The disordered mad of a brain man

You may know that Outlook 2003 – MS's email etc client – has, at last, a spam filter system. Using 'state-of-the-art technology' too, natch.

Someone's analysed how it works. And guess what? Not only is it crap, as in really really crap…

(You know all those 'PEN1S' enlarging systems and 'C*H*E*A*P***V*I*A*G*R*A'? They're considered less likely to be spam, because the subject is all in capitals. Plus 'pen1s' is unlikely to be in the filter's fixed and untrainable list of words, unlike – I kid you not – 'riilldijgjgjg' and the second one has lots of non-alphanumeric characters.)

…but if it detects the word 'linux' in the text of the email, it considers it's more likely to be spam than if it does not.

You're probably familiar with 'Hello, it's your bank, honest, look we've got all the right logos and everything. Anyway, please give us all your details at plausible-address.co.uk@nastyaddress-concealed-by-having-it-in-hex.somewhere' fraud spam.

Here's today's:

Hello dear client Barclays Bank.
Today our system of safety at night has been cracked!!!
It not a joke!!! It is the truth!!!
We ask you, in order to prevent problems, to repeat
registration of your data. Make it very quickly!
Administration Barclays Bank.

Plain html, no graphics. Plus the way they've done the URL means it doesn't work (in my non-MS email program, anyway).

It seems to be connected to these geniuses at adver-line.com

Perspective work in United Kingdom for all comers to have good money!
Our company requires employees able to receive our clients' remittances in United Kingdom. For doing it you should open an account at one of the following banks: Barclays, Halifax, Natwest, Lloyds and inform us the account data.
After that our clients make remittances to your account. You get the money and send them by Western Union to our company
(you'll be informed of the account data after the transmission)
What's your profit?
You will get 10% commission from each remittance. Since all remittances will be about $5000, your profit will be up to $500

Yep, I'm convinced…

… was a 2400 bits per second one: absolutely cutting edge stuff compared to the 300 bps ones or the 1200 bps from them to you but only 75 bps from you to them (!) of the previous UK standards.

It was an Amstrad, and it came with a portable luggable PC clone called the PPC-640 thrown in.

(This was about the size and weight of two reams of heavy A4 paper short edge to short edge, 8MHz 8086-clone CPU, 640k RAM, twin 3.5" 720k floppies, small black and white LCD screen with no back light making it Somewhat Difficult to read unless you had a good light source behind you, and CGA graphics = 80×25 characters or 320×200 in four ugly colours, or 640×200 in black and white. Eight or ten D size batteries would run it for about an hour when disconnected from the mains.)

Doing it this way was, for a while, the cheapest way to get a 2400 modem! Some people bought one, attached their 'real' PC to the PPC's serial port and ran a small program on the PPC so their PC would think it was directly connected to the modem.

They cost about £800 new. I paid about £250 for a second hand one, less than a year after the launch.

File compare. Stolen Adapted from from Unix, it's been around since the early days of DOS. It allows you to compare two files, to see if they're identical, and if not, show the differences.

In its early days, it was ideal to see if that copy of a file onto a floppy was accurate. Now, I sometimes use it to see if the copy onto a CD-R is ok.

How do you think it – the version with Windows 2000 anyway – works? You've got two 700M byte files. How would you compare them? Continue reading →