Spoofed

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(Update: The practice is called a “Joe Job.”)

It is common practice among spammers to “spoof” domains, sending their unsolicited messages with forged From: or Reply-To: fields to make email appear to be coming from a source other than the actual sender. Responses to these messages are “returned” to the forged address, and if that address happens to be that of a real person, woe upon him, as every bounced error message and angry reply is directed to his unwitting inbox.

I was such a victim last night, when a spammer sent prescription drug pitches to several AOL accounts using the brownpau.com domain, prepended with various randomized text-string user IDs. Since I forward all unrouted mail to my home address, I was met last night with dozens of “Failed Delivery” messages, each with a different spoofed header. Fortunately my host provides SpamAssassin and a full-featured email cpanel, so I managed to stem the tide and apply the necessary filters and bouncers before the deluge became unbearable.

Spammers don’t care who gets hurt in their efforts to destabilize the internet for a buck, so they must be stopped.

More info: “My Short Life as an Unintentional Spammer,” Self-Sending Spam, Slashdot discussion.

All Dogs Go To…

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Poor Laika.

The dog Laika, the first living creature to orbit the Earth, did not live nearly as long as Soviet officials led the world to believe.

The animal, launched on a one-way trip on board Sputnik 2 in November 1957, was said to have died painlessly in orbit about a week after blast-off.

Now, it has been revealed she died from overheating and panic just a few hours after the mission started.

It Burns, It Burns!

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Okay, so you’ve brought all your stuff down to the laundry room in the basement. You upend your underwear into the washer, throw in detergent and Downy Ball, set it on “Hot,” and slide in the quarters.

You’re halfway back up to your apartment before you realize that your keys were in the laundry basket — which you absentmindedly upended into the washer. Of course, by the time you’ve run back down and opened up the machine, it’s full of boiling hot water. How does one find those keys in this steaming, soapy cauldron, with no way to drain the machine short of waiting for the wash cycle to end?

Four words: Quick, Deep, Measured Plunges.

Free Avid!

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Avid FreeDV, limited — but still quite useful — release of the industry standard editing software. Not much use to me at this time, since I don’t even have a DV cam, but I’ll keep an eye on this for when I do get one.

Ruined the Web

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The Web is Ruined and I Ruined It (1997), in which early-era web guru David Siegel repents of such non-semantic design tactics as <table> hacks and spacer gifs — presentational hacks interspersed with web content; a web purist’s sin as unto the wearing of mixed garments. He does not mention Creating Killer Web Sites by name, but I think that, at least in part, is what he refers to.

Link found via Dave Shea’s (of mezzo fame) In Defense of Fahrner Image Replacement, that not-so-arcane method of displaying images by setting them as the background of a sized CSS block element.

(Yes, it’s all old stuff. I wasn’t doing web design in 1997 yet, so the whole issue wasn’t even on my radar at the time. I didn’t even have radar.)