09 Nov 2006
What's With All This Spam?

SPAMI know it's gotten bad around here: yesterday I was acutely aware of it as I had to shut off my filters while getting the new system tweaked and running. Overall I logged better than a thousand SPAM's.

Lot's of them were the "image" format that this article discusses, but the majority were the same old drivel that's been hitting us for years. And as far as I can tell, there's no end in sight...

...[the] assumption is this spike in spam levels is a result of a new generation of viruses and zombies that can infect PCs more quickly and are harder to get rid of. In its October report, messaging security vendor MessageLabs says the spike is largely due to two Trojan programs, Warezov and SpamThru. Others say a new breed of spam messages called image spam -- messages with text embedded in an image file that evade spam filters, which can't recognize the words inside the image -- is responsible.

(link) [Network World]

22:03 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Trying Out the Zune: IPod It’s Not

Pretty even handed review - noting the failure of "Play for Sure" and the change in course that M$ is taking. But still concluding that it may be too little, too late. We'll see.

Microsoft is probably the greenest company in all of high tech. Not green in the environmental sense — green with envy.

(link) [New York Times]

21:45 /Technology | 1 comment | permanent link

I Hate SuSE

I've been stymied all day trying to get the simplest of mail configurations to work on this f***ing Linux piece of sh*t box!

I may have finally got it, but it's no wonder Novell offers "tech support with every box" - they need it! What took me 10 minutes to set up on my Mac took 9 hours on this system. It wasn't pretty...

On a more positive note, I got a call today from a job I'd applied to two weeks ago - as an advertising writer. They wanted somebody who was cynical and outspoken, the ad said, so I sent off a letter and a programmers resume. Got an interview out of it, anyway - we'll see. That would be a fun job, I think.

Now, it's time to take a break.

21:33 /Home | 3 comments | permanent link

Robot Thinks Human Flesh Is Bacon

So much for artificial intelligence ... everybody knows human tastes like chicken ...

An "electromechanical sommelier" mistakes a man's hand for tasty pig meat. Let's hope the error-prone machine doesn't get hungry.

(link) [Wired News: Top Stories]

21:32 /Humor | 1 comment | permanent link