The problem of spam has now got silly and there are many people doing many things to reduce it. Personally I use some simple javascript on my contact page to generat my email address on the browser to prevent it from being harvested, and that works rather will, although I would never put my personal email address on a web site. I have also been playing with BoxBe that requires users to interact to sent the mail to me. That is also working well, but it appears many users can not be bothering to follow the process through and email is not getting to me.

Following a discussion with a friend I started using Project Honeypot to try and trap these harvesting spam bots by feeling varying email addresses to each IP address visiting our sites and then seeing which of these addresses get spam sent to them. This has also worked well, but other than seeing the breakdowns of where the spam is coming form it has been of no use until now. Currently Project Honeypot are releasing an announcement every day this week and today http:bl was announced. This is a similar service to email DNS block lists but lists the servers that look for email addresses and not the ones sending the spam email.

I have produced some demonstration PHP that will make it easy for most people to contact me normally (still using the javascript), but make it harder (probably using BoxBe) for people and bots coming from suspect IP addresses. Click for my http:bl example code.

Update: Yes it will work if you are using OpenDNS. This is why I check the first address octet is 127.

…if you believe Windows Update.

I have just run the restore disks on my old Sony Vaio laptop so I can do some Windows development for hardware incomparable with XP. When I came to do the essential Windows update (after upgrading to IE6) I got the message…

Thank you for your interest in obtaining updates from our site.

This website is designed to work with Microsoft Windows operating systems only.
To find updates for Microsoft products that are designed for Macintosh operating systems, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/mac/.

All is not lost as I did manage to find an unofficial service pack with the most recent updates and hotfixes.

This is a quick post to let you know about Hack Day on the 16th and 17th of June in Alexandra Palace London. All the information is on the web site so I will not waffle on. I have signed up and appear to have made the cut, so if you do as well and live close by then get in touch and we can car pool.