I caught this article a few days ago on something similar to what I got on YYZtech.ca a few weeks ago: spam without any urls. The author has two theories: 1) they are trying to train automatic spam filters to allow certain words – that will be later used from spamming, and/or 2) they want to get the e-mail addresses where the spam was sent from white listed, again, to use for “real” spamming later on.
The last few weeks I’ve been selling off a bunch of older titles I had laying around (instead of working on this blog), one of them that almost went off to the local BMV was PHP 5 In Practise; Fortunately, I passed on that one and tonight, while trying to finish off a tag-generator for Halifax-Restaurants.com, it saved my tail at least once. When I originally reviewed it, I was impressed with the amount of material in it- it’s still one of the best books out there when you’re looking for something like- “how do I remove white-spaces from a string” and such basic but necessary things.
I’m sitting in a local Second Cup dashing (ok, bit faster than crawling) through my TTD (Things To Do) list, fueled by cold coffee (yes, more caffee – same price) and I’m thinking about the “Digital Bedouin” (so termed by a U.S. writer Dan Fost in his article WHERE NEO-NOMADS’ IDEAS PERCOLATE, written a few months back) and I’m wondering what it means- kind of like the team cybercrime or auto-crime (yes, apparently when cars where new, criminals who used cars where refered by their tool, much like there is crime and there is cybercrime – I give it another 10-15 years before it’s just called “crime” except for the old folks at CTV – yes, they still show temperatures in Fahrenheit, what 20 years on?).
Anyways, I’m thinking that it’s one of those things that people will just start doing without really thinking of it as anything special- go to a university campus and you’ll see students working on laptops far from the classroom – in a few years some of them will be working far from the boardroom- hopefully with newer laptops. Doubt most of them will describe themselves as Digital Bedouins as much as anyone called themselves a “computer user” past 1990.
In the mean-time, there’s a few good links over at Slashdot, ShannonClark, or Going Bedouin at Web Worker Dail if you’re looking to get into it anyways.
Well summer is coming to a close and I realize that I have a lot of books to finish reviewing – some of them have been sitting around since late June.
So far I’ve finished:
Teach yourself Flash C3 in 24 hours
next up, a book on building photo equipment and another on Photoshop, CS3.
While checking out the forums on YYZtech.ca for spam, I noticed something new and kind of interesting. I wasn’t sure if it was spam untill I looked at the address, but for a second or two it fooled-me, the bot had taken a short quote (or just the fist word – there where several posts from the same bot) and worked it into a question, so at a quick glance it looked like just part of the normal forum thread – sneaky 
ZEE4YYZtech.ca