ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

Last week, to mark the 30th anniversary of the very first spam message (sent over ARPANET, the precursor to today’s internet), Sophos have put forward a spam pledge. If everyone followed this pledge, there would be no financial benefit to anyone sending spam and so we’d get an awful lot less.
And just as importantly, buying […]

Read: Repeat After Me »

I’m trying to make sure I don’t raid my spam filters more than once a month, partly because 99% of the spam is dull, uninteresting and simply a list of links. However, when viewing with a carefully trained eye, you can pick out a few bits that are entertaining.
And it seems I’m not the only […]

Read: April Spam »

Well, I don’t think I’d poked about in my spam filters since the start of January, so I thought it was about time to see what sort of entertaining spam comments had been caught in there recently.
As usual, spam comments are likely to contain explicit language: and explicit sexual language at that, so if that’s […]

Read: What’s in the spam sieve? »

The Holocaust is an emotive subject. It’s difficult not to get emotive when you’re dealing with a subject that involves the slaughter of approximately six million Jews and another three to five million from other persecuted groups. It’s not the sort of subject that you’d want to treat lightly; it represents a shameful part of […]

Read: Hoaxing the Holocaust »

I’m a regular reader of the Sophos Labs’ Blog where I get to be kept informed about latest virus threats, email chain letters and the like (this last through regular reviewing of Sophos Labs’ Most Recent and Prevalent Hoaxes).
And two things struck me today.
Firstly, that someone has written a trojan (for the non-techies, a […]

Read: From Sophos To Spam »

Jeremy Clarkson published details of his bank account, sort code, and even told people how to find his address. He did this to prove that the loss of 25 million HMRC Child Benefit data records was a “fuss about nothing”.
All you’ll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not take […]

Read: Clarkson = knacker »

What better way to start the year, after taking a well earned break of a week or so, than by clearing out the deluge of spam that has flooded my “this looks like spam to me” comment tray. I didn’t plough through them all — I have neither the time nor the inclination — but […]

Read: 2008 Spam »

A more serious tone to this month’s spamwatch: I’m wanting to share with you a very worthwhile site to help you identify scam and spam email, help you identify hoaxes, and share with you a security blog that I find to be of significant value. The best part is, they are all to be found […]

Read: Spamwatch »

Akismet, bless its little cotton socks, has now drowned over 20,000 spam comments to this blog in a bucket and then flushed them down the lavatory of the internet.
Meanwhile, I’ve reached over 1,100 genuine comments at an average of just under three per post, but that’s a rather meaningless statistic since some posts have […]

Read: Further Spam Reflections »

Three reasons, actually. The first one is basic common or garden paranoia.
I consider it more likely that my computer will become compromised than that my house will be burgled by a burlgar who manages to locate the wall safe behind the Hans Holbein painting in the Billiard Room, somehow get the safe open, get access […]

Read: Why I don’t bank online »