliminate it. (Though checking my MT Activity log tells me that it catches a LOT of comment spam.) The fuckwits have now started comment spamming with legitimate urls like “www.fda.gov” to get you to accidentally blacklist non-spamming sites.
The only feasible solution is to put in what’s popularly called a “captcha” – a security code verification that needs a real human to manually enter a random number into a box before posting a comment. So that’s what you will now see on this site. To make it easy, I have used only a 4 digit code. This will change each time you load the page.
The captcha system is easy enough to install if you’re a techie though it involves some mucking around in the MT code itself. It’s only ineffective against manual comment spam but most spammers don’t bother with that. Also, it doesn’t work well with MT-Blacklist and you’ll have to disable MT-Blacklist if you want the captcha to work. (Yes, I found this out the hard way after about 30 minutes of cursing.) Lastly, this means that blind readers won’t be able to comment on your site, but I’m not particularly worried about that since this is a personal site.
Update (15 November): To all the people who’ve mailed me asking me to install it on their web sites, please go RTFM and do it yourself. I have neither the time nor the inclination.
Personal note: The Hindu has done a full-page story on three people who have made a career shift to the food business and yours truly is one of them. (The full-length version of that photo is here.) Of course, they mangled some of my words. For instance, the lady asked me if I cook in the kitchen and I told her that like most executive chefs, I am not into hands-on cooking regular food every day. This got twisted to make it sound as if I’m not involved in the kitchen. Also, I’ve been cooking for 15 years and I didn’t learn it from just one dude. Oh well, you take what you get…
I’ve also written a two-part article for Rediff.com on how to start a restaurant. (Part 1 and Part 2). Actually, I wrote the article way back in August. Then the person handling the new career section left Rediff and the section resurfaced only 3 months later. Unfortunately, the editor saw it fit to inject some of her own editorial “style” into my article, which pissed me off royally, especially since I edit myself ruthlessly. Rediff also does the “follow Jakob Nielsen blindly” dance and chops all paragraphs, regardless of continuity, into no more than two sentences each to “improve readability”. Whackos!

So both Anita and Yazad were facing serious comment spam problems. Depending on your level of nerdiness, you can implement many solutions.

What I did for them is described by Shelley Powers over here. Give it a shot. It’s not that hard. The only downside is that if you’re running multiple blogs on your MT installation, you’ll have to edit the templates for all of them or comments will not work for the other blogs.
(And before you ask, no, I will not implement it for your blog too. I already provide too much tech support without any credit.)

A simpler, but slightly less effective, solution is to have a script that turns off comments on all entries older than X days, where X should be a reasonable number like 14 or 30. A script for that can be found on Geeksblog.

A still simpler solution is to make the “Comments (X)” link go to the individual entry instead of the comments page. People will be able to leave comments, but spambots will probably not figure it out. I leave it to the reader to look through the MT documentation on how to do this. It’s just changing one tag, that’s all.

Incidentally, my restaurant web site (complete with its own chef’s blog) has just launched in its Beta version. The URL is http://www.shiokfood.com
Some more content will also be added shortly. Sign up for the updates if you want to be informed of new articles (approximately twice a week frequency is planned.)
Your comments are welcome. But if anyone says, “page doesn’t validate” or some such crap, I will feed you a knuckle sandwich.
(Tested with Firefox and IE. I don’t use Opera, and I don’t have a Mac. I don’t care if you use either.)

Update: Head on over to Kiruba’s site and tell me if you spot the speed difference in loading. Something has definitely changed. I’ll write more about it. later.

This was a message posted on the thelist, a mailing list devoted to web development and run by evolt.org

Hey all —

Gotta love the internet at times.   Someone threatened to sign me up for about a bazillion SPAM e-mails … and lo and behold, their spam terrorist attacks have now worked … I am getting roughly 60-70 SPAM e-mails per day and am spending all my time deleting those little buggers.

My questions:   (1) Is there any way to remove myself from any of these lists rather than one at a time?   and (2) At first I just let sleeping dogs lie … after several days of this I’m just royally IRKED … is there a way to sign THIS person up for some spam?

(PS. Don’t bother writing nasty mails to me or the list telling me this is “wrong” … you try having your mailbox overflow with garbage every singe hour of the day … I’m angry.)   If you’d rather not send this information publically, contact me privately.

I found this very interesting as I’ve been dealing with spam for many years. So I took the time to write a long reply. Here’s what I wrote (quoted text is indented):

Read More

Convergence. They’ve been preaching it for many years now. Don’t hold your breath though. It’ll never happen.

What exactly is convergence? I wanted to get an “official”definition, so I looked it up on www.whatis.com and this is what I got: “In information technology, convergence is a term for the combining of personal computers, telecommunication, and television into a user experience that is accessible to everyone”.

I assure you that it just isn’t going to happen. Not today, not in the future. The media may be going all bonkers about it. That doesn’t make it more likely. Nor will wishful thinking by companies that have invested large chunks of money in “convergence devices”.

Read More