Yahoo spam protection needs tweaking

January 31, 2005

Yahoo likes to talk a lot about its oh-so-cool tools to fight spam, but just how effective are they? I have a yahoo ID that I use only for instant messenger chatting. Of course it has its own mail account too which I stopped using a few years ago. Of late, however, Yahoo has started letting a lot of obvious spam through its "protection".

Don't believe me? Here's a screenshot of my in-box the last time I checked mail on the yahoo account.

Apart from the first one which was legit mail (I've blurred it), the other messages are clearly spam. They aren't even the more deceptive ones that have benign subject lines like "hello", "how are you doing", or "I forgot to tell you".

Yet Yahoo fails to classify them as spam. They need to tweak their algorithm a bit, I suppose.

(And before somebody asks, yes, the "SpamGuard" option is enabled on my account. I checked twice.)

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Stealing content for your web site - The [name deleted] way

January 22, 2005

Update - 16 March, 2007: I have decided to remove the name of the person involved because I think that enough has been written about him, and it's been a couple of years since the original incident. Since I'm ranked high on Google for his name, I don't see the need to let it stay that way. The hyperlinks to his site have also been changed to example.com

I know we all have writer's block from time to time. It's not easy to keep writing on your blog regularly. Some people wait a while, take a break, and come back when they have something worth writing about.

But not [name deleted].

Because Mr. [name deleted] thought that rather than write something original of his own, it would be oh so much easier to simply steal articles from others (Shanti has more) and reproduce them on his site. No, this wasn't with anyone's permission of course. He simply copied it word for word and posted it on his blog. To give it an air of originality, he even copied the comments from the original sites and posted it on his site. Hey, you gotta give him marks for thinking this through.

What was Mr. [name deleted] trying to do? We don't know. But after Amit Varma brought it to the attention of some of us, we decided to send an email asking him to remove the posts and give him 24 hours to comply. Well, we didn't get a response from [name deleted] so he's about to feel some blogger wrath from us. Next time somebody does a Google search for his name, he may get a little bit about [name deleted]'s blatant plagiarism.

Amit's article on plagiarism also talks about writers in major publications stealing large chunks from others. Having worked in the IT media in India, I know from first hand experience that this is common in the IT publications too. I have seen plenty of people do it, and I've worked with some of them. Some at least tried to paraphrase it. Many didn't bother. It was amusing to watch someone with no clue about SQL Server, for example, write a full article on the full-text search feature. It was clear they didn't exactly learn it all in two days. Plagiarism was so easy that it came naturally.

As a writer, I absolutely hate it when others rip off my work, and it's something I can never imagine doing. But hey, when the Slimes of India takes its page 4 Hollywood gossip directly from the Internet every day without any editing, and nobody bats an eyelid, you know that the problem is serious. It's not a crime if you don't get caught, right?

Well, Mr. [name deleted], you have been caught, and the Indian bloggers have something to say about it. Here's your 15 minutes of fame notoriety, mate!

Update: Ravages has sent an email pointing out further theft on [name deleted]'s site. But don't believe him; compare for yourselves:

http://www.example.com/2003/10/web-process-design.html
http://blogs.mit.edu/chsakda/posts/388.aspx

http://www.example.com/2003/10/query-against-uddi.html
http://blogs.mit.edu/chsakda/posts/389.aspx

http://www.example.com/2003/11/bad-art-night.html
http://crossimpact.net/archives/2003/11/17/bad-art-night-ex-votos/

http://www.example.com/2004/03/sun-ldap-provider.html
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/chrismay/entry/sun_ldap_provider_sucks/

http://www.example.com/2004/05/accessing-utk-ldap-server.html
http://blog.maisnam.com/archives/000062.php

http://www.example.com/2004/11/tomcat-in-high-volume-sites.html
http://www.jroller.com/page/carlossg/?anchor=tomcat_in_high_volume_sites

http://www.example.com/2004/12/open-source-identity-management.html
http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/single-sign-on-in-java/view

http://www.example.com/2005/01/collaboration-technologies-and-portals.html
http://jroller.com/page/portlets/20050202#collaboration_technologies_and_portals

Update (26 January): [name deleted] has apologised for his actions.

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Vote for me in the Indibloggies

January 10, 2005

We interrupt our regular schedule of quality programming to bring you this message. We've been nominated for the IndiBloggies, which comes with 25 cartons of Ego Boost as the prize. (And some other miscellaneous stuff, none of which we're really interested in.)

OK, so I've been nominated not once, not twice but three times for my two blogs - this one and my chef blog. Shiok Chef's Notes has been nominated for best topical blog, and hey, anyone who's read my detailed recipes and seen my gorgeous photographs has to vote for me. The only competition I can see is from Yazad, whose blog AnarCapLib has also been nominated. Actually, I write over there too, so this is a fight between me and 25% me. :)

If that weren't enough, both of my blogs have been nominated for the best design award. Yes, both MadMan's Web and Shiok - Chef's Notes are going heads up against each other. This makes me happy but also sad at the prospect of the vote being split.

I'll make this simple for you. Vote for Shiok as the best topical blog, and MadMan's Web for the best design. My chef's blog has exhaustive useful content and this blog is filled with design doo-dads. I've combined two blogs (the links blog and the article blog) on the same page without crowding the place. My nav bars slide out of side if you want to read my articles on a smaller monitor, and my text is well spaced and readable. Heck, even my comment box expands if you want to write a ton. There's a whole bunch of usability thingamajigs too if you look closer (try hovering your mouse over some text box or label some time.) I deserve this award over the other contenders, some of whom don't even live in this country.

(Update: I see that Ravikiran and JK are now accepting bribes for their votes. I'm far too honest for that. Besides, I have l33t rigging skillz.)

Posted to Random stuff  Permalink  Comments (13)

Bharteeya Blog Mela: The Tsunami Memorial

January 4, 2005

(Welcome, Instapundit readers. Get yourself a cup of coffee, and set aside some time for reading all these posts.)

It's Blog Mela time again, as we present the best posts from Indians and about India/Indians. This is also the first Blog Mela of the new year, which is of course a meaningless statistic.

As you would expect, this week's reading is heavy on Japanese 101, as the word "tsunami" is introduced to thousands of people who had never heard it before.

This past week, bloggers have supplemented the regular and mostly repetitive news coverage with their own account of the disaster, and some of these have been more revealing than what the newspapers dished out.

Sameer has an overview of what a tsunami is.

While we don't typically accept whole blogs as nominations, Amit Varma's India Uncut has tons of reading, written while visiting the tsunami-affected areas.

(Update: Amit is churning out reports faster than I can read them. Some outstanding writing there.)

Amit's travelling companion, Dilip D'Souza, too has plenty to report. I recommend you set aside a big chunk of time to read everything they've written.

Kiruba, who normally sticks to very "bloggy" stuff on his site, changes gear to write long accounts of the relief efforts. He also takes photos, which is helpful.

Suman Kumar, who has suffered a bandwidth tsunami on his site due to being mentioned in the New York Times (with a little help from yours truly), is trying to do his bit with the relief. He has a tsunami site of his own.

Alpha is upset over the loss of life, but is more upset at the lack of news coverage in the USA.

Patrix disagrees with Alpha. He thinks the media is being particularly insensitive in its relentless display of dead bodies and suffering people.

Sandeep blames the government's apathy for the deaths in India. As did I earlier.

Gaurav disagrees.

Rhyncus has a strange rationalisation of why God is needed because two tectonic plates causing the earthquake is not satisfying enough as an explanation. In part 2 of his article, he says he's got a rock which he calls God, and it's an extension of his parents.

Yazad has some thoughts on depression caused by the tsunami.

Ramanand thinks the media is being unfair in its criticism of cricketers for supposedly not doing enough towards the relief effort because they make an easy target.

And now, on to the non-tsunami stuff...

After the silly MMS "scandal" where Avneesh Bajaj was arrested by police for no fault of his, Sandeep lashes out.

Anand Vivek draws some parallels between Don Quixote and the Nasruddin Hodja legends in the middle-east.

Manu Sharma says "A human edited product news feature is never going to happen at Google" because he thinks Google is primarily a technology company.

A lady known only as "Medium Latte" says that she prefers not to accept help given just because she is a woman, although it's tempting.

That's it for this week, folks. I know some Hindi blog entries were nominated, but I've left them out of this mela, not because I'm a snobbish bastard, but because:

1) I studied Hindi for 10 years at school, and speak the language fluently, but haven't read any big chunks of Hindi since 1990. So my reading speed has reduced to a crawl.

2) The thin strokes of the text coupled with the low resolution of a PC monitor made it even harder to read the entries.

3) Some of the spelling mistakes (mostly misplaced matras) didn't help either.

My apologies to you all. Perhaps we should start a Hindi version of the Mela soon. Shanti, what do you think?

I'd like to remind you that my web links blog, in addition to being on this page, also has a separate page of its own. Even if I don't write longer entries, the links blog is still updated almost daily. Check back often.

The next Mela will be on Nilesh.org

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