Wednesday, May 7, 2003

Mozilla 1.4 Beta Released -- 11:34 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

At long last, Mozilla 1.4 beta has been released. Check out the release notes and get downloading! Find out why it is my favorite browser and mail reader.

ICQ Exploits -- 11:19 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Core Security Technologies published a list of vulnerabilities in ICQ that would allow your computer to be compromised. Most of them are everyone's favorite: the buffer overflow. They apparently tried to contact the AOL/ICQ security team about this but received no response. ICQ clones like Licq are not affected.

Infogrames Becomes Atari -- 9:05 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Infogrames announced that they have officially changed their name to Atari. I guess this makes sense after they bought the rights to the name, although it bears little resemblence to the company we all knew 20 years ago. I've always thought that "Infogrames" was kind of a dopey name anyway; it looks like a typographical error. Thanks Blue.

The Master comments: Maybe it's just me, but this ring-around-the-namechange stuff is just stupid. A name change in the business world does not allow you to hide from your stupidity.

Monday, May 5, 2003

Spam Spam Spam Spam Lovely Spam -- 4:22 pm CST, Update by J.t.Qbe

Since switching from AT&T--er, Comcast--cable to SBC DSL for broadband I've been receiving at least 10 times the amount of spam every day. Not a great selling point, in my mind, especially considering some of the, ahem, content of that spam.

However, I've been very pleased with MailWasher, a Windows app which checks your mail before you download it and gives you the opportunity to delete spam before it ever hits your browser. But even better, MailWasher allows you to bounce spams back to sender, telling them that your email address is invalid. Point--click--bounce--and it's gone. I do believe that I've started to receive less spam since I started using MailWasher a week ago. A few minutes ago I was surprised to see MailWasher mark an email as "Virus". I took a look through the email source (MailWasher's previewer displays only text) and found that someone had sent me the good old worm. If I'd been using some form of Outlook I'd be infected by now.

The Master comments: I've been playing with an app called K9 which does Bayesian filtering on your email. It's a proxy app, similar to Mailwasher et all and if my volume of spam was a bit higher it would probably be doing an exceptional job. As it is K9 is at a 97% accuracy rate filtering my spam. As soon as some reporting/bounce features are added I will be VERY pleased with K9.

A.T. Hun comments: Baked beans are off.

No Old News

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