|
|
Tales from the Terminal RoomOctober 2002, Issue No. 36 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Please Note: This is an archive copy of the newsletter. The information and links that it contains are not updated.
|
|
Tales from the Terminal Room ISSN 1467-338X October 2002, Issue No. 36 Editor: Karen Blakeman Published by: RBA Information Services Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR) is a monthly newsletter, with the exception of July and August, which are published as a single issue. TFTTR includes reviews and comparisons of information sources and search tools; updates to the RBA Web site Business Sources and other useful resources; dealing with technical and access problems on the Net; and news of RBA's training courses and publications. In this issue:
The Great Spam ExperimentWe all suffer from junk email, also known as spam, to some degree and for most of us accept is part of Internet life. But Phil Bradley, a well known Internet consultant, wanted to find out more and decided to spend his summer finding out why and how spam reaches his mailbox. He created some Hotmail accounts and placed the addresses in a number of places on the net: 1. This was kept as a control and not posted anywhere After 2 months he received 691 spam mails. Top of the league were "financial" newsletters with a final tally of 231, pornographic spam came second with 185 and health related spam were third with 108. Even more interesting though is which of his Hotmail addresses generated the most spam. The one that was used to opt-out of junk emails came top at 350. So by far and away the most spam came as a result of requesting not to receive any more! The moral of the story, then, is NEVER click on the remove option in spam: you'll only get more, which is something that many of us have long suspected. Phil completed his study just in time, though, because Hotmail have now signed up to the Brightmail anti-spam service. It would be interesting to repeat the experiment with this in place to see how effective it is. More information on Phil's experiment and a more detailed analysis of the data can be found on his Web site at http://www.philb.com/spamex.htm Hotmail and BTopenworld adopt BrightmailBTopenworld has signed up Brightmail to tackle the junk mail bombarding its users' accounts. The service also includes Symantec's anti-virus server side software. Brightmail, currently used by six of the top ten ISPs in the US, claims that its service blocks between 93 and 95 per cent of spam. They also recently signed a deal with MSN to filter spam before it reaches Hotmail in-boxes. According to Brightmail, spam is on the increase. In September 2001, 8 per cent of the email it scanned was rejected as spam. Last month 38 per cent of 3.1 billion messages, that is a total of 1.2 billion messages, were junk mail. Brightmail identifies unsolicited commercial email from decoy email accounts that are seeded to attract spam, but it has recently added a new feature. The technology has been tweaked to detect "polymorphic spam attacks", where the spammer makes subtle differences in punctuation or spacing between messages in an attempt to escape spam filters. My own ISP Telenor uses Brightmail, and its ability to pick up the so-called "Nigerian scams" has improved dramatically over the last couple of weeks. A totally spam free email box is probably not achievable without losing real mail in the process, but Brightmail manages to catch about 98 per cent of junk coming into my inbox and that is good enough for me. Pop-ups banned by AOL and Ask Jeeves.America Online is to ban third-party pop-up advertising. It will also make it easier for users to find and change their marketing preferences, and opt-outs will no longer expire on an annual basis. But AOL will continue to use pop-ups on a limited basis to notify customers about key features on the service and special offers from AOL Time Warner. Unfortunately, this only apply to US users. An AOL UK spokesman has said the company is still debating whether to adopt the US stance when it launches AOL 8.0 in the UK. Ask Jeeves has already banned pop-up advertisements, and is to cut back on banner advertisements that appear throughout the site. It will now rely largely on paid advertising links within search results for extra revenue. According to Nielsen Netratings, who measure and monitor Internet traffic patterns, the number of pop-up ads rose from about 3.9 billion in the first quarter of this year to nearly 5 billion in the second quarter. The number of pop-ups that we actually see may not decrease, though, as spammers have found a way to hijack an administration feature in Microsoft's Windows operating systems. The messenger service allows, for example, a network administrator to send warnings to users about service downtime or problems on the Net. But now some advertisers are using it to send bulk messages to anyone connected to the Internet with an accessible address. How do you stop them? Make sure you have a firewall installed on your PC. There are plenty around and some are free for personal use, for example Zone Alarm (http://www.zonelabs.com/) or Sygate Personal (http://www.sygate.com/). Information ResourcesSearch ToolsGigablast http://www.gigablast.com/ A new search engine called Gigablast has appeared on the scene. It has a relatively small database of approximately 151 million pages but this seems to be growing day by day. The default screen is minimalist with no fancy graphics or advertising and it is very fast. In the results list it has copied Google's feature of having a link to its own cached copy of the page next to each entry.. The default search option is to look for any of your terms but you can change this by using the Advanced Search or the "+" sign before terms to make them mandatory. The minus sign for excluding pages that contain a term and double quote marks for phrases are supported. Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and wildcards are not supported. Advanced options also include searching for linked pages, site search and title search. A very useful feature is the option to sort your results by date, which can be specified on the Advanced Search screen. Definitely worth a test drive and one to watch. Business InformationCompany Financials and Annual Reports http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/finars.htm Infoline Spain http://www.infoline.es/ Trade & Service Directories http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/trade.htm QuickerWit http://www.QuickerWit.com/ You can either list everything in the directory or search by manufacturer, product name or category. Information about product reviews are displayed with the results. QuickerWit has information on every product review published in the major UK computer press over the last three years. Publications that are currently included are Database & Network Journal, PC Magazine, PC Plus, Personal Computer World, PC Pro, Software World and What PC? There is also a searchable reviews index going back to 1994. It does not provide the full text to the article, but gives links to the Web sites of the magazines. The article may not be available online, but enough information is given to enable you to either purchase a back issue or track down the article via your library. Business Information Brokers http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/brokers.htm Directory of Information & Market Research Specialists (DIMARS) http://www.dataresources.co.uk/
Statistics http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/stats.htm Trade Associations and Chambers of Commerce sometimes provide information and statistics on their sectors of interest, local industries, and the economy. Marketing Source Directory of Trade Associations http://www.marketingsource.com/associations/
Eurochambres http://www.eurochambres.be/ British Chambers of Commerce http://www.chamberonline.co.uk/ Top 10 Sites http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/top10/ The delegates on the Key Business Resources on the Net workshop held on October 8th came up with the following as their Top 10 sites:
Gizmo of the MontheCloakerhttp://www.codefoot.com/software/ecloaker/ Email Harvesters - programs that collect email addresses for spam by trawling Web sites - are on the increase. Web page designers use various combinations of images, javascript and forms to try and protect addresses from being harvested. Another approach is to code the address in such a way that it is invisible to harvesters but can be read correctly by an email program. For example, part of the code for joeblogs@gizmo.co.uk might look like mailto. This is what eCloaker does. eCloaker can be downloaded free of charge and is very easy to use. 1. You fill in the Email Address, for example joeblogs@gizmo.co.uk 2. Type in what you want to appear on the screen, for example Email Joe Blogs 3. Press the Make Code button to create the cloaked link code 4. Press the Copy Code button to put the code in your system clipboard. 5. In your HTML editor, paste the code into your page HTML where the link should appear. Two colleagues of mine have been using this for 6 months. They remain blissfully spam free whilst legitimate enquirers are still able to contact them via the links. Training and MeetingsWorkshop: Key Business Resources on the Net This one day workshop concentrates on Internet resources relevant to business applications, and in particular portals and the so-called "invisible web". The emphasis will be on pay-as-you-go and free services. The workshop will benefit anyone who plans to use, or already uses, the Internet for gathering essential business information. Cost: GBP 195 + VAT (Total cost GBP 229.12) Workshop: Market Research on the Web This one day workshop offers practical guidance on how to find and evaluate Web based statistical and market research information, both free and fee based. Cost: GBP 195 + VAT (Total cost GBP 229.12). TFTTR Contact InformationKaren Blakeman, RBA Information Services ArchivesTFTTR archives: http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/archives/index.shtml Subscribe and UnsubscribeTo subscribe to the newsletter fill in the online registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml To unsubscribe, use the registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml and check the unsubscribe radio button. Privacy StatementSubscribers' details are used only to enable distribution of the newsletter Tales from the Terminal Room. The subscriber list is not used for any other purpose, nor will it be disclosed by RBA or made available in any form to any other individual, organisation or company.
|
| This page was last updated on 1st November 2002 | 2002 |
