Cool trick to avoid spam without using CAPTCHA
It seems its not just me but quite a few people who are not too fond of CAPTCHA. Author of the post linked below has come up with a neat trick to avoid spam without using CAPTCHA. He makes use of the fact that humans are more intelligent than bots; but without asking the site visitor to recognize weird looking letters and enter them in a text field. Instead he creates a simple text field and makes it hidden using CSS, so to human eye it wont be visible but when a bot fills the form it would fill in this field too, as this field has been made invisible from CSS not HTML attribute. In the end he checks if this field has any value then ignores it as spam.
http://freecodesnippet.com/articles/security/preventing-spam-on-your-website-without-using-captcha/
Google is sponsoring 20 Drupal projects in Summer of Code 2007
In this years’s Summer of Code, among other projects, Google is sponsoring 20 projects of Drupal, a very popular open source content mangement system. Financial value of this contibution is said to be $100,000. This is a really interesting way to contribute to open source projects.
Even hackers(bad ones) offer subscription and support for their malware
Its not just antivirus or other legitimate software companies that offer subscription and support for their software. Even malware, trojan writers have adopted this business modal. Its really amazing how sophisticated they are getting in terms of doing business.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;838771320;fp;16;fpid;0
Where did spam that you just recieved originate? Probably some big corporation
Security fix analysed spam samples collected last month and found that many of them originated from computers on networks of big corporations like Oracle, HP, ExxonMobil, Home Depot, Electronic Arts and Dow Jones to name a few. Some of these machines are even listed in Spamhaus.org’s “Exploit Block List” (XBL).
How to market your web application
These days you can find a new web application (web 2.0 startup as they say) being launched everyday. Quite a few of them rise to fame as soon as a major blog or a social news website writes about it but sadly, in most cases this fame is very short lived. This article on Read/Write web very interestingly divides these web applications into the WAIT list, the WALK list and the RUN list, and suggests some strategies to effectively market web applications belonging to each category.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_market_your_web_app.php
