Tag Archives: Yahoo! Messenger

Strip CAPTCHA Spam

Whatever useful stuff the good guys come up with, the bad guys ain’t far behind. A few months back I wrote about researchers at Carnegie Mellon coming up with a way to use CAPTCHA tools to help decipher words in text by the Internet Archive. The basic idea is that the effort to prevent spammers… Read More »

The Message Behind Instant Messaging

Be careful what you wish for. For nearly a decade I, and a lot of people like me, have been dreaming of the day when we could send an instant message to someone who wasn’t on the network as us. An instant messaging program is one that sits on your computer and allows you to… Read More »

Is SPIM Another Non-Problem?

No. It is a real problem, if only because there’s still plenty of sleazy people figuring out new ways to ruin your day. There’s some skepticism out there about this new spam threat: SPIM, in case you didn’t know, is spam that’s delivered, not to your inbox, but to your instant messaging chat program, like… Read More »

Goodbye To The Browser?

Here’s some more interesting end-of-year stuff from Nielsen//NetRatings: a report issued today (PDF file) says that three out of every four home and work Internet users access the Internet using a non-browser based Internet application, particularly media players, instant messengers and file sharing applications. “With 76 percent of Web surfers using Internet applications, functionality has… Read More »

Yahoo Proposes A Way Out Of Spam

 At last, someone is doing something about spam. Part of the problem behind spam is that email allows sleazier folk to fake where the email is coming from (the ‘From’ part of the email’s address fields, or header.) But if email didn’t allow that, and authenticated a sender before passing it on to the recipient,… Read More »