spam_ascii

spam_ascii
Originally uploaded by magnor.

Spammers now a days are getting smarter and smarter. Started from a plain text emails, which is basically very easy to be detected by spam blocker, then they moved to an image (gif or jpg) that contains text.

A few days ago, I received this spam email that contain only random ascii characters. The real msg is 'hidden'. These random characters, if you set the font to monospace type, will form the msg. Very nice. :)

Spam blocker can't recognize this email as a spam. It's not yet as smart to figure what's the msg behind this random ascii character. It's good for spammers to get the msg into someone mailbox without being detected.

However, the "downside" (for the spammers, not me), is that the reciepient of the email will not be able to recognize the msg right away. Most of the email client program will not display the msg in monospace font (such as Courier). Most of them will display it in either Arial or Times, which will just shows a series of non-sense characters.

Spammers, one thumb up for you for this trick, and "go to hell" for you for keep spamming.

Cool ransom-note online generator

darmadi

I found two online tool to make a ransom-type text from images. (from boingboing.net)

http://blog.outer-court.com/yahoo/letters.php5
Will search the equivalent of the word from yahoo.

http://metaatem.net/words
will search the equivalent of the word from flickr.

The result from flickr is nicer, as you can see the sample I've created.

Evaluating 2 OSX blogging client

Usually I blog directy via blogger.com. It's quite suite what I needed. A few days ago, someone told me to try blogging using a client.

I checked out versiontracker.com for any freeware blogging client that support blogger.com (I'm poor, so I can only afford any freeware. :) Also I live in Indonesia which is very difficult to do online payment, thanks to those carders).

So I downloaded 2 freewares : iBlog (the freeware one, not the shareware one with the same name), and WeblogPoster.

iBlog was a bit confusing for me, and I was too lazy to play around with it. Then I tried WeblogPoster. This program come with a better documentation, especially on how to do setup for blogger.com.

So this is my posting using Weblogposter.

update :
When posting using Weblogposter, aparently the 'title' didn't get posted. I don't know whether this is a bug, or my fault.