Category Archives: Security and Privacy

SpamBayes is great!

The amount of spam I get through my business account, which is exposed to spambots, is fairly small, about 37 spam a day. The amount of spam I get through my personal account, which is hidden yet visible in a … Continue reading

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Still more reasons to turn javascript off!

I resolve to write one entry in this journal every day, even if it’s total crap. At least I have persisted in keeping it going for three years now; that’s a start. Chastisements are finished. Now, on to business: Reading … Continue reading

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New Year's Cleaning

After spending a few hundred dollars on a used laptop (Of the same model as my old one with a cracked screen and which now stands to be cannibalized for parts.), a roomy drive and an 802.11 (b+g) transceiver, I … Continue reading

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Don't open attachments today at all!

Even if you are clever in a security sense. The Mydoom mail worm has been spreading and proliferating since late Monday night, here in the western United States. Even here at the mighty research laboratory of Farlops Industries, we got … Continue reading

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What is that gobbledygook at the bottom of your mail?

A few months ago I made a change to my mail client, something that I had been dithering over for years since getting on the Internet. Now, when I send out text e-mail (I avoid using HTML-based mail for good … Continue reading

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Personal E-mail Security: The Definitive Guide

Many of my friends have been on Internet for years and years. They have the knowing of the Way of the Machine. And they know what to do when it comes to keeping their mail accounts free of spam, worms, … Continue reading

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Bad Mojo for Internet Explorer

I just read on Slash today how a piece of valid markup can crash Windows Internet Explorer 4 and later. This includes many applications that use Trident, a dynamic link library that is the markup rendering component of IE–this means … Continue reading

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Wasted security

Thank you Microsoft and Apple. In introducing computers to the public, you’ve done a good thing. I’d like to think that our world is improved because of it. But, I just wish you both hadn’t taken shortcuts with security like … Continue reading

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Paranoia on Parade! Grepping the spoken word

One of the chief things that intelligence agencies have been lusting after for many years is the ability to pick out certain key phrases in spoken conversations that rush over global phone lines on a daily basis. Bright sparks have … Continue reading

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Pattern recognition improves, more spam expected

There used to be this web-based mail service called MessageTo that used a clever test to automate the process of updating an e-mail user’s whitelist. Sadly, but not surprisingly, research has cracked this clever test. The test was hard to … Continue reading

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