Many users and forum programs in attempt to make automatic e-mail address harversting harder conseal them via obfuscation - @ is replaced with “at” and . is replaces with “dot”, so

bill.gates@microsoft.com

now becomes

bil dot gates at microsoft dot com

I’m not an expert in regular expressions and I’m really curious - does such obfuscation really make automatic harvesting harder? Is it really much harder to automatically identify such obfuscated addresses?

For example, if every email address on a large community site is reversed in the markup and rendered properly with CSS, or token-replaced (@ becomes ‘at’), or any other predictable method, the harvesters will just write a thin adapter for your site.

Think of it this way: if it only takes you one line of code to “scramble” them sitewide, it will only take the harvester one line of code to “unscramble” them for your site. Roughly speaking.

What concept is the right? Do more complex obfuscation or consider about new ways?

Obfuscation techniques fall in the same category than captchas. They are not reliable and tend to hurt regular users more than bots.

Javascript obfuscation seems to be praised, but is no silver bullet: it is not that hard today to automate a browser for email sniffing. If it can be displayed in a browser, it can be harvested. You could even imagine a bot that’s taking screenshots of a browser window and using OCR to extract addresses to beat your million-dollar-obfuscation-technique.

Depending on where and why you want to obfuscate emails, those techniques could be useful:

• Restrict email visibility: you may hide emails on your website/forum to anonymous users, to new users (with little to no activity or posts to date) or even hide them completely and replace email contact between members with a built-in private messaging feature.
• Use a dedicated spam-filtered email: you will get spammed, but it will be limited to this particular address. This is a good trade-off when you need to expose the email address to any user.
• Use a contact form: while bots are pretty good at filling forms, it turns out that they are too good at filling forms. Hidden field techniques can filter most of the spam coming through your contact form.

One common way of hiding email from bots and spammers is to create an image containing the email address. Facebook does this, for instance. Now, using images for email is inherently bad for accessibility, because text readers will not be able to read it. But even otherwise, there are several free character recognition programs that do a pretty good of decoding such email-images.

At least you have always to keep in brain that if it’s difficult for the spammers it’s as well your users to identify the email address. A nice article from wikipedia on Email obfuscation or address munging you’d pay regard to.

The real question is whether the extra effort will be put in by harvesters and if the (major? minor?) barrier to the harvesters is worth the possible problems for your users.

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Finally this article is as so many about fighting spam - In my opinion, spam has become such a problem and so many databases have been turned over that we’re beyond hiding our addresses. Instead, consider of more efficient ways of classifying and blocking spam.

Until Wednesday noon over 3.8 million users worldwide downloaded the new version of Firefox from the Internet. Firefox 3.5 is more than twice as fast working as the previous version, and above all more stable running. The software now uses better the performance, the modern computer with multi-core processors available. According to the developers over 5000 new freatures are in the sources, of course most only will be recognized at second glance.

Nevertheless it’s amazing (or maybe it should make me blue) that the market share of Firefox is still just about 22 percent. In comparison to that the market share of the Internet Explorer is about 65 percent.

It seems to me that besides a lot of companies whose hands are tied using another browser caused by a partnership or a similar contract with Microsoft there must be a great number of normal pc users that seem to like IE…

Just a few months ago, the blogosphere was exploding over the possibility of Microsoft and Yahoo joining up to become an online powerhouse. But after a lengthy deliberation, political jockeying, and pleas for help, Microsoft walked away after Jerry Yang did everything he could to kill the deal.

But the story didn’t quite end there. Since then, Microsoft and Yahoo have gone back to the table twice. First, Microsoft entertained the possibility of acquiring Yahoo’s search for $1 billion and a buyback of Yahoo stock for $8 billion. After that deal fell through, we once again thought it was over. But now, they’re back to talking about a full buyout and Jerry Yang, not Ballmer, is starting to look like the CEO who really wants to get the deal done.

So how does the plan address the major issues Yahoo is currently facing? Shareholders are calling on Jerry Yang to either sell the company to the highest bidder or move aside, the stock price continues to fall, and as more executives jump ship, more people are getting the sense that something quite awful is going on behind the scenes.

All the while, Microsoft is sitting back and watching events unfold. With zero debt on its books and quarterly profit of more than $4 billion to boot, it’s in the best position to save Yang from himself and finally satisfy Yahoo’s long-suffering shareholders. Whether or not it will is another story.

But at this point, Yang has little choice but to go to Microsoft with his hat in hand and ask for a buyout.

The Microsoft-Yahoo soap opera started with Ballmer wanting Yahoo to ensure that his company plays a major role in the online world going forward. Since then, Ballmer’s desire for Yahoo has dwindled and Yang, the once-obstinate CEO, is left wanting Microsoft and hoping that Microsoft will want him back.

Mail Goggles, available at Google Labs, tries to prevent drunk e-mailing.

Google Mail has invented a way of stopping you sending emails that may later prove embarrassing.

Intended to help you overcome the urge to say what you really think late on a Friday night when you are a little the worse for wear, Google’s Mail Goggles asks you to solve “a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind”.

Of course, you have to enable the feature first – Google isn’t trying to force you to take an unwelcome arithmetic test every time you want to send a message – and even if you do enable it, it doesn’t assume you’re drunk all the time.

“By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as that is the time you’re most likely to need it. Once enabled, you can adjust when it’s active in the General settings,” said Jon Perlow, a Gmail engineer.

Note: You can activate the feature in your Gmail or Google Mail account by clicking on the Settings tab on the top right of the screen and selecting Labs. Scroll down and you should find a brief explanation of the Mail Goggles feature and the option to enable it.

The website I yesterday night found is the proof again that almost everything, achievable by man, can be found in the internet. The project idea shows me in a very obvious way that the respond to individual human needs in some parts has moved into the world wide web.

It’s called Dead Man’s Switch but what is it for?

If anybody already got confused even by its name, don’t worry: In general a Dead Man’s switch is, as its name suggests, a switch that is automatically operated in case the human operator becomes incapacitated. For example firefighters use it when being in a burning building.

Alternatively, as some of you might have seen in the movies, the switch detonates a bomb. This is applied in suicide bombing, to trigger the explosive if the bomber is shot or overpowered.

The concept of www.deadmansswitch.net is similar:

Everyone carries valuable information in their heads. It might be about their work, financial information, etc. If anything were to happen to them, this information would be lost, unfortunately.

This is where Dead Man’s Switch comes in.

I’d like to give to a quote from the founders website about how the website works:

This is how this works. You write a few e-mails, and choose the recipients. These emails are encrypted with military-grade algorithms, so you can be sure that no-one except the intended recipient will ever read them. Your switch will email you every so often, asking you to show that you are fine by clicking a link. If something were to… happen… to you, your switch would then send the emails you wrote to the recipients you specified. Sort of an “electronic will”, one could say.

You can regard the project as a system designed for people who really have paranoia or somehow are just crazy. I’ve seen lots of crazy, even useful projects in the internet therefor I just say it’s kinda funny thing. Even thought I will not use it to anytime!

Apart from that I’ve noticed that the website itself is well done and designed appealingly in terms of color

Domains ending in anything from .nyc to .travel may be possible after ICANN modifies its process for approving new names.

If your domain name of choice has been already been soaked up in every ending from .com to .tk, fear not: a new move by the organization responsible for registering domains may soon open up a limitless supply of new endings. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) decided that it will create new guidelines to streamline the addition of new domains in the coming years.

Allowed will be common words like .love or even proper names like .bob. However, endings that violate the law of trade marks or are agains morals and decency will not be permitted.

ICANN announced its decision at the conclusion of a week of meetings held in Paris. Although the plan still needs approval from a board before new domains can begin to crop up, ICANN foresees a slew of specialized new endings, from .travel to .nyc, growing from the new guidelines.

To foot the cost of introducing new domain endings, they will most likely have to be sponsored by the introducing party. The Associated Press speculates that fees could begin around $100,000, cutting the market for “vanity” domain names.

Although the full approval for a new domain has no set timeline, ICANN hopes to begin accepting applications in the second quarter of 2009.

I’ll think the question I ask myself the next several days will be how I can take advantage of that. What domain names may be available due to this?

Unfortunately I guess that www.bka.bonn won’t be allowed?