Friday, May 26, 2006

SPAM flood

Another posting on spam. This is getting crazy, my Yahoo account is continually flooded by spam for the month of May. At last count (May 26) I received 1,498 emails of which only 128 were legit mail. A total of 91.5% of all mail coming in was porn, UCE, phishing or out-and-out scams. To keep this in perspective I have received a total of 3,083 mails of which 686 were legit for 2006. For the last seven months of 2005 only 2,029 emails of which 1,017 were legit. I am averaging 50-125 emails a day now.

For those who keep saying that CANSPAM works... It does not. Not all of the spammers are in the US and they have more than made up for the drop from last year. What is the solution, I am not totally sure. It may help if people secure their machines better and check to see if their machine is clean from all of the Mal-ware. Next the ISPs should be looking at the volume of email coming from people to see if they are really a business or a machine that has been hacked.

I will try to remember to update these numbers at the end of May.

Update 2006/05/29 - 1689 mails, 1533 spams, 136 legit. Spammers do your worst, Yahoo filters are working over 99% of the time and all legit mail was received.

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Canadian census and Linux

I was originally going to write a short rant about the Federal government supporting only Windows based computers with JVM (Java Virtual Machine) for online entry of our 2006 census. When I first saw the notes on the web I thought that they were kidding. My machine is up-to-date and has Java running without a problem on a number of sites. This is a fully secured computer and the hack attempts so far have not succeeded. The banks and insurance companies don't have any problems with Linux hosts accessing their systems. All they are looking for is a browser with the proper encryption, O/S is not relevant to them.

On Saturday I tried to enter the census system and it told me that the environment was not supported, which from my viewpoint was total bullshit. The government, when they allow their citizens access to services should not dictate the O/S in any way. If they were concerned about security then they should be banning the use of Windows as it is the O/S of choice for viruses, trojans and spyware.

On Sunday I saw a short note on the Yahoo SCOG forum that the Feds updated the system to allow access for Linux based systems and when I tried it the site worked! One more small victory for Linux. I hope that the Federal government realizes that they would be better off designing systems that meets standards (not Microsoft's version) that are O/S independent. I realize that it makes testing more difficult, but, it will allow anyone with the proper secure protocols access to the system.