How to Stop ALL Spam... No, Really!

I want to talk to you about Spam, and then I want to ask WHY email users are not doing the obvious, most simple, most effective thing to prevent it.

Security newsletters go on, and on, endlessly, about the spam problem. And it's not helping. Companies are making a lot of money creating and selling anti-spam software, and it's not helping. What good is catching 98% of incoming spam? To me, that's like an OCR program that is 98% accurate... one still has to read the whole damn scan to find the mistakes. And with spam, one pretty much has to scan the "spambox" of collected junk mails to ensure that there are no false positives.

On top of that, the spam-masters just keep getting better at getting past the spam-filters. Let's face it; the only way you can block out the 10,000 different spelling variations of "viagra" is to include every word that has the letters v, i, a, g, and r in it. This stuff is always going to get through, to a greater or lesser extent.

I get NO spam. None. Zip, zero, nada. And I use my email client extensively, day and night. (I use ThunderBird as my POP3 client, but that is beside the point... I pretty much ignore the Junk message filter system that this particular client offers.) It isn't a question of which client has the best filters or plug-ins. Nope.

Here is how I have kept my Inbox literally free of spam for over a year now.

1. I changed my email address to one nobody had ever seen before, and eventually phased out my old address.
2. I do not post my email address on any websites; not even my own. Instead, I use text-only or a special HTML tool to hide the real address.
3. I use my email address only with my friends, and never with casual acquaintances (at one point earlier in 2004, I corresponded with a guy who needed to advertise in my magazine... and that was promptly followed up with him sending me a joke email, which contained a list of at least 50 of his "friends" in the header... and to no one's surprise, the next day I got a joke email from one of those friends, thereby beginning the cycle of junk-mail-from-"friends" hell. I hastily informed both of these people never to do that to me again, under any circumstances. I got lucky: none of them appear to have been hit with a mail-out virus.)
4. Anytime I subscribe to a website for anything at all (newsletters, purchases, trial downloads), I make sure I never give them my email address.
5. Even though I own several domain names, I use a special service that hides my real email addresses from bots and others that scan the WHOIS libraries (all registered domains must provide email contact addresses; it is very easy for spybots and even casual readers to access these addresses, which are usually true addresses.) Services such as myprivacy.ca prevent this from happening. This makes a huge difference.

BUT YOU SAY: "OK, fine, anyone can just stop using their email. And by the way, pal, you can't subscribe to an email newsletter without giving up your address."

Wrong. What I do instead is use an email anonymizer, or ghoster. In my particular case, although there are a number of these services out there, I use Sneakemail (www.sneakemail.com). This is a FREE service (although you can buy a monthly subscription and receive extra tools) that generates a unique email return address for every message I write that needs one. For example, it has created the return address that I used for this email, and to subscribe to Windows Secrets. My REAL email address is never seen by anyone or anything, outside of the Sneakemail servers. And they are pretty damn secure.

BUT YOU SAY: "Hmmm, interesting... but how do you know which address you used; there must be hundreds of them. And more to the point: how does this stop you getting spam? Surely you just get spam at all those addresses."

Wrong again. For each unique address, I can add a little note that tells me who the address was for... even the date I created it. And I attach a little bit of a header that says "This might be spam..." for every address, so that I instantly know, when someone responds to that address, that it is from a place that has received my Sneakemail address... and therefore I am alerted that, well, "this might be spam".  Better yet, Sneakemail even creates a SECOND blind email address that the recipient sees... they never even actually see the REAL fake email address. Still with me?

If I ever get a piece of spam, thanks to the Sneakemail header, I know instantly which unscrupulous, lousy, stinking, rotten, lowlife company provided my email address to some entity outside of their domain. I know they either sold it or gave it away, or worse, unbeknownst to them someone in their own company is selling their mailing list off.
Because each address is unique, I always know exactly who sold my name. This lets me do two things:

1. I immediately contact the company that originally sold (or otherwise dispursed) my Sneakemail address. And I give 'em a potential blast of nastiness, couched in polite inquiries into their potential knowledge of the crime. That is, I give them a chance to tell me they were not aware, or to point out that somewhere along the line I missed the part in their Privacy Policy that said they could actually do this.

2. If I don't hear from them in a few days, I simply scrap the address. Here is the cool part: because each address is unique and applies to only one site or company, I never get any more junk mail... no matter how many junk mailers get sold that address. And I don't cancel my subscription to whatever it was, thereby allowing the offender to burden their mail servers with useless mailings to me, mailings that I will never see or even know about. On top of that, any spammer that is using that address is paying money for nothing, and weighing down their servers, too. Isnt' that fantastic?

A few caveats here: this is not particularly a push for Sneakemail; they just happen to be the anonymizer I chose. They are simple, effective, free, and offer many, many other benefits (for example, letting me c.c. any Sneakemail mail to my real address, so I have an extra record of any dealings). As well, I must point out that since I have been using Sneakemail, I have actually only received a very, very few pieces of spam to any of the unique addresses, which means to me that there are far more responsible companies out there on the Web than there are bad ones (either that  or I have been exceedingly lucky in my choices). And finally, just this week I received two pieces of unwanted junk mail trying to sell me some Men's Club party facilities, complete with pictures of comely babes in Bunny costumes... and both Sneakemail addresses pointed out that the originators (the guys who sold my name) are a pair of partners in very respectable newsletter businesses, whose names I won't mention here). The mails came from two different servers, but arrived within seconds of each other, and apart from the return addresses, were identical. Man, what a waste of everyone's time and money.

In conclusion, I urge everyone around the world to kill the Spam problem immediately. You don't ever have to give out your real email address; always use an anonymizer, and you will never be bothered again. Wouldn't you like to hook up to your messages in the morning and not have to worry about skimming through all the crap, wasting all that time deleting the stuff that gets through your well-intentioned but hopeless filters? And for God's sake, don't post your address anywhere.

If we all did this, wow, what a wonderful world this would be. Now if only the solution were as simple in the fight against crapware...

... Mike Riley

--------------------------------------
Protect yourself from spam,
use http://sneakemail.com

Drowning in a sea of rednecks.

What is going on with these red- necks, any- way? I was born in '52, and the prom- ise of a better world was everywhere. Everything was to be better, cleaner, brighter. Yeah, the 60's was a nightmare in many ways, but they also gave birth to a new way of thinking for young people: freedom from racism, from war, from hunger. Educations for everyone, international aid, faster communications bringing us closer together.

Yet now, these kids are running for president, and running the businesses, and trying to turn it all around, send us marching back through time into some kind of Conservative hell.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, once on the side of gays, is fighting same-sex marriage as part of his campaign. Fred Thompson, actor/senator presidential candidate, proudly proclaims his anti-abortion and pro-Iraq war stance. I know there are lots of dickheads out there already (see FOX News) who believe we should all be locked up for even having sex... but these guys are running for President of the United States (formerly a great world power). And they have support, for Christ's sake.

Well, maybe it's a good thing, I don't know... once the U.S. completely caves in upon itself, the rest of the world can move on.

But I still want to know --and nobody seems to be able to answer this-- what is their motivation? What is this going to get them? Are there truly that many voters out their who give a damn about these issues? And if there are, what is their motivation? Who does this kind of thinking actually help? I mean, what the @#$%@#$&!!?

Penn and Teller's BULLSHIT Show is just that

Wow. I loved Penn and Teller for years. Even went to see them with Bro Chris. Fantastic, fun, devilish. Even loved their BULLSHIT Show, wherein they have taken on everything from anti-Mexicans to professional colonicists (is that a word?).

But tonight they did a show ravaging Alcoholics Anonymous (and all 12-step groups), and they went too far. Their "cool tool" of obfuscating the issues by interviewing dorks with degrees, and making them look stupid on camera, now is obvious as just another way a couple of rich fucks can shape things to look different than they are.

Don't let their status in the entertainment world fool you anymore.

I'm a "recovered" alcoholic; haven't had a problem for over 25 years. P & T called AA a "religious group"; they interviewed a pissed-off lawyer (at one point in his career, he was told to quit drinking and join AA or get fired) to describe AA's use of the term "higher power" as only GOD, and a specific type of God, who would ruin your life if you didn't follow His ways.

BULLSHIT.

Nobody every pitched me that the higher power was God, unless I wanted it to be. AA members told me that higher power could be anything or anyone. Their definition of a higher power? "Whatever lets you admit that you are powerless over alcohol." Yes, you read that right: whatever. I chose the AA group as my higher power. And all that meant to me, was that I no longer had to worry why I was there, or what a bad person I was.

I quit drinking; I stayed in AA for over a year. Then I had had enough, and moved on. But I still don't drink.

P&T's BULLSHIT extends to them having us believe that AA teaches us we don't have a mind of our own, that without them, we are nothing. Fucking preposterous.

They showed two people, one pro AA and one anti-AA, arguing at a bar about whether or not it was a disease. And when the anti-AA gal finally said `Look, even if it is a disease, isn`t it your responsibilityÉ`, the other guy didn`t have an answer... because YEAH, and what`s your pointÉ

P&T's BULLSHIT tries to convince us that this almost-70-year old organization is strictly religious because it's headquarters are now in some church-organization building. Well, guess what? LOTS of people believe in God (I'm pretty atheistic myself), and so what? Whatever works. And it works.

P&T's BULLSHIT says that 70 years of never changing your technique is just stupid; after all, cures are improving all the time. And they use an old manual hand drill as a prop, trying to tell us that if doctors still drilled us to get out cancer, then we certainly wouldn't do that, would we? That's just redirection, my friend. Where's the logic in that argument? Look: if doctors still drilled us (and I have to look that one up... I don't think they ever drilled us for cancer), then we would still believe in it, and we would still do it, wouldn't we?

And they didn't offer us any indication that either science or medicine has any methods at all to cure addictions. More redirection.

Then they played the Big Brother card: lots of people have been ordered by the courts, by insurance companies, by employers: either get into a 12-step group and get cured, or lose (you fill in the blank: insurance, family, jobs). And they tell us that this is against our Constitutional rights (American, eh?). They forget to mention, again, two things: one, it is not our constituional right to abuse a substance so badly that we endanger our lives, our familys' lives, or our employers' well-being. Two, the damn programs work; always have worked; that's why people get ordered to go there.

Worse, P&T continue to attach this so called personal-rights thing to organized religion. So at the beginning of the show, they claim AA is a religious group... so by the end of the show, you are agreeing that we shouldn't be forced into religion against our will. Wow, obfuscation, redirection, and entrapment.

This may work for stage gags, but it doesn't work for me. Looks like these guys could use a 12-step group of their own: Bullshitters Anonymous.

'Nuff said.

Harumi: Psychedelic Rock

"one of the wildest and most unbelievably ambitious recordings to come from the psychedelic era."

"Simply put, there is nothing at all like this record in the known universe."

Thus arrives a re-release of an album by a Japanese rocker named Harumi (interestingly, that seems to be both a boy's and a girl's name in Japan). When I lived with Nanny & Grampa Weiss, Grampa had purchased a stereo that came with 100 free record albums. He was given a free membership in a record club, and every month he allowed me to pick two or three albums for myself. What a great guy.

Most of the records were way off any charts, so I chose by album cover. Harumi was a double-album set. I never knew anything about the guy, but the music was fantastic. Just what I was looking for in the age of psychedelic music. This would be about 1968. It was a huge relief to actually get a record that was good; there was a lot of crap available. I played it for Chris on a trip to Camp Petawawa; together we were thinking this guy was pretty good.

Imagine my surprise the other day when the All Music Guide informed me that, not only was the record now out on CD, but that the reviews were air-gaspingly good. Take a listen to an MP3 that someone thoughtfully has made available. If you are a 60's pysch-era rocker, you owe it to yourself to hit the record store and pick up a copy.

Cheevy Impalah

Lease is up in early July. Click here to see more photos of new house, Sunday April 29, 2007.

Moving is such sweet sorrow...

New House April 5 07

Click on the photo to see more...
April 12, 2007. Packing taken care of by Chapala Movers, we leave Los Angeles #93, and take the long journey (all two blocks of it) to San Mateo #25. Mom spends that night and the next few at Pat and Terry's house, with the doggies. Mike spends one night in the new place, and during the next few days does a bunch of stuff: organizing workers, and moving crap around to make it look like he's been working. Then he spends the first weekend, nights only, at Cecilia's.

In between he tries to do as many customer PC service calls as possible, working until late into the evening hours to catch up on the backlog. It promises to be many weeks before all is settled... especially since the Impala decides to vent its weariness by allowing a short, rusting wire to keep the gas pump from working in the mornings. Ah, dear. Mexico... .

McAfee a Bust

So what, prey tell, is up with McAfee? I have been uninstalling McAfee security software all over town, to give my customers their computer freedom back. McAfee (and let's be fair, Norton even more so) takes over a PC or laptop and eventually grinds it to a halt.

So I went up to us. mcafee.com to talk to tech support, because on one customer's machine today, I could not remove the program. It crapped out halfway through uninstallation, and then I was left with no ability to remove the program completely. And the damn startup files insinuate themselves into the startup routine all by themselves.

So guess what? They have no tech support, at least none that is accessible through their website. I even created an account and logged in to see if that would get me somewhere. Nope. Nowhere.

Any software company, especially a so-called security company, that doesn't provide access to the general public, is just a piece o' crap as far as I'm concerned. I'm not talking about the software itself, mind (although it is). I'm talking about the company.

I will pass this information along to my customers from now on, at every opportunity. Humbugs to you, Mc.

Bugs in AntiSpyWare tools

Everyone on the web consistently recommends Lavasoft's Ad-Aware SE and Spybot Search & Destroy, for protecting your PC. I install these two programs for most of my customers. Ad-Aware Pro, the version that includes Ad-Watch, is better because Ad-Watch loads at startup for live protection.

But I have yet to read anyone's comment, including the developers of these programs, about serious BUGS that each program has:

Ad-Watch often refuses to unload itself from memory, so when you click on Shut Down, it never does. This is a major pain in the ass. (Savvy users discovered a tool to unload all memory-resident programs, like Ad-Watch, to cure this: Google for Windows User Profile Hive Cleanup. It didn't work for me; maybe it will for you.)

Spybot version 1.4, which has been around for quite some time and is still the latest version, has a display bug that effectively hides half its message windows, so you can't properly make selections.

Both these bugs have been around for months and months, so now I don't install Ad-Watch for anyone (including myself), and I use Spybot 1.3.

Should I be complaining? Both these programs are free, yes, so never look a gift horse in the mouth, right? BUT my confidence in the ability of either of these programs to perform effectively and protect me and my customers from malware is seriously diminished, when the developers can't even be bothered to issue a fixed build.

Which brings me to Microsoft: not on the subject of anti-spyware, but their damn MSN Live Messenger. Did you know that early in October Microsft updated their server side, which immediately placed a bug in most user's client versions of Live Messenger, which in turn refused to allow them to connect! The little people heads that signify MSN just kept spinning, and spinning... When questioned, a Microsoft employee said he hoped that MS would issue a statement and a fix... but two weeks have gone by with nary a word from them. You'd think that with the millions of MSN users, this would have become an issue. I just don't understand it.

(You can fix this bug if you have it, in Live Messenge: Google for remove_wlmpolicies.reg)

Michael Caine in ZUNE

Oh, wait, that's wrong. He did a movie on the big screen called ZULU. But now you can watch it on Microsoft's tiny new ZUNE video player... .

Wow, Apple doesn't stand still long. Just when I was looking at picking up a 30Gig shiny, black video iPod thingy, for over $300 U.S., Steve Jobs comes out in a button-down shirt (I have it on good authority that his butler, Cato, put all his regular black turtlenecks in the drier and shrunk 'em just before the announcements) and tells us about a new video iPod, bigger, better, faster.

http://reviews.cnet.com/4326-6490_7-6546236.html?tag=cnetfd.mt&tag=nl.e501

At the same time, Microsoft announces their new Zune, an iPod fighter. Zune has wireless, so you can share tunes in the classroom or at work. Too cool. All these totally unnecessary items in our lives, enriching our futures.

http://reviews.cnet.com/4326-6490_7-6546547-1.html?tag=nl.e501

2006 TV Season

In the old days of rileyfamily.ca, I would post the full fall TV schedule for everyone to enjoy. Not much I like better than the anticipation of a buncha new shows. Usually, only two or three survive and they are often not ones I like.

In the absence of updating to our website, here with some great links you will find useful, as they hold everything you want to know: shows, weekly listings, and premiere dates... and even some reviews.

Network listings:
http://www.metacritic.com/tv/seasons/2006fall/networks.shtml

Premiere schedule:
http://www.metacritic.com/tv/seasons/2006fall/index.shtml

Yahoo! preview with video ads of all shows:
http://tv.yahoo.com/feature/fall06/

Martin Luther King's widow, Coretta Scott King, died Monday. She was 78. She had suffered a severe stroke and a mild heart attack last August and had ovarian cancer.

For some reason, the BBC found this a more compelling and newsworthy story than CNN. Read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4665820.stm.

I was a young fellow when the Kennedys and King were assassinated. That was a time when there was nothing but glorious hope for the future, and "they" seemed to be fighting back to ruin it all: killing our heroes, and destroying government, ending with the resignation of Richard Nixon. Or should I say, that was the beginning of this long, slow slide to insanity. The hippie generation, so-called, was crushed. Those same freedom and love-loving hippies grew up to be the guys who run companies like Nortel, firing 5,000 people at a time because profits are never big enough. Not that there are losses, you understand: profits are not big enough. Puke.

I'm sad to see yet another umbilical cord, to my past, move on.

Now I want you all to read about a particularly fascinating group in Black American history: the Black Panthers. This was what we call a BIG DEAL. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3150491.stm

goddam sonofabitch bastard

Came out of a customer's house today to find my passenger-side mirror totaled. This happens frequently on the narrow streets of Ajijic, and results from one of two things: people parking really badly and sticking their cars' asses out too far; and asshole drivers. Note that I was parked fairly close to the curb.

Funny thing is I am taking the vehicle in Wednedsday, Feb. 1 (tomorrow0 for a complete body job, to repair all the nicks and dents that have accrued since I got here (two of them my own fault). Funnier thing is, I will have to wait days to get a new mirror, at probably an exhorbitant cost, and then it will be black... so I will have to haul it to the bodyshop for a paint job before it can be installed. Do we see money slipping away here, faster than it's coming in?

The good news is that, upon further inspection of my car, I realized they hadn't just stupidly zipped by and smashed the mirror with their vehicle. They'd actually manage to graze the entire length of the car. Why is this good news? Because it could have happened after I had gotten my car back from the bodyshop; instead it happened the day before, and will only be a bad memory soon.

Assholes. I'm keeping my eyes peeled for a dark-colored vehicle with a streak of Cappucino Cream down the driver's side.

Tower, tower, wherefore art thou....

In the ongoing saga of the Wireless Internet Wars (WIW), it seemed this morning someone stole the transmitting tower right off the roof of the Mexico Wireless offices. The office is just near the TelMex business office on the main highway through town. This could only be the work of some nefarious ex-employee, it was reasoned.



Turns out it was the work of the current owner and a nefarious employee! In an effort to scuttle business following a failed buyout, they figured they would get back at the lost new buyer by screwing up his business: cancelling out the signal to the Instituto Technologico, which has recently been given a huge gift of hardware by IBM U.S.A.

But wait! In the process, they scuttled the signal to a whole raft of their own customers, who were, to say the least... pissed. And wait again! Since the new owner never actually became the new owner, weren't they shooting... themselves... in the foot... to spite their toes?! Woh, yeah.

At the same time, some kind of connection snafu caused TelMex, which supplies their T1 lines, to suspect an overabundance of virused spams being sent out on Mexico Wireless's system, and they shut down one of their T1 lines. So even more customers were without service.

It never rains, but it pours, huh? Eh? Eh? Eh?

Eire

Ireland - we believe this country to be the home of our forefathers. Today Chris and I were digging around the web, connected between Canada and Mexico via Skype, looking for other examples of our family crest. AS Chris pointed out, in just a couple of years the amount of family history information available has grown massively. And we came across some cool stuff.

You can see a large version of our crest at www.rileyfamily.ca. And there is a link on the page to some information concerning the legend of the red/pink hand, shown dripping blood, bracketed by regal lions. Part of the legend concerns the origins of Ulster,and that made me wonder: what and where exactly is Ulster? I started rooting around again, and what I dug up is truly fascinating.

You can check out more about Ulster, the northern provinces of Ireland, by following this link to Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.

Sheila Copps... is coming, to town (sing to "Santa Claus is coming to town"

One of the original Brat Pack (Dingwall, Chretien, Copps, Kinsella etc.... wait, Chretien??) in the Liberal government, Sheila Copps seemed destined for great things. She and her cohorts were, 15 years ago, the young, the un-tampered-with, the rebels in the government. My generation believed they would finally bring good government, responsible government, to Canada.

God only knows what happened. Patronage, swishy positions, false fame... who knows.

Anyway, Sheila was so hot in politics at one point that Canada's national news magazine, Saturday Night, actually got her dressed in leathers and posing on a motorbike on their cover one month. I tried to find that picture to post here, but I can't find anything of Sheila except one tiny .jpg. I guess the Saturday Night cover was copyrighted and there was a big fight with the photographer, so you who missed it may never get to see it.

All that being said, she is turning up here, in Frebruary, in our little town of Ajijic to speak to members of the Canadian Club (I am a member, but as with Groucho Marx, I won't go to any group meetings where they would actually have me).