The Gallery team has sent out a urgent notification that all users should upgrade to the latest version due to a security problem. Upgrade is dead simple if you use the patch file, just replace 3 files on your machine.
Things are a bit dead here for a short while as I am in Cape Town for a few weeks on business and being kept pretty busy and without reliable net access from home.
c|net brings news that Road Runner is bundling CA’s antivirus and firewall with new signups, this is good news as I discovered in recent analysis that they are the 3rd largest generator of spam, hopefully much of this spam comes from drone machines.
However them only targeting ADSL customers would not solve the problem for the rest of us since as I found in my analysis even if I filter out all their dynamic allocated IP’s – their ADSL customers – they simply move up to largest sender of spam for my system, which means they have some rather dodgy corporate customers as well.
I handle mail for about 40 domains on my servers at the moment, some are secondary and some are primary, they all get spam.
I have been keeping close track of all emails in and out of my machine. I keep lots of meta information about these emails including to, from, sender hostname, subject, attachments, time spent processing, is it spam or not etc. I do this partly because there are certain legal requirements for this to be done in the EU and because i like the kind of stats I can pull out of this.
It has now been a year since I started keeping this stats and my SpamAssassin has tagged 55 000 emails as spam. I religiously check my own spam folder for false positives and do not get much, but I am aware of some html newsletters that gets tagged as spam when it shouldn’t be. Overall though I believe that my tagging is fairly accurate.
What follows in the extended entry is a bit of analysis I did on this data to find out what ISP’s, Countries and so forth are to blame for this plague.
It is important to note that I am not setting out to have a hugely scientific approach to this or even a highly accurate one. If there were a very accurate way to identify spam we would not have a problem with it, this is merely interesting observations made on a small system.
In many large cities there are train, bus, underground and sometimes water based public transport systems, these can be very confusing and you can spend hours a month staring at various maps to figure out the best route from A to B. Enter Mรฉtro a tool for your Palm, PocketPC or Smartphone that will calculate the quickest route or route with the fewest changes for any of these systems. It currently covers over 250 Cities and amazingly is also freeware.
A full overview with plenty of screenshots are available here so I will not be posting any screenshots here, but this is an essential tool for anyone living or traveling to a large city.
Important features include:
This is definetely an essential tool, one that I have been using since about 2000 on my Palm based PDA’s
I use Power PHLogger to do my visitor tracking, it works by running a bit of java script on the client browser each time a visitor loads a page. This means that the majority of browsers gets counted and aggregators etc does not. This is ideal for me as it shows me actual users viewing the pages, their click streams etc. I also use Webalizer to do general stats.
PPHLogger counts unique visitors as those who are unique in 30 minute intervals, so far from examining my logs it seems some installs of Konqueror does not always load my bit of javascript, the rest are fine. The site owner can set a cookie that will skip his own browsing on the site, so my own hits never gets counted.
Today I received my 1,000th visitor using a real browser on this site since I started tracking it, 6th of September 2003, which was very shortly after it was launched in this format.
The lucky browser was from ntli.net and was searching google for “best freeware” that took him to my post about 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities
