Category Archives: Spam

A New Image for Your Email Address

John Graham-Cumming, author of Bayesian spam filter POPFile, points me to a neat tool he’s created which will turn an email address into an image that may spare you some spam from bots scouring web pages for email addresses: This site converts a text-based email address (such as me@example.com) and creates an image that can… Read More »

CAPTCHA Gets Useful

An excellent example of something that leverages a tool that already exists and makes it useful — CAPTCHA forms. AP writes from Pittsburgh: Researchers estimate that about 60 million of those nonsensical jumbles are solved everyday around the world, taking an average of about 10 seconds each to decipher and type in. Instead of wasting… Read More »

The Name’s Bristly. Sickling B. Bristly.

I don’t want to encourage spammers because, frankly, they’re so out of control even people who don’t have email accounts are getting spam, but you have to admire the creative ones. I’m a sucker for a good ‘from’ name, so here are a few more (not that these are as good as earlier ones; you… Read More »

What Probably Won’t Happen in 2007

The BBC has asked me to make some predictions about the coming year, something I’m always loath to do because I seem to get it wrong. Anyway, here are my notes. They’re based in part on my own bath-time musings, and partly inspired by the thoughts of others (tried to credit them where relevant.) 1999… Read More »

What Probably Won’t Happen in 2007

The BBC has asked me to make some predictions about the coming year, something I’m always loath to do because I seem to get it wrong. Anyway, here are my notes. They’re based in part on my own bath-time musings, and partly inspired by the thoughts of others. 1999 just took longer than we thought,… Read More »