Today I was made aware of something that’s been pestering the Internet for ages. A trend that the pornography industry started ages ago, and has fooled more than one innocent web user. We all know how easy it is to make typos, both in letters, e-mails and when we enter the web address of the site we want to go to. This of course is really annoying, especially when we’re at work when we try to make this office friendly. So what is this method that so many use to fool innocent Internet users? Well, the technique is as easy as it is in terms ingenious. What companies do, is that they register a domain name with very similar spelling to a popular web site. For instance, it might be gooogle.com, googel.com, gogle.com etc. All possible misspellings of the word Google, that might get you to a site you didn’t ask for. So what happens when you misspell the domain name? Well, you’re taken to a page which in effect redirects your request to another site. This is something that porn industry has done for ages, and has gained them millions upon millions of unjustified hits.

Continue Reading »

I just gotta tell you, SpamAssassin rocks! For those of you that don’t know what SpamAssassin is I will give you a short explaination. It’s a program that goes through all the mail you get, and checks if the mail is a spam mail or not. The way it does this, is to do a series of test on the mail. These tests range from looking at what the subject is, to what is actually written in the mail, and to do checks to see if the mail comes from a source known to send spam mail.

Why do I love it so much? Well, when you’re like me and been on the net for quite a while your e-mail address(es) kinda gets around, and before you know it your inbox gets filled up with all these do you want cheap viagra? and do you want free porn?. This is stuff that might be interesting to an impotent old fart, but that’s just not me. I get around 200 to 300 spam mails daily, and since SpamAssassin filters all these mails away I don’t waste time. SpamAssassin also uses an artificial intelligence, which over time trains itself to become better. The result for me? It catches almost everything, I now see an average of 2 spam mails per week. It’s perfect, it’s bliss. So where’s the link? Well, there’s a lot of humour surrounding the topic spam, and here is a lot of examples why. Everything you didn’t want to have to know about spam.