What's with my couch??

Recently, spammers have been very concerned about my couch.

Rubin: "heave your belove couch adventures"
Roscoe: "support your belove couch experience"
Jacklyn: "uplift your sweet couch experience"
Marilin: "ascent your lover couch experience"
Rosendo: "boost your couch experience"

Is it the type of experience you can mention in your resume, alongside your plow experience? 15+ years of couch experience. Somehow, I doubt it... The imperatives kind of give away what this is all related to. "Ascent" is the odd man out, here, grammatically speaking, but conveys the same idea as the verbs.

Out of curiosity, and to expand my knowledge of the English language, I looked up "to heave" on the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. It turns out it's been around since before the 12th century, has both irregular and regular inflicted forms, and several meanings and synonyms, among which another word we don't see everyday: "to retch".

Did anyone puke on my couch?!?!

How to protect yourself from spam when registering on a website

Access to information on the web is not as open, free and anonymous as one may think. How many times a day do you need to sign in to get to what you need or want? Making a plane or train ticket reservation, leaving a comment on a newspaper article or blog post, viewing your nephew's first birthday pictures on some picture sharing site, reading some article on pink eye on a medical site... all of these may require you to identify yourself. When signing up for a service on a website, you will most probably be asked for a username, a valid email address, and a password to access the service you are signing up for or to modify the information you have provided. As a follow up to last week's post, here are a couple of tips to help you keep your spam folder as thin as possible and protect yourself from private information dissemination.

• Username:

Unless you want to make yourself known as yourself, like maybe on LinkedIn or Facebook or on professional websites, there probably is no need to give out your real name in a firstname_lastname type combo. It is customary on forums and on "geek" websites, for example, to use a nickname. It doesn't need to be the one your grandpa gave you when you were little. Since your username will end up being the name you go by on that website, you may want to keep it bearable to go by and avoid stuff like "mofo99". Of course, there is no need to systematically hide yourself and be over-protective of your identity. It's simply a matter of deciding where and when it is appropriate for an online service, its administrators and fellow users (or for anyone else for that matter) to know your real name.

• Email address:

Create a separate email address that you can enter as your contact address on registration forms. Why give someone you don't know the address you give to your friends, or the one you give to your professional contacts? If needed, create filters to automatically forward legitimate correspondence to your main email address. In any case, keep your main email address as private and spam-free as possible by not using it to register to any online service. This is obviously one tip I ignored when I registered on the site that got hacked. There are lots of options out there to create the address you will be using to sign up for stuff online. You should be able to find what you're looking for in this list of the Top 17 Free Email Services, compiled by about.com. What about your password? Let's deal with that later! Do you have other strategies when you register on a website and need to provide a username and email address? Do you think I am being paranoid?

Hacked website leads to spam surge

Last month, one website of which I was a registered member got hacked. The hackers somehow managed to find a way in, got their hands on the phpBB user table and published everybody's username, email address and password for everyone to see on some other website. I guess this is the risk you take when you give out any information about yourself on the internet...

I don't care about my username or my password being advertized as they are now, because they have little to do with anything confidential. As a matter of fact, I had given a very simple password when I signed up, which I had never used anywhere else and which was only intended to be used on that site.

I have however been foolish enough to use one of my main email addresses as my contact address and am now reaping the fruits of my stupidity. This address had not been spam-free, of course, but it has clearly seen a surge in the number of unwanted messages since the hacking incident.

period	total	daily average	daily min	daily max
before	63	3.94	1	8
after	165	10.31	5	20

Over the 16 days prior to the incident, I received a total of 63 spam emails, with a daily average of a little under 4, a minimum of 1 and maximum of 8. Over the 16 days after the incident, the total amount of spam messages reached 165, with a daily average of about 10, a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 20. As a result of my stupidity, I am now receiving about 160% more spam overall than before (and counting, presumably).

Above is a chart of the daily spam activity recorded on my compromised address just before and just after the hacking incident. Can you guess when the user table information got published?

April Fools take spam seriously

Ever wondered what would happen if you replied to that Nigerian prince who needed help to transfer his hard-earned AIG bonus? GMail is now offering to do it for you, so you can focus on earning your bonus.

Google just announced the Autopilot feature, available for both email and instant messaging. The Autopilot will respond to any email or instant message for you!

And this is not your standard auto-respond feature, delivering the same message to everybody. The text produced will be relevant to the context of the message it is responding to, like with Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA program (which could give you a free shrink session -- check it out here if you have no idea what I'm talking about). Also, one crucial feature of Autopilot is that it will try to emulate your communication style:

You can adjust tone, typo propensity, and preferred punctuation from the Autopilot tab under Settings. (source: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html)

Too bad it's too good to be true!