Category: Life

Life is full of idealistic views; and realistic views.

Childhood is consumed by idealism, shielded we are from the real. We are taught things such as “It isn’t the end that matters, its the journey to that end.”

High School, through both a growth in maturity and beaurocracy, exposes one to the realistic side of things. Innocence is lost that way. This is where we realise that the journey really never mattered, at least according to many, but rather it was the end. It didn’t matter that you studied for a test for 10 hours straight… what mattered was your mark. It didn’t matter that someone could boost their marks %40 by simply using a Powerpoint presentation, regardless of content. I took much advantage of this, revelling in its hypocracy.

What I realise now is that… though the journey never mattered to them, it matters to me. Going into this third year of university, I will no longer aim for the marks. No. I aim for the life in between these exams. Live it up!

I will live up to this. I won’t allow myself to have a forgettable existence like I’ve led the last 2 years…

New article at ThompsonWatch; the website I started up to track the danger to common sense that is Jack Thompson.

I also updated other facets of the site.

I just watched Tae Guk Gi… One of the few movies that ever made me cry. If you like Saving Private Ryan; only with a story – hell if you like any movie; you owe it to yourself to watch this. Rating: 9.8/10. This coming from a guy that gives movies on average 4/10.

The basic premise is that two brothers are unwillingly enlisted to fight in the Korean war. The movie follows their journey; and the decisions the older brother endures to make his younger sibling return home.

The cinematography is excellent; as are the special effects. And the plot… well… was enough to make me cry :p

The spam all links to the domain of:
http://t-e-x-a-s-poker.com

The site itself contains nothing on the outset – just baseless text. So who is texaspoker? Well that’s the fun bit. The WHOIS points to a registrar of “gandi.net”. Gandi.net has this to say on the domain:

domain: T-E-X-A-S-POKER.COM
owner-address: Djibuty Convega
owner-address: company
owner-address: 2003
owner-address: St John’s, English Harbour
owner-address: Antigua and Barbuda
owner-phone: +188.4306129
owner-fax: +188.4306129
owner-e-mail: brooksjohnson2004@yahoo.com
admin-c: DC1330-GANDI
tech-c: AR41-GANDI
bill-c: DC1330-GANDI
nserver: ns7.gandi.net 217.70.177.44
nserver: custom2.gandi.net 217.70.179.35
reg_created: 2005-07-07 10:44:32
expires: 2006-07-07 10:44:32
created: 2005-07-07 16:44:33
changed: 2005-08-12 09:39:33

person: Djibuty Convega
nic-hdl: DC1330-GANDI
address: company
address: 2003
address: St John’s, English Harbour
address: Antigua and Barbuda
phone: +188.4306129
fax: +188.4306129
e-mail: beth.ruble@gmail.com
lastupdated: 2005-07-07 16:46:33

person: GANDI Auto Register 4.1
nic-hdl: AR41-GANDI
address: GANDI
address: 38 rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth
address: F-75003
address: Paris
address: France
phone: N/A
e-mail: support@gandi.net

But will gandi.net do anything of this spamer? Well, not even worth a try according to its clause.

by doing a whois on any domain name found in the email, you see that the domain name is handled by Gandi: Gandi is an ICANN accredited Registrar, and as such registers domain names on behalf of its customer. Gandi provides no webhosting nor email accounts to its customer, only the registration of the domain name. The use of the domain name is only up to the person owning it, and/or its contacts (see whois to find the owner and the contacts of the domain name). We can not deactivate and even less delete a domain name just because it is used in a spam: we can not and do not want to act as a judge.

There are many other gems on the registrar’s site, such as tidbits which says that if you get Spam from them, its a demonstration that their mail relays works and its a good thing. Right.

Okay, lets revise how alog of spam harvesting gets done. Spam spiders crawl through the net, looking for a combination of “something@something.something”. Whether they crawl newsgroups; blogs; eBay; etc. – it all relies on the same principle of searching for the “*@*.*” string [* being wildcards].

So who is the genius that thought up that writing “person [at] ISP [dot] com” would be an effective antispam technique? Now that nearly everyone uses that, spambots simply have to add a new search pattern: “* [at] * [dot] *”. Suddenly, all these people that believed they were protected from penis-enhancing pill dealers and Nigerian scammers find themselves vulnerable again.

Just google the following for an example of what I mean:
http://www.google.com/searc…le+Search

I guess I’m being a little too hard. After all, if this idea hadn’t spread, it would of still been an efficient antispam technique. But I’m not so forgiving of the people who adopt this technique today, after everyone and their dog are using it.

This is not a good way to protect your inbox.

What do I suggest? Use variants of this overused original, or use different techniques altogether: obfuscated text with javascript; replace ASCII text with an equivalent unicode character; insert 0px wide gif in the middle of the text; make the email address an image with the text written on it [or even part]; use invisible characters in the middle of the address; etc…