Spammers like using Yahoo Groups homepages to advertise their shit and then use the group invitation feature to mass spam users about it.

Lately I’ve been receiving an increasing number of these spammer group invitations and I’m reluctant to mark them as junk mail since it’ll poison the Bayesian database and probably flag legitimate Yahoo Group invitations as junk as well.

I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of people just delete these spam invitations and move on and no one is bothering to report them.   In the past, I’ve done the same.   It’s quick, it’s easy.

However, this time I’ve been making the small effort to report every single spam invitation I’ve received.  I was expecting days before they took action (or no action at all) but I was surprised at the responsiveness of Yahoo’s abuse department.

Within just a few hours (and even sooner in some cases), the spam group and its connected user account was deleted.

In contrast,  I reported a site that carried a virus/malware payload to its host’s abuse department.  That was back in September…  Two months later, the site is still there and injecting its payload into hapless visitors.

But like all scumbags, spammers count on user— and sometimes host/sysadmin— apathy to help them continue to do their dirty work.

Has this experienced changed my outlook?  Hmmm… maybe it shifted it just a little over to the positive side even though I acknowledge the fact that it can be a futile battle to fight.  The spammers simply create another user, another group (probably by the hundreds) and send out invitations again.

One person submitting an abuse report may not amount to much.  But many people doing that could get some results.

It’s something to consider…

Tags: invitation spam, spam, spammers, yahoo groups

There’s this new “Anderson Study” out of Iowa State that supposedly shows a “conclusive” link between violent behaviour and children/teenagers.  You can read about it from the Washington Post article.

The study, conducted by researcher Craig Anderson, looked at children from Japan and United States and found an increase in violent behavior and aggressiveness that lasted up to five to six months after exposure.  The fact that the effects transcended cultural differences supposedly makes a powerful statement.

But the study is plagued with problems as GamePolitics.com reports.   According to their report, Texas A&M International University researcher Christopher Ferguson openly disputes the study, stating that it failed to take into account other variables such as genetics, family violence exposure, peer group influences and other media such as music and movies.

The study also didn’t look at actual violent behavior but made its conclusions based on test subjects’ hypothetical responses to aggressive situations presented to them by researchers.

Oh that’s good!  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that what people say they’ll do and what they will actually do, or be capable of doing, can be very different things— especially when you ask children!

In Ferguson’s own words, the researchers of the study  “simply ignore a wide body of research which conflicts with their views…”

The parents are the single most significant influence in a child’s life.   You don’t need a PhD to figure that out.  Yet these kinds of studies seem hell bent on laying the blame on everything else but the parents for the behavior of their children.

Tags: anderson study, craig anderson, parenting, video game violence

One of the things I love about Halo 3 is the playback feature.  It allows you to relive your greatest (and no so greatest) moments and it can capture amazing fluke events like this inadvertent vehicle kill where the victim is partially responsible for his own demise:

It’s videos like this that make me want to take up Halo 3 again… and I would in a heartbeat if it weren’t for the fact that Xbox Live is just brimming with assholes that really detract from the gaming experience.

Tags: halo 3, vehicle kill, xbox live

Moving the Blog

Now that my computer system is fairly usable after the re-configuration and my security flub has been taken care of, it looks like I can start moving the blog to the new location ahead of schedule.

Starting on a fresh installation of Wordpress should help solve the 404 permalink problem as well as get rid of some of the plugin bloat, resulting in a snappier, more responsive blog.

New Windows Vulnerability

This news is actually a few days old but it slipped under my radar while my system’s still being worked on.

It’s a new kind of Windows vulnerability that allows an attacker to execute code using a specially crafted RPC request and they can take advantage of this exploit without having any authorization to run arbitrary code.  This affects all Windows versions.

You can read more about it from here, as well as download an appropriate patch for your version of Windows.

Way to go Microsoft!

Dead Space

I’m all set for Halloween with my copy of Dead Space, the new sci-fi survival horror for the PC and X-Box.

The suspense in these kind of games always gets to me.  I couldn’t even finish Silent Hill 4.

Hopefully I won’t wimp out this time.

Tags: 958644, dead space, Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067, rpc, windows vulnerability

Fast Email

I’ve completely simplified my email set-up by eliminating the Spambayes proxy service after learning that Thunderbird’s junk mail filtering system is indeed Bayesian.

My previous set-up was like this:

Email client -> YPOPS (if applicable) -> Stunnel (if applicable) -> Spambayes -> Anti-virus Email scanner

YPOPS is for downloading yahoo email without having to use the web mail interface.

Stunnel is a universal SSL wrapper.  Some POP3 services require SSL, like Gmail for instance.

Without the Spambayes proxy in place, checking mail is significantly faster.  The set-up is now like this:

Email client -> YPOPS (if applicable) -> Anti-Virus Email scanner

Under the old set-up, checking email would fail occassionally  as the local app-to-app connections would sometimes hang.  With fewer steps, everything works far more reliably and quickly.

The change wasn’t completely painless.  I have retrain the junk mail filter from scratch and I had to manually reconfigure the email client so it would proxy its connections through the anti-virus application and that got a little confusing at times with four email services, each with multiple accounts under them.

Pain of Colour and Gamma Calibration

It took me a good two hours to calibrate each monitor’s gamma levels… and now I’ve lost those calibrations and I have to do it all over again.

I’ve had to do these monitor calibrations a number of times already, so I’m extremely tempted to get an entry level monitor calibration system like the ColorVision Spyder or the Pantone Huey to take the whole guess work out of the process.  To be honest, I really don’t fully trust my sense of evaluating colour and grey scale values.

If you’re serious about any sort of computer imagery, whether it be digital photography/cinematography, 3D rendering or illustration, it’s important to ensure that your monitor isn’t skewing your perception of the finished product.

Colour calibration hardware/software used to be the domain of the professional, but they’ve come down in price dramatically.  The Pantone Huey sells for $89 USD, putting it in reach of many entry-level consumers.

Colour calibration isn’t a one-time affair either.  Monitors slowly go out of sync over time so it’s recommended that the monitor be checked at least once a month.

I think for me, it’d be worth it.  Hours upon hours can be spent on lighting a scene for a 3D render.  If my monitor isn’t calibrated correctly, that means my perception of the colour and lighting in that scene isn’t correct either and those are hours that are completely wasted.

If I send those renders to a professional print house to make a hardcopy for the portfolio, then it’s also money wasted.

As I am getting more serious with computer imagery, colour calibration becomes increasingly important.

Tags: anti-virus, avg, colour calibration, email, huey, pantone, pop3 access, proxy, stunnel, system re-installation, thunderbird, ypops