My Brain is Not for Eating!

I refuse to make fun of any covert mission with a well thought-out name like "Operation: Bot Roast."

Grrraaahhh ... sarcasm taking over ... mmmmmmrreeeeaaaahh ... can't resist ... bleeeuugghh ... Okay fine! ... "Not since 'Operation: Iraqi Freedom...'" ... There! I said it! Happy now!?

Ironically, though, I think the guy in the accompanying picture is, in fact, losing to the zombies.

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/29654

Also ironic is that this article comes from Yahoo. Last I checked, their chat rooms were overflowing, but you were hard pressed to actually find a real human being using them. Of course they are owned by SBC, who had the bright idea that my email address should be my login. Thus ensuring that, even though they didn't actually publish my email address when I asked them not to, it wasn't very @$!*# hard to guess since it was right there in the URL of my profile (major DUH!). Also says something of why, of my 22 email accounts, the Yahoo! one is the one that gets hundreds of spam emails a day, even though I don't actually use it.

And these are the monkeys who want to dictate Internet policy to our elected offcials? At last, Ted Stevens is making sense ... well, not really ... but we now see where he gets his information anyway.

Please, won't somebody with a technological clue run for public office?!

In honor of the late Mr. Wizard, here's a little science experiment you can try at home. Were you aware that in GMail, and presumably other email programs as well, you can add a "+" sign and some other tag to the end of your email address and it will still be delivered to you. For example: djaysnider+blogspam@gmail.com.

This is actually a very powerful tool. When you sign up for various services on the Internet, try appending the name of the service to your email address. For example: djaysnider+amazon@gmail.com or djaysnider+technorati@gmail.com. Then, when spam arrives for one of those addresses, you automatically know who has sold you out.

When I saw this article, I decided to make a run through my spam folder, which I never check (that's probably why I never returned your email, by the way). For the past 30 days, there was record 5090 spam emails caught (not counting the ones that didn't get delievered because they were too obviously Spam, and the ones I deleted out of my inbox because the spam filter didn't catch them). Worst offenders in order: 1) sbcglobal.net -- which I never use, so it no doubt came from a combination of the aforementioned public profile and an old account on Hotjobs (both of which publicly display my email address as my login ID); 2) Monster.com -- though I know some people there, very stand-up guys, so it's more-than-likely through a recruiter who decided to branch out into selling contact information; 3) ICANN -- since my email address was displayed on the public whois profile for all of the domains I own; 4) Random guesses at email addresses (administrator, info, and webmaster@[domain name]) -- I don't use them, but they are caught by my catchall rule. These four accounted for 80% of the spam I was able to definitively identify, and 60% of my total spam. (Which is a whopping 83% of all emails I received in the past 30 days -- 1072 real emails; 5090 spam emails.) Doncha just love statistics?

To my pleasant surprise, I received no spam to the addresses I designated to eBay, PayPal, MySpace, and Amazon.

	File Under:	Cool Link
	Current Mood:	Frustrated
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