Macrocosmic Technologies

I’m conducting an experiment. I’m going to throw an email address out there, sparchive@valuableonline.info, and see how long it takes for spiders to pick it up and start spamming it. The email will be funnelled into an auto-posting blog, allowing for it to be easily searchable and reported on. To further the fun, perhaps even comments will be allowed to be posted unmoderated, which will let us analyze multiple spam vectors.

Why do this, you might ask? Simply put, I’ve been exceptionally careful with my email addresses. Using a service like Sneakemail religiously, I have absolutely no sense of what most folks go through with spam. I get maybe one or two a week. With Sneakemail, as soon as an address is compromised (ie, starts being spammed), you turn it off or apply filters or grey-listing (which causes the first transmission to bounce, but if the sender is a real relay, they will try again). Now, I’ll actually have an understanding of what people are actually going through dealing with spam.

A Pennsylvania junior high student has been suspended for sharing drugs. In this case, it was a stimulant called caffeine. Quoth the school district superintendent, “As a parent, would you want your child to be able to get that type of product?” Quite frankly, yes, I would. Considering everything else they can get, I don’t think sharing a piece of gum should merit a three day suspension.

Amy Palermo, the superintendent, said the gum is “a stimulant that has no other redeeming quality.” Clearly, she didn’t check out the Jolt Gum web site, where they wax poetically about how minty it is. If alert students with fresh breath isn’t something teachers want, is that a school where we want to send our kids?

If you’ve never heard of Dave Farber, you owe it to yourself to check out his Interesting People (IP) mailing list. Dave covers a broad range of technology topics, many focused on personal liberties in the digital world. While most days you’ll get no more than five messages, on busy days, you can get up to four times that. It’s post-only, though he can and does forward on some of the more interesting, insightful, and substantive replies he receives.

Given all the freely-available web services out there, it’s fairly easy to build a custom search engine. Combining the services of Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and MSN, you can build a dynamic directory script that is easily monetized and is very search engine friendly. MSN search results, Google and Yahoo keyword suggestions, Google AdSense ads, and eBay and Amazon search results. All of it is combined in a couple of PHP pages that are easily customized and even more easily installed.