Category: Tech

Categories
Hotmail

Hotmail sold my e-mail address to spammers!


How often have you heard this?  Perhaps even thought it?  I know I’ve been asked about it more often than I can count and see it crop up on every web board I frequent at some point in time.  The story is always the same…


I signed up for a Hotmail account, never told anyone about the address, only used it a couple times to e-mail friends and within a couple days I was already getting junk e-mail!  Microsoft must have sold my e-mail address to spammers!  How else could you explain them sending me spam when I didn’t tell anyone my new address?


Well, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Microsoft did not sell your e-mail address to anyone.  Junk e-mail is actually so costly to Hotmail that if we were to try to make a business out of selling e-mail addresses to spammers the addresses would be so expensive that spammers couldn’t afford them. 


But if Microsoft didn’t sell my address, and I didn’t tell anyone my address, how did the spammer know to send me junk mail?


The answer is simply: they guessed.  Spammers invest a lot of time in generating software designed to be good at generating possible e-mail addresses.  The software performs what’s called a “dictionary attack” by taking a list of words and names and combines them into every conceivable address.  The word list can include e-mail addresses found in public locations (e.g. if xxx@test.com posted to a newsgroup you can bet that xxx@hotmail.com will get spam).  After constructing their list the spammers then try to send e-mail to their list of constructed e-mail addresses.  In order to increase their odds, the spammers will identify the largest ISPs to test out their new e-mail lists.  As the world’s largest free e-mail provider (source: Guinness) it’s no wonder spammers hit us hard.  After preening their lists the spammers then change the domain names and start hitting other sites.


Junk E-mail costs Hotmail a lot of money.  In, fact, junk e-mail costs everyone money (estimated cost to businesses last year: $10 billion).  Businesses hate it, consumers hate it, ISPs hate it.  There is no possible way for Hotmail to profit by selling your address, the cost in customer support complaints alone would be enough to sink us.  Add the storage, administration, networking, PR and legal costs to the pile and there isn’t a spammer out there who would be able to afford to buy our list were it for sale.


In short, no, Hotmail didn’t sell your e-mail address.

Categories
Net Weird

It’s like crack… for pranksters

You always hear about people getting scammed, you can’t swing a cat without hitting a little old lady who lost her identity on the Internet.  How often do you ever hear about scammers getting scammed?


Mike pointed me to the hilarious bulletin board discussion chronicling the exploits of community of tech savvy people and what happens when a con artist tries to cheat one of them out of a laptop.


A warning in advance… the thread is really really really long.  You may want to start by reading it to get the feel (it is worth digging in a little to enjoy the group as they feed off each other).  When you get overwhelmed by the volume move over to one of the summary pages to get the Cliff’s Notes version.

Categories
Blog Photography Web

A virtual vacation!

Aren’t computers grand?  The magic of the web and blogging technology allow us to keep a virtual eye on Rob and Sharon as they each celebrate their 30th birthday in Paris.


Rob has quite the photo setup and the skills to back it up.  The pictures are bound to be beautiful.

Categories
Hotmail Web

Out of block space?

When talking to strangers about Hotmail the most frequent complaint tends to be about Spam.  This is often followed by the complaint that their block list is full and they can’t block any more Spammers.


Know what?  The block list is terrible for blocking Spammers.  Know why?  Because each time a Spammer sends out a new piece of junk e-mail they change their address so you can’t easily block them.  The block list does work, but it really just works for that annoying ex-friend who won’t stop sending you the latest e-mail humor (which happened to be the latest e-mail humor three years ago and you’ve already seen it, oh… about a bazillion times).


The best thing you can do to stem the flow of junk is turn on Hotmail’s Junk E-Mail filter.  You won’t stop junk e-mail entirely, but you will slow it down (I’ll tell you later how to totally stop it, but the solution is not for everyone).  To turn on the junk e-mail filter for your Hotmail account you can take one of two paths…





























The quick way:


From the Hotmail Home page (the first page you see when you sign in) click on the red “Junk E-Mail folder:” link. 



If you have the Junk E-Mail filter turned off, you’ll get the prompt to turn on the filter.  Set the filter to “Enhanced” then click the OK button. Why is there no “Off” you ask?  Perhaps I’ll get into that some other time. 


The slow way


No, clicking on that one link on the home page is not the only way to access the Junk E-Mail settings.  You’ll find, in fact, that once the filter is on, clicking that link simply drops you into the Junk E-Mail folder.  To turn on the filter in options, or to adjust it at a later date, you need to start by going to options (the link’s at the top right of your Hotmail page).


Make sure you’re on the Mail options page by clicking the “Mail” in the left hand column.


Click Junk E-Mail Protection.


Click Junk E-Mail Filter.


Tired of clicking yet?  Don’t worry, almost done.  Now, just as in the first section, set your filter to Enhanced and click the OK button to save.
So, after going through all that work, what do you get in return? You get a cleaner inbox. Most of the junk that used to be landing there is now landing in your Junk E-Mail folder.  The Junk E-Mail folder will be cleaned out every 7 days or so, keeping your account space from running out due to an influx of Junk E-Mail.  I will tell you: this is not a cure-all.  You’ll still get junk, but it will be much easier to manage.

One final tip: add your friend’s e-mail addresses to your address book to tell Hotmail you always want to get their mail.  Hotmail will rarely (if I say never I’m sure I’ll be proven wrong :)) put mail from a friend in the Junk E-Mail folder.


I’ll be happy to get into more details later… but I think I’ve already tried everyone’s patience enough with 7 pictures in one blog entry. 🙂

Categories
Software Weird

Ego search

A cool Google feature (and there are many, perhaps I’ll post them later) is the ability to search for sites which link to a particular site.  This is cool because searching for the text “little.org” won’t necessarily find me all the sites which link to me.  To do a search for your site simply type “link:yourURL” into the Google search.  Any site which links to your URL (you can type just the root, e.g. little.org) will be listed.  Turns out Omar links to me a lot (Hi Omar!).


So… while stroking my own ego, I came across Mark’s site.  I’m not quite sure why he links to me but I’ll have to ask (I hope it’s not someone I know and I’m just being an airhead, how embarrassing).  At any rate… there’s a link to my site with the display of “calittleblog” but I wasn’t able to find any other reference to my site in Mark’s blog entries.  Oh well, another Internet mystery.  I suppose I could just wait for him to find my site…


Hi Mark!

Categories
Gear

Two for the price of one

For a little bit of extra cash and a little bit of extra effort you can turn your one person PC into a two person PC.  It’ll be great… tell your friends you have a main frame (and then feel old when you have to explain what that is).  Head over to BeTwin for the goods.


Here’s the quickie details from Gadget Madness




Forget that low-profile dual-user system, take any Windows 2000 or XP PC, add a PCI video card (or just use a dual-head nVidia or ATI if you don’t mind a performance hit), a USB keyboard and mouse and install BeTwin. Thanks to Windows’ profile system and terminal services engine, as well as a bit of nouse from ThinSoft, you can have two people using the one PC. In fact, you can go up to five users if you can get hold of enough PCI graphics cards and USB hubs.  Unfortunately it doesn’t like my laptop’s dual-head adapter, but I will be trying this out on a machine as soon as possible.

Categories
Gear

My mind is already racing…

If you like computers but live in the physical world you need to check out Phidgets.  The development kit they provide allows you to easily create sensor and display interfaces for your PC.  They have a basic USB interface which plugs into sensors (force, light, motion, etc.) as well as USB interfaces for server motors, LED systems, LCD displays and (for you big brother types) RFIDs.


Now that you have all this cool USB hardware, you can create an computer control for it.  Phidgets are interfaced via their supplied VB APIs (other languages are rumored to be in the works).

Categories
Gear Tech

But what if we need you again?

Well folks, the guy who invented ctrl+alt_del is retiring.  The good news, we can still use his stuff.  David J. Bradley is retiring from IBM after more than twenty-eight years of service.  More on the inventor, David J. Bradley.

Categories
Blog Language

Say what?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one…



Someone who speaks three languages is…
trilingual
Someone who speaks two languages is…
bilingual
Some one who speaks one language is…
American!

Sure, an oldie but a goodie. Now in my defense I speak English, French and a little German. I don’t, however, have any idea what is being written into the comment fields of my blog (see here and here). I found a Norwegian to English translator on the web (but have since lost it… I’ll find it again I know, if only IE had some sort of history feature ;)) and had fair results. Perhaps I should try Swedish or Finnish… I’d really love to know what this person has taken the time to write. Anyone speak… well… whatever?

Categories
Gear

Honey, I shrunk the laptop!

Here’s just what you need to get your geek buddies to drool: a 1 GHz laptop not much bigger than the power adapter powering your current laptop (4.9”x3.4”x.9” and 14 ounces).  It has all the goodies you’d want, Bluetooth™, 802.11b, USB, FireWire™ and more.  Dock it and it’s a full PC.  It’s not as small as a PDA, but it’s close, and it’s running Windows XP.


One problem, there are a bunch of other things I’d rather spend 2 grand on.


Visit OQO to find out more about their ultra personal computer (uPC).