Just what we needed...another search engine. Launched by Amazon.com, A9 seems like a search engine that has some interesting features, but after a couple test searches, it is nowhere as complete as Google, nor does it present the search results in a clean, clear, precise manner. But not only did Amazon enter the search market, but there's also a toolbar to go with A9. And if you read the terms of service, the second paragraph clearly states that they will track EVERY page you visit on the Internet (except for secure (https://) sites). People are raising a flap over Google's GMail instantaneously reading your e-mail and serving an ad, yet no one has proposed a bill to stop Amazon from tracking every page you visit - though just about every other spyware you get infected with will do the same thing. Do yourself a favor, don't install the Amazon search bar - if you need to install one - go with google - at least that way you can turn off any potential privacy invasions.

URL: A9.com > Search Technologies

It's kind of odd - over the past couple days, I've been noticing that it's been taking longer to download my e-mail off the server and when I checked in on it, it was just because there were more e-mails there. I have my client set to check every 45 minutes and I'll usually get 70-80 e-mails, but when I checked a couple times over the past couple days, I was receiving upwards of 200. Now - why would there be a sudden spike in the amount of spam? It's not because there are more diverse spams coming in...but because I'm getting multiple copies of the same spam. In the past, I wouldn't really think twice about getting four copies of the same spam because they were all going to different e-mail aliases which filter into my one main account - so it would make sense that if four different aliases got on spam mailing lists, I'd get multiple copies. But now, for some reason, I'm getting 15-20 copies of the same spam message - all going to the same e-mail address.

Now, it's not really a huge problem because SpamBayes catches them all (if you send the same thing 20 times, if one is caught, all 20 are caught), but it's just a pain to have to download all these messages and I'm sure my hosting provider isn't too happy that my e-mail address is using up system resources (it can't be easy getting upwards of 5 e-mails a minute for my one e-mail address). In the end, it's no big deal because they're all filtered, but I am just trying to understand why I would get so many copies of the same thing sent to one address. I'm not going to click on anything in a spam - not even if you show it to me 20 times. If my e-mail filter catches one, it gets all 20 - so there's no point there to send multiple copies. I'm just trying to understand the spammer's logic (though I doubt any of them have a strong logic), but still - it makes absolutely no sense to me.

On a side note, I recently read an article where a company will pay you $1/hour for running their program on your computer. What does the program do? Does it search for E.T.? Does it crunch numbers or analyze proteins for science? Does it show ads on your computer (ahhh...the early days of internet advertising)? What could they possibly want to pay you $1/hour to run? Oh yeah - they're relaying spam through your computer. What a great idea. You can get paid $1/hour to get shut down by your ISP for spamming, get your ISP's IP address blocked across the internet and make tons of friends who are looking for vi.co.d1n. What a joke. I seriously hope that no one is stupid enough to sign up for this - though I'm sure you'll find some suckers out there.

URL: BB ~ Blake's Blog

I know I'm certainly in the minority, but I love earthquakes. The adrenaline felt afterwards, the frenzy to figure out where it hit, what it did. It's just great - a little scary - but great. Living here in Orange, I've felt my fair share of quakes - usually just minor tremors as there are no direct fault lines here that are too important (though we did get one in Riverside a year or two ago - just adjacent to Orange) - the real "fun" ones are the ones with epicenters in LA, or further east. We just get a bit of shaking, but nothing too spectacular and it's just amazing to think where these come from. I mean...the whole crust of the earth is moving beneath us and we just continue on with our daily lives, thinking nothing of it (unless of course, it does damage, like Northridge).

But after living in San Diego for the past few years for school, I've missed the earthquakes (and the police chases we get on the LA television stations), and I most definitely won't be missing this one - unless of course, it turns out that you can't predict earthquakes. In which case, they've just gotten my hopes up for no reason. Why not just tell me I'm going to win the lotto by Sept. 5th as well?

URL: Quake to hit LA 'by Sept 5' - World - www.smh.com.au

Previously, I reported on how much spam I receive - it came out to about 2,250 spam a day (or about 97% of my total e-mail). While the number of "good" e-mails has gone up to about 4%, the number of spams has gone up as well. Looking at my stats from the last 30 hours, I have the following:

3434 messages processed
128 (4%) good
3289 (96%) spam
17 (0%) unsure - though they were all spam...so we're at 96/4 spam to ham ratio.

Out of the 3289 spams, 1 was a good e-mail. So the false positive rate is 0.03% - pretty good - and as such, I'd highly recommend SpamBayes - I use the Outlook plugin and it works wonders. But this is just one more reason I would love to test Google's GMail. Assuming a large userbase and some way to mark e-mails as spam, you could build a distributed spam filter that could best the one of Cloudmark (which was a great filter until they started charging). For some reason, I thought my number of spams had gone up considerably, but it seems to be increasing slightly. I've gone from ~2250 spams a day to ~2450 spams a day. Still pretty outrageous, but controllable...

URL: The Spamhaus Project

Not much to write about recently. I did, however, get a job at a local bank working as a teller (what fun...hopefully it has ample opportunity for advancement). Google's new GMail system sounds pretty cool, but until I can give it a hands-on test, I can't really comment on it - however, those who think it poses a privacy problem are misguided and the California senator who introduced a bill to block GMail is just ignorant and looking for publicity. I did like the GoogleBombing of John Waffles Kerry on search engines, such as Yahoo, MSN & Lycos (search for waffles on search.yahoo.com). The GoogleBomb idea for waffles comes from the link below.

URL: Esoteric * Diatribe