Fighting spam, part 1

(Taken from a forthcoming article in the Domnitjen magazine)

These days, there are times when using e-mail seems far less of convenience it once was. The huge amount of spam, undeliverable mail (probalby as a result of spam), annoying Out of Office replies etc. Add to that the inherant dangers with e-mail (namely viruses) and there's no doubt we're well over our honeymoon period with e-mail.

E-mail hijacking - more correctly called spoofing - is another problem that is cropping up these days. Why? Because it's so easy to do. When you send an e-mail, the From part (and other properties such as Reply-to) is simply what you say it to be in the account identity settings of your e-mail client (by client we mean software like Eudora or Thunderbird).

So if had your 'From' setting as "George Bush", with a return address of the.president@thewhitehouse.us for example, it might appear that the e-mail was indeed from the Man Himself.

Of course, if you pretend to send an email as if you were someone else, when the recepient replied the plot would soon come unstuck.

Unless of course they had also hacked into your actual e-mail account. Then they would really have hijacked your e-mail. To avoid this, the number 1 rule is use a strong password. Use a combination of letters, numbers, and try to make it more than 8 characters.

Spoofing is most commonly used in spam e-mail in order to hide where it was sent from, rather than to maliciously impersonate someone. If you think you've received a spoof e-mail, do some checking. Using the 'View Headers' option reveals useful information such as where the e-mail came from.

And don't forget, if you're using a webmail service like Hotmail, always log-off when you finish checking your e-mail.

A good guiding principle with e-mail is: be suspicious - suspect any attachment, any request for detailed personal information, and of course suspect that $10 million inheritance from Nigeria!

Ndiyo: affordable networking

Worth a mention is the Ndiyo Project - recognising that networking is basically expensive because you're using an entire PC for each person on the network, the Ndiyo project is aiming to produce small hub-like devices that all connect to just one PC running Linux. Ndiyo.org

Spell-bound

There are almost 200 photos in Flickr tagged with the mis-spelled tag 'Domnica'. Easy to do - in fact, I did it with the very first web page I put up in 97, and suffered for what seemed to be an age every time I searched Google, but it shows the import of spelling. And given that even Firefox now carries a form-field spell checker, it's getting even harder for a typo to slip through the net.

Anyway, that's 200 photos that most people would not see if they were searching for DomInica'. So check your spelling!

Google Earth & KML

It's not easy, but you can create routes that be brought into Google Earth and shared with others. The Boiling Lake hike was an obvious choice to do, here in Dominica. You do this using Keyhole Markup Language files (KML).

Then (!) all you need to do is let people know about it - you can use the Google Earth Community.

The ultimate laptop

...is the new One Laptop Per Child (OLPC); one reviewer said 'why can't my expensive laptop do that?'. The review is excellent. See http://etech.eweek.com/content/desktops_and_notebooks/meet_the_xo.html#more for more.

Flickr

I'm a big fan of Flickr. For me it's as much a search engine for photos as it is about photo sharing. So tagging images with good keyword tags is important. But I also like that you can browse for 3 main criteria - relevance, popularity and how recent a photo is. don't forget as well as tags you can add explicitly, the picture title and a description are also used to rank an image. Just like in Google.

It's all about trust

We continually emphasise trust as one of the key components of doing business on the web, and you need to work hard at it. Which is why the whole 'offshore sector' in Dominica makes me a little uneasy. Mainly because the one or two bad apples in the sector get the spotlight - I think of StockGeneration scam of a few years ago, and how it was the only time Dominica's ever been mentioned in Wired magazine.

I'd rather we were seen as a wired island rather then home to numerous dodgy schemes. At a time when we're seeking to encourage lots of e-business start-ups, we owe it to all the potential young e-business entrepreneurs here not to fuck it up for them even before they've started!