Today I had this notification pop up from my MSN messenger, which is linked to my hotmail account. And I was absolutely astonished at how this email address even passed as legitimate.
What the hell kind of spam filter is this??? MSN needs to do something about this soon! Needless to say, I didn’t even open the email - it went straight to garbage.
Spam in the wrong language is probably the biggest waste ever. I speak English and Korean, and a little bit of Japanese but not enough to want to read through spam email in Japanese. But I’ve been getting an influx of them. One of them even says “Merry Christmas” on it, for God’s sake. I thought they operated with the same solar calendar, but apparantly not!
I wonder how my email address got exposed to all these Japanese guys. It could be from random websites that display my email as a direct link… I often just cannot be bothered with checking all the securities, and I guess that’s my fault. I’ll just beef up my Outlook spam settings by marking all these as junk so that the filter learns better… God.
There is a new way to abuse other people and expose peoples’ emails using blogs. Yesterday I got some interesting emails in my inbox. 2 of them, to be precise :
Subject : Re: [#111403528] [Jeff Kee's Blog] New Comment On: Anna Nicole Smith’s death, and my reaction
Hello,
Thank you for your report. Your email has been provided to the Gmail Abuse team.
To help us process your request as quickly as possible, we recommend filling out the form specific to your situation by visiting the Gmail Security Center at http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?security=1&ctx=security
….
The 2 of them had different case numbers attached to the top, and at first I could NOT understand what this was all about. I never reported anything go Google as abuse, and what’s more is that the title of it has my blog’s name and a title of one of my posts on it!
So I started doing some snooping around to figure out how this could have happened, and why.
Several years ago spam was introduced. It was a revolutionary new way of exposing billions of people to advertisements and bombard them with merchandise and services. I grew up through the internet revolution in South Korea. South Korea, in case you did not know, has had, and probably still have, the highest high-speed internet subscription rate in the world. Korea was one of the earliest countries to adopt to high-speed internet. When I came to Canada in 2001, I was absolutely appalled at the fact that they still sold 56Kb modems!!! They were non-existent in Korea at that time already. So back to my point. I was smack down in there along with all major developments in the internet world, and I went through all the revolutionary changes and phases. And spam was one of them.
First, I will recall the evolution of spam as I remember it :
Ajax stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. In a nutshell, it is a method to interact with the server and send data back and forth without having to refresh the whole page like we used to have to. Instead of the <form> submitting to a separate page, the Javascript hits a file on the server with the given variables, and that PHP or ASP or VBScript file returns the result string based on the input, and the Javascript parses it again to put it out anywhere on the page. For more information on what Ajax is and how to do it, please see the links on the sidebar, down below, under the category “Technical Resources”.
I’ve implemented Ajax on a number of different occasions, and based on my experience, I will discuss what I like about it, and where it should be implemented, and where it should NOT be implemented.
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