February 2008 - Posts
Websense is reporting in a blog article that Google's CAPTCHA has been broken with a one in five success rate. More interestingly, they have a lot of technical details about how the botnet members coordinate with two different computers during the
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A few weeks ago I blogged that it sure looked like spammers had broken the CAPTCHA for Windows Live (Hotmail), Yahoo and Gmail. The evidence was circumstantial in that I was seeing a lot more spam from these services. Over the past couple of weeks
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In a follow up to the blog post from Google arguing against IP addresses being Personally Identifiable Information, I have a couple of more comments. A couple of months ago we ran into the exact same issue. While Whitten does make valid points that
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I don't normally cheer for Google when I don't have shares in the company, but this time I will make an exception. Alma Whitten, Software Engineer at Google, today posted to their Public Policy Blog that IP addresses shouldn't be considered Personally
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In my previous post , I described an indicator I just invented called the Relative Performance Index. In this post, I'd like to describe how to interpret it. The RPI makes it possible to do an apples-to-apples comparison. Our spam filter
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I’m so good sometimes I amaze even myself. I like to play around with metrics and measurements. For the longest time, this was difficult to do because I was unsure of how to determine our non-spam. Well, a couple of months ago I devised a system
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The other day on Facebook, I kind of accidentally spammed my friends. Here's what I mean: I got one of those Quiz invitations from one of my friends asking me to answer one of their questions, how well do I know them? It may have been "What's
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A couple of weeks ago, I blogged that some outfit in Russia claimed to have broken Yahoo's CAPTCHA for creation of new email accounts. Someone posted a reply in the comments with a link to an article that this was unlikely. Yet, in the past
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Sometimes I moan about the difficulties of being part of large company in the time it takes to get things done, but it has its advantages. As part of a small company, stuff is often done ad hoc. People write spam rules, write little scripts to do
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If you're a stock trader at all, it'll come as no surprise to you that over the past three months we've been in a correction. If the definition of a bear market is a drop of 20%, then from peak to trough we have seen a bear market in the Nasdaq.
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I thought I'd post a couple of more thoughts on the David Ritz case. There are a couple of points in the judgment that are simply bizarre: Ritz has engaged in a variety of activities without authorization on the Internet. Those activities include
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As I wrote in an earlier post, a judge in North Dakota recently ruled against David Ritz. Ritz is an anti-spammer who was sued by Sierra Corporate Design, Inc. The full judgment is here , I will attempt to summarize it. The basis of
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In the last few days, I have started receiving piles of stock spam from Gmail touting the ticker symbol RQST.PK. I see these spams in my Gmail account, my Frontbridge account and now my Yahoo account. I still get spam from Hotmail, but it's confined
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A couple of weeks ago, a judge in North Dakota ruled against anti-spammer David Ritz for conduct against Sierra, Inc, allegedly an enterprise that spams. In a future post, I'll comment on the case. But for the time being, the key point to
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Last Friday, Microsoft made an unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo for $31 per share, representing over a 50% premium from Yahoo's then-share price. Leaving aside the question of whether or not this is a good deal, and what Microsoft's true motivations are
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