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Month: November 2007

Spammers “giving up” according to Google

Published November 30, 2007

According to this Wired story, Google reckons spammers are giving up on spam:

a remarkable trend is underfoot, according to Brad Taylor, a staff software engineer at Google: The number of spam attempts — that is, the number of junk messages sent out by spammers — is flat, and may even be declining for the first time in years.

Actually, this is a wilful misunderstanding of what the Googler in question really said, which was that ‘attempts to spam Gmail users have been leveling off over the last year and more recently, even declining slightly’. In other words, they didn’t make an observation about the state of the spam problem on an internet-wide basis — just about the “local” situation as it pertains to Gmail. Bad reporting there, Wired.

But, in passing…

David Berlind at ZDNet recently blogged a rather grumpy response to InfoWorld coverage of CEAS 2007. He raised a very important point:

If I could say something to the author of that story, it would be that so long as any anti-spam solution is not deployed universally throughout the Internet’s e-mail system (in other words, so long as some anti-spam tech is not a standard), that anti-spam solution actually makes the spam problem worse. You read that right. Worse. Proprietary anti-spam solutions make the global spam problem worse. They are digging us deeper into the hole that the Internet is already in because everyone who makes those solutions is under the false belief that “s/he who is finally successful at filtering out all spam while allowing the legitimate mail in wins.”

Google’s blog post is a case in point: ‘we’re keeping more spam out of your inbox than ever before, so more and more, you can use Gmail for things you enjoy without even realizing that the spam filter is there most of the time.’

That’s great — but it doesn’t help anyone except Gmail. It’s a myopic view of the spam problem, and David’s point stands.

(I disagree with his later conclusion that the only way forward is for Google, MS, AOL and Yahoo! to get together and ‘commit to jointly supporting the same technical solutions’ — when the usual BigCos get together, they tend to focus on their own priorities. Take what happened back in 2005 with nofollow for blog-spam — while it helped the search giants with their own overriding priority, which was to tweak their algorithms to filter out the spam on the search results page, it did nothing to slow the spam flood itself, which has continued unabated.)

We need more open-source, and open-data, anti-spam work.

Informed

Published November 30, 2007

This should be in the running for “least informative dialog ever”.

(The information in question was that Firefox had been upgraded by the Ubuntu Gutsy Update Manager app, if you’re curious…)

Working around O2 Ireland

Published November 28, 2007

I’m pretty conservative with my mobile phones — until recently, my mobiles were all cheap, low-end, super-lightweight Nokias with long battery life and low “worry factor” (ie. not a big deal if they were lost or stolen). Very sensible.

I’ve finally started catching up with the gadgetorati, though — my current phone is now a Sony Ericsson K550i, which is still small and light, but has nice features like a 2 megapixel camera, a decent amount of onboard flash space, and a good implementation of Java, hence support for GMail and Google Maps. (Thanks to Joe for the recommendation!)

The only downside is that it came from my operator, O2 Ireland, with some broken configuration settings. (This shouldn’t be surprising, of course — I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a phone arriving with working data connectivity, from any operator, anywhere in the world.)

Anyway, here’s what I’ve done so far to fix it. Hopefully this might be helpful for random google searchers.

1. “Failed to resolve hostname” when publishing photos:

Generally, when I’d try to publish a photo using its Blogger support, I’d get a “failed to resolve hostname” error message. Investigating further, I found that the “O2 WAP” service used a proxy server — turning that off fixed the problem nicely. Nice reliable proxy you’ve got there, O2 ;)

Here’s how to do that. Open the menu, then select Settings -> Connectivity -> Internet settings -> Internet Profiles. Select O2 WAP and hit More -> Settings. Select Use proxy and change it to No, then hit Save. Problem solved.

2. Cannot send email from the device:

O2’s default mail server has a tendency to refuse to accept outbound mail from the phone. Switching to GMail for outbound SMTP works fine. Notice a trend here?

Open the menu, Messaging -> Email -> Settings -> New account. Set the Account name to “gmail”. Scroll down to Email address, set it to “[email protected]”. Connection type is “POP3”, Username and Password are whatever your GMail account uses. Outgoing server is “smtp.gmail.com”. Enter Advanced settings, and set Encryption to “TLS/SSL”. Set Outgoing port to “25”. Press the back button, then select the “gmail” account’s tickbox to make it active, before pressing back again to exit the configuration screen.

3. The “side” buttons go online:

By default, if you hit the “globe” button or the “open window” button on the side of the phone, to the left and right of the main joystick, it’s set to open various URLs at www.o2.ie. These buttons are prime UI real estate, and easily accidentally hit; I don’t want to go online (and possibly incur a charge) if they’re pressed.

Easily fixed. Open the menu, then select Settings -> Connectivity -> Internet settings -> Internet Profiles. Select O2 WAP and hit More -> Advanced, then Change homepage and enter “file:///” under Address and hit Save. It’ll now issue an ugly warning if you press those buttons, but at least it won’t go online. (It’d be nice to get a nicer fix for this.)

I’m sure there’s plenty more; if you’ve got this phone and have any tips to share, feel free to drop a comment below.

In particular, I’d love to know how to further “de-O2ify” the UI; the top 3 buttons on the menu screen are taken up with worthless operator spam (“O2 Music Store”, “O2 Menu” and “Entertainment”, all of which go to various URLs at www.o2.ie), while the useful Applications and Alarm screens, which I use all the time, are hidden in a submenu. ugh.

Investing in real estate

Published November 21, 2007

Screen real estate, that is — 3600×1050 pixels of it:

(That’s a Samsung SyncMaster 225bw226bw connected to a Thinkpad T61p running Ubuntu Gutsy, if you’re curious.)

‘Dead spammer’ story: yep, spam

Published November 15, 2007

Remember the ‘Russian ‘make penis fast’ spammer murdered’ fake blog posting I wrote about last month? I was right — the site has now become a spammer link farm.

There’s now a new category in the right-hand sidebar of the fake blog post. See if you can spot the odd one out:

  • Programming
  • Personal
  • Web 2.0
  • Python
  • Penis exercises
  • Uncategorized

Sure enough, “Penis exercises” is the only valid outlink from the page (all the others lead to the ‘sorry, closed due to too much traffic’ page). It leads to a page discussing the usual ‘make penis fast’ topics, with a batch more links to more pages along the same lines. If you follow the links a little, the whole thing appears to be hawking some device called “Size Genetics”. Totally spammy.

New job!

Published November 13, 2007

So, as I’ve hinted previously, I’ve left Vast to work full-time at a new gig: PutPlace.

I’ll be working on more EC2/S3/SQS-related large-scale cluster stuff, and on their open-source plans… looking forward to that. They’re a great team — lots of familiar faces from the Iona days — and it finally gets me out of telecommuting from home, back into an office again after 5 years ;)

Joe has put up a nice blog post welcoming me. Cheers Joe!

Now to get to grips with Python. (I still love Perl though. ;)

Fedex Ireland and unfair duty charges

Published November 12, 2007

I’ve been on vacation for a week, introducing Bea to the many joys of the bogs of Connemara. I think she liked it.

While I was away, I appeared in Ireland’s newspaper of record, the Irish Times, specifically in Conor Pope’s ‘Pricewatch’ consumer-affairs column, under the byline “Shopped to the taxman”. Here’s a cut-and-paste of some relevant snippets:

Justin Mason [hey, that’s me] contacted Pricewatch after being hit with just such a charge. In August, he and his wife, who were expecting a baby, received a package from friends in the US [thanks Nishad and Janet!] containing amongst other things, some hats, socks and a little hoodie for their baby.

“It was shipped via FedEx, got here in good time and was very cute,” he says. The couple were delighted, until a couple of weeks later, when they received an invoice from FedEx looking for EUR 34.47, made up of EUR 2.49 duty, EUR 19.88 VAT and EUR 10 in “administration fees”, plus an additional EUR 2.10 VAT on the “administration fee”.

“This strikes me as pretty unfair, maybe there’s duty payable, but I’ve never had to pay VAT on a gift I’ve received before? On top of that, being charged one-third of the price as an administrative fee? Ouch!”

The couple disputed the fee and were told if they didn’t pay, the invoice would be sent to a debt collection agency and non-payment would affect their credit rating. A couple of weeks later, another gift arrived from the US, followed by another invoice looking for EUR 7.84 in duty, plus the EUR 10 administration fee and EUR 2.10 VAT on that fee. Mason disputed the charge and was eventually told it would be waived as it had a value of less than $50 (EUR 34.70) and was clearly labelled as a gift. There is tax relief called Small Parcel Standard Relief on goods purchased from outside the EU, which is EUR 22 for bought goods and EUR 45 for gifts, so the tax should never have been applied by FedEx.

We contacted FedEx and UPS, highlighting our readers’ concerns. A spokesman for FedEx said the administration charge has always been in place in Ireland and was applied “to ensure customers receive their packages quickly”.

He said that if it did not pay the VAT and duty, “packages would not be cleared through customs until the customer has paid them, thus adding severe delays to the delivery process”.

So, to be honest, I’m not impressed at all with Fedex’ response here. I was hoping they’d be more helpful, especially once it hit the most significant consumer-affairs column in the country — but not at all :(

To recap — since Conor didn’t mention it — here are my problems with the charges:

  • the packages were both genuine, unsolicited, gifts. Surely having to pay duty on a gift is not applicable; it certainly makes receiving a gift a particularly unpleasant experience!

  • the first package contained baby clothes, which are VAT-free in Irish tax law anyway.

  • we cannot seem to get contact details for someone at Customs and Excise to talk to about this, and Fedex have failed to get back to us since then.

Not sure what the next step is…

There’s also a little follow-on discussion at Conor’s blog.

Update: good news. A couple of days ago, a letter arrived from Fedex UK, containing 2 credit notes; both invoices had been reduced to EUR 0.00, citing “incorrect application of duty” for one, and “customer satisfaction policy” for the other. Hooray!

Surprise smash hit in the Irish Blogs Top 100

Published November 2, 2007

Damien posted an interesting suggestion for the Irish Blogs Top 100 the other day — during discussion of which, it emerged that there were a few overlooked Irish blogs which hadn’t yet shown up on the planet.journals.ie Irish blogs aggregator, and therefore were not appearing in the Top 100. These were:

Anyway, they’re in now. When I first spun up the script and checked the results, though I was a bit shocked and had to do a bit of a double-take — at number 1, far beyond Damien’s number 2, was InPhotos.org, with a Technorati Rank of 1 and 102,857 inbound links from 88,772 blogs, compared to Damien’s Rank of 7946 with 1,606 links from 519 blogs.

Insane! I guess being in the default WordPress install makes a bit of difference there ;)

Interestingly, InPhotos.org, with a Technorati Authority of 88,434, is far beyond the most popular blog listed on the Technorati Popular Blogs page. It seems that page is a hand-tweaked set of blogs, and not just a “Technorati global Top 100”, then, despite what one might naively assume…

PS: Damien’s original suggestion, btw, was to measure blog popularity using Google Reader and Feedburner’s audience stats. However, I can’t do that without a public API I’m allowed to scrape. Does anyone know of one?

Also worth noting that I recently added del.icio.us bookmarks as a metric of popularity, to go with the Technorati stuff. It’s interesting to see how those rankings differ — bloggers and bookmarkers don’t always agree, with bookmarkers preferring MP3s, Second Life, and politics I reckon.

the Ron Paul spam scandal

Published November 1, 2007

A US presidential candidate called Ron Paul has been advertised in spam. There’s currently a massive shitstorm raging about the true source of the spam — it was delivered via an infected consumer broadband machine, so the source is of course untraceable from the email alone.

Of course, being spam, I received a copy ;) Here’s a spample, if you’re curious.

The unusual “Content-Type” header format (matching the STOX_REPLY_TYPE SpamAssassin rule) has been seen in a lot of pump-and-dump stock spam recently. (It’s also shown up in Storm output, but this isn’t from Storm.) It’s been around for at least 6 months, so it’s probably a built-in behaviour of a downloaded spamware app, rather than a frequently-updated web-hosted spamware site.

My guess — I’d say the spam was sent using the same spamware application that one of the larger, recent pump-and-dump spammers has been using — so a reasonably sophisticated app, and not just an ancient copy of DarkMailer or whatever.

It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out…