Mmm… Food…

Thanksgiving approaches. Yum.

Sorry about the lack of updates over the last few days. I’ve been especially busy. Got several projects going on at work, and we’re doing a lot of house maintenance at home. Every once in a while, I get to spend a few minutes working on WordPress stuff. I’ve started trying to integrate a cool PHP Naive Bayesian Class (use the fish to translate into English). I haven’t gotten very far yet, though. Pretty much all I’ve done is created a new database connector class which will use WP’s existing ezSQL db functions, and written a few stubs for the functions that WP will need.

Ah well. More as time allows…

Friggin Fraudsters

I have gotten several spams recently, both in my personal email and at my work address, from someone trying to scam PayPal accounts. The text of the message looks like this:

Dear PayPal member,

We regret to inform you that your account is about to be expired in next five business days. To avoid suspension of your account you have to reactivate it by providing us with your personal information.

To update your personal profile and continue using PayPal services you have to run the attached application to this email. Just run it and follow the instructions.

IMPORTANT! If you ignore this alert, your account will be suspended in next five business days and you will not be able to use PayPal anymore.

Thank you for using PayPal.

oggohnah

Of course, the little “oggohnah” bit at the end was random, and was different in each copy of the message that I received — a classic tip-off for spam. And it contained an attachment which our anti-virus system on our email servers caught and quarantined.

IMPORTANT TIPS: No right-minded company or service is ever going to send you an attachment in order to update your account information. They are going to ask you to visit their web site. And when you do visit their web site, you shouldn’t do it by clicking on a link in the email. You should manually type the known address into your browser, or use a bookmark that you’ve saved in the past. And watch out for emails that tell you what link to go to, and be sure that it’s the real deal. Registering a domain name similar to the real one and putting up an official-looking web site is child’s play, and is a technique that fraudsters have used for years.

This applies to just about any service on the Internet where you enter personal information. Make sure you are dealing with the real thing before you enter any passwords or personal information.

Spam: Kill it at the root

I posted an article over on the WordPress development blog earlier on the subject of blog comment spam.

Why do spammers post comments on blogs? Do they really expect blog owners to leave their comments up for people to read? Do they expect people to follow their links to the spammers’ sites selling viagra and porn? Not really. What they are really after is search engine ranking. Because the more links to their sites that a search engine sees, the better the chance that their site will come up in a list of search results. Even if you’ve deleted the original comment, it won’t matter, if a search engine has already indexed the links in the comment before you deleted it. So, one of our anti-spam tactics should be to bust up the search engine ranking for spammers links.

I am also going to be contributing to the blam! project, which is an effort to create an open distributed method of maintaining a network of spam blacklist information.

Matrix Revolutions

Susan and I saw The Matrix Revolutions this weekend. It was good, but somehow not as good as I had hoped. The philosophy was toned down a tad, compared to The Matrix Reloaded, which was good. And there was plenty of action, both inside and outside of the Matrix. And I even felt like the ending was a good resolution to the story, overall. A definite ending, while still leaving things open for more storytelling in the Matrix universe. But somehow, I just didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. Maybe I was just too tired on Friday night.

Oh well, I can still look forward to seeing Agent Smith in another kick-butt movie coming soon…

GeoRSS

Localfeeds is a nice new service that’s leveraging information from GeoURL. Enter a U.S. or Canadian zip code, and find RSS feeds geographically close to you.

Geolocation has always interested me. I can’t wait for the day that I can have a cell phone that will let me post to my blog, and automatically tag the posts with my GPS location. But right now, I’m still locked into a contract with a service that is lagging, technologically.