Comments welcome by email. I don't care if you disagree with me but name-calling and cussing are not acceptable. Comments that are just rude and not relevant will not be posted.
The spam news post did go through from IE but not until the same post
from Netscape went through too. Well, I've deleted the really messed up
one. Now on to Road Hazards as originally scheduled!
10:53:45 PM
Well, That Was a Miserable Failure!
Tried to post the spam news using IE. Well, clicking the
Post to Weblog button closed the browser rather than posting anything
to the blog. (Same thing happens when I click the Delete button when
I'm reading my mail at Yahoo.) Anybody know how to fix that in
IE? I've uninstalled and reinstalled and that just didn't do it.
Guess I've got to get used to the way this works in Netscape since I
don't have the time to mess with totally reinstalling Windows just to
fix IE. (Now if I could just import my IE Favorites. Netscape insists
it does that automatically, and maybe it did when I first installed it,
but what about the newer links added since then?!)
Now for the Road Hazards I've saved up for weeks. Then I can start that subject fresh too.
10:47:44 PM
Spam News
Because of computer problems, I'm way, way behind in this category. This is pretty much all old news. Oh well, for what it's worth, it's what I had before my attention was diverted by things like browsers suddenly closing for no reason, etc. I'll start fresh today now. Sorry about the big gap in the news.
DidTheyReadIt happens to rely on a tactic used by spammers to build their mailing lists. Each message sent through DidTheyReadIt contains a link to a tiny, invisible "Web beacon" image file hosted on the company's Web site.
Jason Smathers, who worked at the company's Dulles headquarters, is accused of illegally obtaining the e-mail addresses of nearly all of the Internet provider's customers in May 2003.
The laws are in place to make spam illegal but these laws cannot be used to prosecute people or shut down operations if everyone is blocking the spam and not reporting it.
As outlined in CAN-Spam, the bounty system would offer a person who first identifies someone violating the law's provisions a reward of not less than 20 percent of the total civil penalty collected by the FTC.
German-language messages bemoaning the presence of Turks and other foreigners in Germany started arriving in e-mail in-boxes around the world this week.
By some estimates, hundreds of thousands of computers around the world have been infected with software that lets them be used without their owners' knowledge. Such machines now account for as much as 40 percent of all spam.
Jurors sentenced Carmack to seven years for convictions in March of forgery, identity theft and falsifying business records. He must serve a minimum three and a half years. Earthlink said Carmack ran 343 illegal email accounts under false names from 2002 until his arrest last May.
Mr. McBride, 38, explained how the techniques he learned in tracking down prison escapees have come in handy finding spammers. He unfurled a giant piece of paper covered with hundreds of tiny symbols—faces, trucks, computer screens, telephones—connected by a spider's web of multicolored lines. The diagram was made with a software program used by police to keep track of organized crime investigations.
Let's see what happens when I post using Netscape. Radio is functioning
just enough differently than it does in IE—though the aggregator is
updating more reliably!—that I'm not sure what this post will look like once it's live.
I have been having so many annoying problems with IE
(and Win XP in
general) of late that I've pretty much had to skip blogging in order to
put my time and efforts into just keeping the computer
functioning. Grrrr... I've been depending on Netscape a
lot, ; the version I've got on my machine (7.1) has almost as
many irritating quirks as IE. (Before anybody says "Try Firefox," I
did, but it had all of Netscape's annoyances plus a few, so it's gone
again.) (And before anybody else says "Switch to Linux," I probably
would have long since if I knew anybody who could help me set it all
up. At least I'm good at fiddling with Windows already...)
Yeah, I am giving some serious thought to getting a Mac next time.
