Why so much Spam? Because People Respond to it.

I was amazed when the percentage of email that’s received by the organization where I work exceeded 50% a few years back. Today the number is over 90%. What a waste!

I have always wondered “why?”, and obviously the conclusion was that it generates more revenue for the spammers than it costs. But I guessed that less than 1% of the email users who get spammed responded to it. I was wrong. According to this article,  12% of those who read spam respond to it. I have no way of knowing if this is true, but even if they’re off by an order of magnitude and 1.2% respond then I have been way overestimating my fellow email users.

Why, in a rational world, does spam continue to exist? Because someone you know—or maybe it’s you—has actually tried to buy something from it, a new study finds. Find that person and beat him (or yourself) with a stapler.

It says that 12% have responded to spam because they were “interested in product/service.”

April Fool’s Day, Conficker Worm Edition

Will the dreaded Conficker worm, which has infected millions of Windows PCs, bring about the end of the Windows world today?

Here’s a good description of the problem from cnet.com.

My guess:  No. But there’s likely to be some pain for Windows users who have not applied all the latest patches or have not kept their anti-virus apps up to date. See why I like my Mac so much?

Unix Turns 40. Happy Birthday!

ComputerWorld reports that Unix turns 40.  Why would anyone but the geeks care about this birthday? Because just about everything that works well on your personal computer has Unix roots – except for the graphical interface which came from Xerox PARC.

• The hierarchical file system in which a directory contains files and other directories which in turn contain files and directories, etc, etc.
• Linux, an open source Unix, runs most of the web servers of the world.
• Sockets, a programming layer on top of  the TCP communications protocol, first appeared on BSD Unix. All of the web and email services we rely on is built with sockets.
• Open source started at UC Berkley with BSD.
• Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web on a Unix based NeXT system using BSD Unix and  sockets.

Happy 40th Unix!

Hacker Steals $9M from ATMs in 1 Day

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/02/atm.html

And it is suspected that may be the work of someone who has stolen million$ several times in the past. Of course this is a mere rounding error compared to the unearned bonuses the banks managements paid themselves while making loans they knew would never be repaid.

My Work Project is in the Courier

Though they failed to mention my name , the 1/28/2009 Prescott Daily Courier has an article about one of my current work projects, remote booking.

If you expand the photo of the officer at the top left portion of the article, look at the computer screen and you will see my work. I did the user interface and also wrote the code that transfers the booking data into the jail management system (DSI).