Ah, nuts. Should have followed the link a few posts up. Mind you, good to see someone else aware of that film. Looking forward to it myself - it looks a bit like an old Peter Jackson film.
M.
It's a shame that he didn't encounter a genetically engineered pissed off sheep as mentioned in this forthcoming NZ film:
Black Sheep
Revenge of the Sheep!
M.
Viral infections are the result of (unwillingly educated) computer users who will click on everything and anything and then after a few days wonder why their machines are so slow; and that suddenly all those pop-ups are showing up causing them much annoyance. Even worse is that these people just ACCEPT it and close all the pop-ups and continue working - thinking "it's just one of those things". Aghh!
And you'd be surprised just where the viruses are launched/ originate from. Over the recent months I've tracked down the origins of the type of virus that Theresa mentions from peers in the film industry and the advertising/PR industries. The IT departments of those responsible for spreadng it should be shot.
I've given enough warning to people in my charge about opening dodgy attachments from people they do not know. The worse culprits, however, are usually our own parents (or parents in-law) in which they buy a new computer, start using it, and then find that keep getting viruses and other malware and wonder why it's happening. You go over and spend the weekend fixing it - only for it to happen again.
Ironically, I've just been reading about MySpace.com with has unwittingly been responsible for dishing out malware via a SINGLE banner ad! See the Washington Post for more information.
I'm now running OS X both at work and at home and don't have any anti-virus software. At work we run Linux and OS X (we're a visual effects company - Linux/UNIX is King here) and those that usually have to run Windows (producers, important folk, etc.) are heavily fortified against virii and then there's the network anti-virus and firewalls on top of that. And we do educate our users.
Windows is the main culprit in all of this, and if what I'm reading about Vista is true, it's really not going to get that much better.
Technology (and the Internet) is wonderful, at the right hands ;)
What I REALLY want to know is why I kept hearing "Go West" (the Village People, Pet Shop Boys) at the end of every game in the World Cup. Someone must be earning some serious royalties right now.
M.
Keith Allen and Damien Hurst - what a combination!
A little history and some other football songs are charted here:
Pop Goes the World Cup
reveals more info, and the battle to win the pop spot of Football songs.
M.
Speaking of Hormel, a Welsh firm has managed to register a text trademark containing the word 'spam'.
See The Register for more details.
It's happened me to several times, including my own valid personal email address. It's called Joe Jobbing, and you can find reference to why it's called that here (with apologies to a Wikipedia link):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job
Thus, I've pretty much given up trying to conceal any of my email addresses. I've never had catch-all email addresses enabled due to (a) what you've experienced and (b) it attracts spammers who just send to anything @domain.com in the hope that somebody has catch-all email facilities.
Are these attacks personal? Difficult to say, I have done a lot of anti-spam work and have always reported spammers wherever possible, so it might be retribution. However, more than likely you've been chosen purely at random.
Spam Kings (http://spamkings.oreilly.com) by Brian McWilliams was an interesting read into the thinking about spammers. There is also another book (whose title I forget at the moment) which delves much more into that.
These days, I have a multi-tier solution to spam for my web sites and personal domain. The first line of defence is a Barracuda Spam firewall which filters out the obvious stuff first. Anything it isn't sure about, it sticks it into quarrantine and sends me an email every few hours with a list of messages that I can then flag up as deliverable, spam, or whitelist the sender. The second line of defence is SpamAssassin running on the mail server which performs even more checks against the message and then delivers it, or drops it entirely.
The system works well for me, and I've not had any false positives because of it. However, it's a pain and in an ideal world I wouldn't have to do this at all.
Perhaps what really hacks me off with spammers more than abusing my own domain name and email address is the use of putting excerpts of popular books into the bottom of messages to get around the various rulesets. I think I might have collected half of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince at one point.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2006 | 8 |
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