Fav5 - Jan 30, 2009

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Researchers at the University of Washington are developing a system for "digitally preserving and authenticating first-hand accounts of war crimes, atrocities and genocide." The system computes a hash of the video so that any changes to the video content will render it un-authentic.
   
   


2. Is the GDrive (Google Web Drive) for real? Scott Gilbertson argues that problems with security and large media files will hinder the GDrive from becoming a killer-app. Not everyone agrees.
   
   


3. April 23,2008: The highest volume of email spam caught by Google on a single day. Google blocked an average of 194 spam messages per user that day.
   
   


4. I just made available a paper on arXiv that I co-authored with Michael Nelson and Herbert Van de Sompel entitled Everyone is a Curator: Human-Assisted Preservation for ORE Aggregations. I'll be presenting this paper at DigCCurr 2009 in April.
   
   


5. This year's Super Bowl pits the Pittsburgh Steelers vs. the Arizona Cardinals. Although I really like Big Ben, I'll be cheering for Kurt Warner and the underdog Cardinals. I'll also be watching the commercials, hoping they're a lot better than last year's.
   

Archive spam

So that's why Hanzo:web has been down...


Spam: A tragedy of the commons. Looks like they are not the only web archiving site to be plagued by spam; Spurl.net has had this notice posted on their website for months which apologizes for offering "reduced functionality due to heavy spam attacks":



Update 7-1-08:

I received an email from Mark Middleton this morning informing me that Hanzo:web's free archiving service has been discontinued. There's really no other free web archiving service to take Hanzo:web's place- WebCite is mainly for academic citations, Furl and Spurl only archive since HTML pages and don't make archived materials publicly available, and Archive-It charges a subscription fee.

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. A humorous take on What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft? (Thanks to Mike Baur for sendimg me that one.)
   


2. While we're on the subject, Gmail now supports IMAP. That means you can now use email clients like Outlook and Firefox to access your Gmail without popping the emails off of Google's servers. Had Google supported IMAP several months ago when the Harding faculty was forced to switch to Gmail, it would have made many lives much easier. I was abile to get it to work with my harding.edu email address following the instructions and using user@harding.edu for the username.
   


3. If you like Google, Java, and mobile devices, you may want to give Android a shot. Reto Meier has written a little how-to on developing a person-mapping application with Android. Non-developers may not be quite so fascinated with Android.
   


4. Playing catch-up: an interesting article pointing to 12 research projects aimed at reducing spam.
   
   
5. Congrats to the Dallas Cowboys on a best-ever record of 10-1 after defeating the Jets 34-3 on Thanksgiving. Next victim: the 10-1 Green Bay Packers. Also congrats to the Razorbacks on an amazing win in triple overtime over the #1 ranked LSU Tigers. The Cowboys really need to draft McFadden next year...
   

Fav5

1. I’m back from Archiving 2007. Yesterday Czeslaw Jan Grycz (Internet Archive) gave an entertaining keynote address. He showed this video about copyright and fair use which has made by favorite 5 for the week: A Fair(y) Use Tale by Eric Faden. My guess is since the entire video is made from Disney clips that it probably won't hold up in court as fair use (Disney couldn’t possibly leave this alone). By the way, this video reminded me a lot of the 100 movies video I just saw the other day.


2. How do you get people to help you digitize books with words that a character recognition scanner can’t recognize? Put the unrecognized words into a captcha! Brilliant.


3. The IETF gave preliminary approval to a promising antispam/antiphishing technology called DomainKeys Identified Mail. It uses cryptograph digital signatures to identify the sender and receiver of email messages.


4. According to Nielson/NetRatings, Google accounted for 55% of all searches in April. Believe it or not though, other search engines besides Google actually do exist. In fact, someone recently took the time to rate 300 of them. (I would have added one more criteria though: Does the search engine provide a link to the cached resource?)


5. Colorado Christian University recently were told they were “too Christian” for their students to receive equal access to tax payer money. I added a couple of comments to the story although I normally don’t. I think CCU should just leave it alone... if you receive mammon from Caesar, you may find yourself beholden to his wishes. It's also hard to imagine Jesus wanting his followers to sue for tax money.

2007 is poised to be the year of spam. Although Bill Gates thought we’d have the problem licked by now, the problem is only getting worse. I’m now getting approximately 50-60 spam emails per day, and although my spam filter catches a lot of it, a new form of spam is regularly beating the filter: image spam. Spammers are now using attached images to replay their spammy messages. They work like a captcha for your filter- since your filter is good at reading text but lousy at reading images, there’s little you can do to stop well-designed image spam.

What really bugs me is when companies that spam claim they don’t. For example, I received the following spam about 10 times over the past few days:


Notice the clever text to the side of the image. They change that each time to keep my filter from figuring out this is spam. Now if you'll visit their website, you’ll see that they have a link that allows you to report spam:

Pharmacy operates a strict anti-spam policy. We do not tolerate unsolicited advertising messages. We will actively pursue anyone engaging in spamming activities! This includes email, icq, instant messengers, chat rooms, message boards, newsgroups or anywhere else where commercial postings are prohibited. We will take appropriate actions against spammers that will result in loss of services and accounts closure.

Sure they will... they ask for your name, email address, and phone number, just so they can spam you some more with unsolicited phone calls while you’re eating dinner!

Once you submit your information, they reply “Thank you for your patience.” I think these guys may be qualified for the ninth ring.