Having worked at a spam marketing company for a while, I have learned several things that one can do to help in the fight against spam.
Why do spammers spam?
Lets face it, email is cheap. Many spam companys can buy email lists for dollars per 100k. Statistically around 10% of people who click on the email, purchase the item... not a bad conversion. At my place of employment, we averaged around a 60% conversion (somewhat of an industry phenom). Why were ours so high? We bought targeted lists (lists that consisted of known buyers, and were of the demographic that fit the product we were advertising). We also staged our website advertising so that it ran alongside television advertising (if you have ever seen a commercial about "as seen on television", my former company probably had some hand in the web advertising for it). This resulted in something like a brute force approach to saturating our audience with advertisements.
I'm not impressed Kyle, get to the point...
Ok, Ok. How do spammer's make their money? Many times they get paid on a CPA (cost per acquisition) basis, and other times they get paid on and ROI basis (the advertising company will pay for 'x' acquisitions... they don't care how many emails are sent out, or anything like that, so the marketing company will send out as many as they have to in order to hit their target). So how do you make it less profitable for spam marketing companies to send out spam? Visit every website that they promote (and of course DON'T PURCHASE!!!)!
What did you say???
I know, every day it seems like their is more and more malicious code being injected into webpages, and to actually go out and seek those webpages seems a bit masochist. So proceed with caution. What is done by visiting their website is decreasing their Conversion percentage, which gives the appearance of making them less effective.
If the website has a streaming video on it, watch it SEVERAL times, and get your friends to watch it. Why? Bandwidth is NOT cheap. Every video they stream is money out of their pocket. Many of the companies also track their streams, so the increase in streams also yields a lower conversion. Huh? Companies pay the marketing companies per stream, and if those streams are maxxed out quickly and yield no results, then they are less likely to advertise on that medium again.
Thats it?
Pretty much. Just think of it this way. spam companies only have to initiate contact, and wait for a purchase. If people actively eat up their resources, it becomes less profitable to be in that business.
Warning!
Use discretion when using this approach. If you don't know how to secure your computer, then you won't know how to clean up if you end up with a trojan.
What have I been doing lately you ask? I've been creating widgets for the upcoming Mac OS x Tiger release. My company bought a developers liscence, and off I go, charting unfamiliar territory with only a handful of websites out there to help me in my quest.
What is a widget you might ask? Its the bridge that gaps web development and regular software development. Widgets are essentially safari webpages that are executed on the widget dashboard. Why is this useful??? Think of it this way. You are a busy person, you want to know the weather, you want to see your stocks, you want a todo list, you want to see if you have any new email, you want to have a dictionary available. How can you accomplish this? Conventionally you would have a program for each of these tasks, or you would have to write your own script that would access all of this data. Widgets are more like the latter than the former, except you don't have to have your browser open, and that many of these mini programs have already been written for your pleasure.
In addition to that I have been working with the XmlHttpRequest javascript object. Who out there thinks that javascript only offers cheesy dynamic content? (oohh, mee!) Well, its seems as thought there has been a paradigm shift due to whats being done in google labs (google suggest & google maps). XmlHttpRequest is a way for your site to dynamically talk to a webpage without a refresh. This opens up the door for live autosuggest, or live webpage manipulation. Its a pretty neat concept (and yet an old one).
So that's what I've been up to lately.
Heidi and I went down to my parents house for a wedding this past weekend. My cousin got married (on short notice, so I had little time to plan), and since my cousin and her now husband were also good friends of mine I knew I needed to make an appearance. It was only supposed to take 20 hours, and I thought maybe if i drove faster than the speed limit, I could make it there in less time. Yeah Right. Apparently this was not our weekend for luck. We managed to spend 1 hour in traffic for every 4 hours of driving. Not to be morbid, but after the first hour of traffic, I wanted to see a reason for the delay... like some blood stains on the ground, or at least a crater in the middle of the highway. Nope, from all I can tell 3 semi's just stopped in the middle of the frikkin road to hold up traffic. Maybe it was some sort of protest. The next couple times we were in traffic we looked all over the place to make sure we weren't sitting there for the sake of it.
Here's the deal. I was browsing through blockbuster a couple months ago and came across a particular movie. What particular movie might that be? Thats where I need some help. I remember nothing about the movie other than what the DVD looks like. :)
What Im fairly certain about
I believe it shows the back of a man's head, the man is bald, and has a tag on his ear (much like a toe tag for dead folk). I believe the photo is fairly close up (could be a bust, or a headshot... cant remember). If my memory serves me correctly, behind the man it looks like a very clean light blue environment (could be a labratory, a really futuristic prison, a space ship... who knows).
What Im not sure about
The movie seems to have come out in the 2000's, and looks to be of a sci-fi/suspense nature. I think the name has numbers in it, but i could be way off. And i believe the movie was a "previously unreleased" film. Perhaps by some popular director?
A burning question I've had lately: Why aren't the tables in the default "mysql" database normalized? What is it about these tables that makes them better than normalization? Throughout my few years of programming, I've learned that striving for Second Normal Form (2NF) will create some of the best designed databases.
Every time I go to setup user access in mysql, I have to go to 3 different tables to make entries (db, host, user), and enter a lot of the information twice. Yes, i know there are better ways to do this, but I like the feel of having my hands dirty. It seems like Normalization could help out the mysql database immensely (not to mention it would be putting to practice the methodologies that are supported in the database community).
Just yesterday I was using one of the google lab's latest toys... Google X. It was the same google search engine, where the images, news, froogle links resembled the dock on a mac osx system. It looked really cool, and was a bit more visually appealing than the regular google site.
Well, the fun ended. This morning I found out that it was yanked from google labs. Im not sure why, but im *hoping* because it brought the server to it's knees, and its just temporarily down, while they put it in a place that can handle the load better.
As a replacement, i did find Google Mac that searches all things mac related.
There was a an arm wrestling match in caliafornia where the opponents were robot vs. man... i mean young teenage girl. Apparently the match was a test to display how artificial muscles were far enough along to be a match for human strength. Well, the girl whooped the robots non-ass. You would think that the scientists would have tested the thing before putting it on public display. Or maybe the scientists were weaker than a 17yr old girl (self proclaimed as a wimp)... sad either way.
It was about time I gave the blog the old overhaul. I thought it would be a good experiment in stylesheets.
I ran accross this article (while searching for something completely different), and started reading it. I quickly realized this is way above my head, and far past my attention span.
Thorn's Morgue: Putting Christian apologetics to eternal rest.
If anyone has any spare time on their hands and wants to translate this into laymans terms, I'd love to hear what you have to say.