Archive for August, 2005

Our family went out to see “March of the Penguins” today. We payed $45CDN – $30 for the tickets (there were 3 of us), and $16 for a bag of popcorn and three drinks.

Well, the movie was swell. It’s a 1.5 hour documentary on the life of a penguin tribe in the Antarctic. Was it worth the $45? Nah – not really. Don’t get me wrong – it was a good movie. Just not the $45. (Overall Rating: 7.9/10).

But what I found interesting, is that before the movie I was treated to 5 minutes worth of television ads. I clocked it with my watch. Five. Whole. Minutes. That doesn’t even count the advertisements for up-and-coming new movies.

Here I am, we payed $45… certainly we deserve to get an ad-free experience? I mean, do they really need the extra money that these advertisements can generate?

I remember a time (few years ago) when such ads for Mazda, Coke, Pepsi did not exist. You got in, watched the trailers for new films, and got to the movies. Films were cheaper too, at $6 a person. So what has changed? Why suddenly are we paying much more than the increase due to inflation? And so insulted by feeding us ads like that?

Soon – mark my words – movies will cost $15 per person, and will be interrupted by ads throughout the movie. Like television today. Mark my words.

No wonder piracy is increasing. Spending money to watch ads – really.

I’ve connected to 17 different Battlefield 2 servers. I’ve been kicked out 17 times within 30 seconds of play due to “lost connection”. That figure is not an exaggeration, and I’ve yet to succesfully find a playable server. Spending an hour just to connect to a game is not my idea of fun, and my ISP is to blame for this one. The router has been reset to factory conditions (with the ports forwarded to the right spots and everything) so that eliminates that.

This is really, really, really, REALLY starting to irritate me.

Update: Of course, it took multiple retries just to put this post on the net. DNS errors everytime. I… want… to… kill…

Update: This is now server 24 that has let me play for 2 minutes before promptly kicking me out due to connection problems. I wanted to go to Google to search to see if I was the only one – but Rogers resolving Google was just too much to ask. So of course – that didn’t work.

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.

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…