Population: One

I wound up calling this guy. The number listed was his home number but his wife kindly gave me his work number. He sounded pretty confused when I talked to him, so I just recommended that he contact his local FBI office and complain that someone was using his name for fraudulent purposes. At the time, there was no telling if he was lying or not. I figured recommending the cops would work either way.

I later got email from the sysadmin at one of the hosts associated with the spam, who said they’d found the guy responsible for the spam. Didn’t say who it was, which is OK with me.

Today, Greg pointed out this page, on which nandi@bonbon.net says:

We are a new online bank. We need someone who can make us a script which supports fully automated banking (credit card deposits, internal money
transfers, wire transfer requests, etc.). We are willing to pay big cash for
the program.

Alas, Justin Young confirmed that nandi@bonbon.net was his email address when I talked to him on the phone. So I’m thinking he’s responsible after all. Poor guy. I’m glad I got to help wield the hammer.

Jeremy Bowers writes on the hidden dangers of Bayesian spam filters. Core of the argument: spammers can use any possible filter mechanism to fine tune their spam, and since the Bayesian filter is the best we have, once it fails we’re doomed.

However, if you’re trying to sell me something, you have to either a) market it in the body of the message, or b) give me a URL to look at. Here’s the simple algorithm for filtering spam with URLs in it: if the sender is in my address book, let it through. Otherwise, mark it as possible spam. Jeremy neglects to consider the possibility of personalized filters which by their nature can’t be duplicated by spammers, since they rely on information that only I have.

Bayesian filters may in the end prove to be personal enough, in fact, since they use your own email as the basis for the filters. All in all, I’m not too worried.

(Link by way of Workbench.)

Bring me the brains of Baader-Meinhof. They’ve gotta just be misplaced; what would someone do with them? But man, it prompts weird imaginings.

The International Children’s Digital Library is a pretty cheering concept. I bet it gets more traffic from adults than children, though. Um, by which I mean adults who want to read the books themselves. Current computer screens are not the best technology for reading books to kids.

This is much closer to what I want than Microsoft’s Tablet PC. Not quite there, cause I still want the keyboard, but pretty close. There’s nothing really aweinspiring about the technology; it’s just X Windows for Microsoft. Still pretty sexy.

There’s actually no reason Apple couldn’t do something like this for the Mac, although they’d need to provide remote display capabilities in Aqua. Still, why not? PDF might be a little heavyweight for transmission over WiFi, I suppose.

The real “digital hub” revolution comes when WiFi gets built into the television, DVD player, and so on. However, free-roaming lightweight devices that leave the computing power in various hubs are an important part of that. The DVR talks to the central processor, which runs the portable display, and so on. Gotta be small, gotta be light.

Thinking more on roaming devices, what might be useful is some sort of standard database discovery protocol. You want to be able to tell roaming devices in your vicinity what sort of information you’ve got, and allow them to do queries based on that. Perhaps you do need some intelligence in the device after all.

Would that intelligence be appropriate for home use? Sure; a lot of what you want to do/know with the DVD and the DVR and so on are lookups anyhow. You probably need a discovery process for procedures you can run, as well. The real trick is the higher level UI stuff, that knits it all together into a coherent whole.

“Borders Hub is offering the database Books in Store with the description ‘Books available in the store.’ Subscribe?” Tabs, maybe, to flip between databases. Some standard query interface stuff.

Saturday was busy; Sunday was pleasantly quiet. Either way it wasn’t a talkative web weekend for me. I woke up at 4:45 AM on Saturday for some network maintenance at work, which went very well indeed; I went to bed around midnight, after the Ring of Honor show. Lotta video games in between. Sunday I just slept and caught up on movies and watched wrestling. You know how it is. (I feel a little like I should belch around here.)

Raiders beat the Patriots last night. The Pats managed to score 20 points with no offensive touchdowns. Tom Brady had best be using this year as a learning experience; he gets a free pass for a year for winning a Super Bowl but god help him if he doesn’t improve next year. The Bledsoe trade may wind up driving Belichick out of New England yet.

Greg Beato takes the time to analyze Glenn Reynolds’ readership claims. My. I’m going to have to visit his weblog more often; he does a better job of skewering Professor Reynolds than I do.

Speaking of which, a friend on LJ asked me why I read this stuff, referring to the rants of Mischa and others. My answer may be found there, but boils down to “I think it’s important that someone goes out and points out the inconsistencies, the hatred, and the poor logic. Criticisms must exist, and they must be discoverable.”

The subway gas scare in London may have been unjustified. London police are saying that there’s no evidence the three men arrested were planning on gassing the Tube, and they did not actually possess any gas. The terrorist materials for which they were arrested were false ID papers.

Winter has come to Boston. I am glad of the winter jacket I bought last week.