Blogs Worth a Click

 
Top Stories from Reuters May 25 11:36am ET

• Iraqis Demand More Freedom, Swift End to Occupation


• Bush's Public Approval Rating at New Low, Poll Says


• Holiest Shi'ite Shrine in Iraq Damaged in Attack


• Iraqis Say U.S. Soldiers Steal During House Raids


• Qaeda Has 18,000 Militants for Raids - Think Tank

Is it just me, or is it Reuters?

 
Another Fund Settlement
One more of the holdouts in the mutual fund scandal has settled. Richard Strong, founder of the Strong Funds, has paid a $60 million fine and been banned from the industry for life. His company paid $115 million and agreed to expense reductions (there it is again), and two other executives have also been banned for life. This was an especially bad case — Mr. Strong was market-timing his own funds.

The company's letter to the shareholders is here.

Update June 14, 2000:

It looks like Mr. Strong is not going to have to eat much macaroni after all. According to this Forbes article, he owned 85% of the investment company named after him. It was just sold to Wells Fargo for about $500 million. Sure sounds better than my 401k.

He should have gone to jail.

 
Local Flavor
I had not linked to this before because I could not get the audio to work. It looks like the site has added an MP3 that works fine, so without further ado, permit me to introduce Hoover, the famous talking seal. I had the honor of meeting Hoover at the New England Aquarium many years ago and remember enjoying his conversation very much. His remarks were more cogent and intelligible than anything John Kerry has ever said.

 
Spring Cleaning
I've deleted some items from my blogroll, where either the link has been broken or the blog is clearly dormant. The one exception is Norwegian Blogger, for sentimental reasons. I keep hoping he will come back. Sigh. Maybe if we pester him enough ...

 
Unintended Consequences — Spam and the Blogosphere

Back in the day, one of the easiest ways to get spammed was to post your e-mail address to Usenet. Within days of posting, connoisseurs of Nigerian 419 scam letters could relish new variations on the theme (taking off the caps lock, for example). Putting your e-mail out on your website is still a good way to get a spam-a-lanche for your inbox. Lately, the comments section of reputable weblogs (oxymoron alert!) have been both the target of spamming and the source of e-mails to spam. Those families of deposed African dictators are nothing if not resourceful.

Actually, it's not the bereaved Mrs. Laurent Kabila who so diligently searches out the e-mails. Instead, there are programs called spambots or spiders that search web pages for valid e-mail addresses. The spammer either runs the program or purchases/steals a list generated by one. If you can confuse the spider, the e-mail address will either be unrecognizable or invalid. Since the spammer relies on massive volume, more than likely any error, no matter how trivial, will not be corrected.

Here are some strategies for reducing your spam:

• Spoofing your e-mail address with characters to be deleted or replacing the "@" sign with "at." This is sort of a Turing test — easy for a human, difficult for a computer to fake. This method is easy to use and widely known, so I suspect the spammers will figure it out before too much longer.


• Using javascript to either hide or encode the e-mail. You need access to the HTML to do this. The simple approach works very well -- I only received two spam e-mails in the first six months of using this method.


• Using disposable e-mail addresses. Either use one of the many free e-mail services and abandon them when you get spammed (not recommended except for occasional use), or use the wonderful Spamgourmet service. This lets you set up temporary e-mail addresses and specify how many times it can be used. The Spamgourmet database application forwards that many messages to your permanent e-mail account, then blocks any more. You can set up a temporary account that lets you track where the spammer got the e-mail. For example gum.2.mitcht@spamgourmet.com will forward two e-mails to my real e-mail address, and if I look at the message header, I can see what temporary address gave rise to the spam. This does not work very well for comments on blogs because the spiders seem to find the temporary address fairly quickly and use up the message allotment.


• Get your commenting software up to date. Samizdata uses a graphic Turing test to enable a comment to be posted. I believe it was installed by his excellency the Dissident Frogman when he gave their site an extreme makeover.


• Whitelists and blacklists. Most e-mail programs let you set the account to accept only messages from specific addresses. You can set it to allow only your close friends and family to reach you. It works best if you use another address for the general public. Blacklists simply block known pests.


• Filters. These vary in quality. Some legitimate messages get blocked and some spam inevitably squeezes through, but you really need to set the filters and accept the risks.

 
Local Boy Makes Good
Hey, I'm one of the Chicago Boyz. No, they're not making me move out there to Flatland. It's one of the blogs I have been reading daily for over a year, and they put out a notice asking if anyone wanted to join. I did, of course — this is the big leagues. 'Course, now I have to think of something to write.