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From time to time, I like to reflect upon my own personal strengths and weaknesses. I may be a spam fighter, but I'm also a professional working within Microsoft and I want grow my entire asset base of skills, not just in spam analysis. You know
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I came across this parody of a 419 while reading a financial blog. In lieu of the current financial atmosphere of the United States, I thought it was very amusing. FROM: Dr Ben Bernanke Central Bank of United States of America 01-658-555-1234 TO:
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This post is a bit of a rant... but just a bit. I've been at Frontbridge/Exchange Hosted Services for a while. We were a startup in 2000 (long before my time) and like any startups, the way to get going quickly is to use LAMP technology - Linux
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I came across an article in PC World about the top 50 Tech Visionaries. I was only going to read a couple of them but ended up reading the entire thing. I thought I'd repost 5 of my favorites and maybe add a couple of comments. Steve Jobs
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From time to time, we have major spam emergencies. Running a service, stuff invariably breaks. We try our best to monitor stuff, but something always comes up that we weren't aware of. Queues build up, perf monitors don't always get
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This post is a bit of a rant. On this particular blog, all of my commenters are quite intelligent. You all provide good content and I try my best to respond to most of the comments. The times I don't is because the connection screws up and
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One of the annoying things about Facebook is that whenever I want to install an application, or respond to a friend's application, I have to install it, check 5 different checkboxes and then ask if I want to send the notification to all my friends.
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A few months ago there was a research presentation presented on computer security. It touched upon botnets and the presenter gave some data. Below are some summary results based on a 9-day down-sampled spam trace from Hotmail. There were 294
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Accused spammer Sanford Wallace has been sued... again. And he has had a major judgment made against him... again. This time, it's to the tune of $230 million. From the Associated Press: NEW YORK (AP) - A notorious "Spam King" and
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Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has described Facebook as a walled garden, that is to say, inside is very nice but only certain people can get in. Facebook is based on trust, only friends can view your profile and not just any old person can talk
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This is a rather strange story that has come to my attention. I live near Seattle and the other day I was reading a story about a suspected domestic terror organization that set fire to several multimillion dollar homes in Woodinville, a Seattle suburb
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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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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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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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