Peter's Site - Misc

Top 10 Spam e-mail subject lines

nospam@example.com (Peter) — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:13:34 +0200

While cleaning my email inbox today, I thought it might be funny to look at some spam mails.. It was funny indeed. And some of those spam mails are strange enough to really be considered as art
Here are ten of the funniest subject lines:

Woman with artificial butt
We offer the best alarm-clocks for your small buddy down there
Your bedroom doesn't smell like love anymore? Change it.
Powder for custard launcher
We have drugs to cure any illness you suffer from
Look like a million dollars
Deutsche Filme können auch begeistern!
She won't need a magnifying glass from now to find your tool.
Women will be funk when they see your trunk.
Crazy Korean eats dogs alive!

Wahl-o-mat Europawahl 2009

nospam@example.com (Peter) — Tue, 12 May 2009 11:05:19 +0200

Keine Ahnung wie repräsentativ das ist, aber lustig ist der Wahl(versprechen)-o-mat allemal..
Aber warum überrascht mich das Ergebnis nicht?

A historic moment..

nospam@example.com (Peter) — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:15:00 +0100

... needs to be celebrated, of course!

Happy Xmas

nospam@example.com (Peter) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 09:39:00 +0100

Schon wieder ein Jahr rum. Damn. Trotzdem wünsche ich euch ein schönes Weihnachten und viel ~~Glück~~ Freude beim Geschenke auspacken.

Evil form spam protection

nospam@example.com (Peter) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 10:02:00 +0100

Everybody who has ever set up an HTML form on a website (e.g. contact form for sending eMails), knows that some nasty spam bots visit your site from time to time and submit the form with random spam. The usual countermeasure is to verify that an actual human being is submitting the form. This verification is normally done with the help of a Captcha, a small image containing random letters. By typing the letters into an input field, you prove to be human, because it is assumed that bots cannot recognize the letters in the image. (Actually nearly every Captcha implementation has been defeated so far and trained bots can circumvent their protection.)

Over at Marian's website, we have a form for online support requests by customers and encountered an increasing amount of spam coming to the support staff's inbox through the HTML form. Since I was to lazy to set up a captcha - although I liked to idea of the reCAPTCHA - I tried a different, evil, mean, unfair but still elegant way of blocking spam posts. Knowing that spam bots want to deliver their advertisement links in any possible way, I just set up an additional input field in the form:
<input type="text" name="website" value=""/>
This field is hidden using CSS display:none on the surrounding element, so that normal users don't see it. One can assume, that bots usually don't care much about CSS and try to fill out all form fields, especially the one labeled "website". They just can't resist.. hrhr.. For CSS unaware user agents and screen readers, we add a (also hidden) text message, telling the user to leave the field empty. Now, with our trap in place, everytime the form is submitted, we just check if this input field is left empty. If it was indeed filled out, we reject the submission with an error message, since it was probably submitted by a bot.

Outcome: During February, the form was submitted 7 times with a non-empty website field, everytime containing a spam link. No other spam came through our filter and the support staff is happy. I know, it's not much data now, but principially this easy method seems to work quite well in our case. Evil grin..

Note: Obviously this trap only works for "generic" spam bots, which have no prior knowledge about our form and the madness of its programmer.. Usability note: There might be some issues with browsers automatically filling certain form elements, based on visits to other forms with same input field names.

Fireworks

nospam@example.com (Peter) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 19:38:13 +0100

Selbstverständlich habe ich keine Kosten und Mühen gescheut, noch ein paar aufwendige Bilder vom Silvesterfeuerwerk fürs Blog zu produzieren^^ Enjoy..

Happy New Year !

nospam@example.com (Peter) — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 11:46:15 +0100

Die Weihnachtsfeiertage sind überstanden, die kurze Erholungszeit zwischen den Jahren ist auch schon um.. was bleibt noch zu tun? Ach ja, das neue Jahr begrüßen.. Ich wünsche euch einen "Guten Rutsch" und ein schönes Jahr 2008!

Es ist mal wieder Weihnachten..

nospam@example.com (Peter) — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 12:56:09 +0100

Der Baum ist geschmückt, die Geschenke sind verpackt und aus der Küche duftet es..
Ich wünsche euch allen ein schönes Weihnachtsfest mit schönen Geschenken, leckerem Gänsebraten und ein paar ruhigen Stunden..

Es wird eng...

nospam@example.com (Peter) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:29:03 +0100

... zumindest ist das meine Erfahrung aus den letzten DÄ / FU Konzerten. Dafür gibt's dann ordentlich was auf die Ohren. *freu*... *hüpf*... Vorfreude schönste Freude...
Update kommt dann morgen, wenn ich wieder sprechen und vlt auch wieder hören kann.

Update - Es war eng...

... zumindest ganz vorn vor der Bühne.. Knapp 3 Stunden haben die Köche die Arena zum Kochen gebracht. Gewürzt mit reichlich Klamauk, X-Laolas, der Wall of Death und vergessenen Liedtexten - zum Glück hatte Bela das Textbuch dabei. Ich fand es mal wieder ein extrem geiles Konzärt und wir waren hinterher auch ziemlich breit.. *schwitz*. Leider gibt's das nur alle paar Jahre zu erleben.. schade schade. Naja, warten wir eben auf Farins nächste Solo-Tour..

Hier noch ein Bild von Rod, leider miese Quali, dabei stand ich keine 5m weg.. Handycam eben.. blöd.

Muhahaha...

nospam@example.com (Peter) — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:47:45 +0200

...und er gehört mir, mir allein!!

Crowdsourcing the search for missing sailor

nospam@example.com (Peter) — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 22:32:00 +0100

The renowned computer scientist and Turing award winner James N. Gray has been reported missing on sea after not returning from a solo boat trip outside San Francisco Bay on January 28, 2007. The coast guard of California searched for his vessel a couple of days, but did not succeed in finding any signs of his boat. Since he has water and food supply for some time, chances are not too bad to find him alive even after being lost for a week now. Thus a big effort is made by lot of people at various places - among them Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com) - to find him on the ocean using any intelligence data available. The search mission focuses primarily on the analysis of satellite and spy plane images. Since a huge area of ocean was captured, thousands of images need to be examined for a some pixel sized boat shape, which cannot be done reliably by image processing software, because the noise of waves and clouds masks possible hits. Thus the images were split into smaller tiles that can be easily scanned by a human. These tiles were made availabe at the Amazon Mechanical Turk Service, which provides a platform for exactly this kind of tasks.

Artificial artificial intelligence

The Mechanical Turk is a commercial service by Amazon that lets users assign various little tasks to helpers - in the Amazon jargon called Turkers. These Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) are typically repetitive and require almost no special skills but having a brain. This is also the reason why computers are not capable of solving these tasks, since in some rare cases the human brain is still superior to silicon chips. Hurray, the machines still need us.. (-:

The name Mechanical Turk is derived from an 18th century hoax robotic chess player. Its inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen claimed that his automaton - called The Turk - was intelligent enough to beat even best chess players, but it turned out to be controlled by a human chess master which was hidden inside the box (see picture). Likewise, Amazon's Mechanical Turk service allows humans to help the machines of today to perform tasks they aren't capable of, yet.

Among typical Mechanical Turk tasks are image annotation, simple yes-no-questions or selecting one of possible alternatives. More time consuming jobs include transcription of podcasts or producing text content for blogs, trivia questions or restaurant critics. Since most of the HITs are no-brainers and can be done in almost no time, the reward is typically far below one dollar per HIT. Only by completing a considerable number of HITs the Turkers can supplement their income, which has been one of the main critics about this service. But typically Turkers do their mechanical work in their free time and not as a major source of income.

In the case of the satellite image analysis for searching Jim's boat, no reward is offered at all for completing HITs, because its completely based on volunteer's work. As of February 4th, over 6000 individual workers examined over 100.000 assignments.

I have completed over 100 HITs for myself and it is truly fascinating helping in a rescue mission from my comfortable chair at home. Weird, huh? (-: It seems to be one of the phenomena of Web 2.0 and all of that social network stuff. The Wired magazine titled a story The Rise of Crowdsourcing about this new form of outsourcing jobs among people on the Internet. I think it is a very cool way of getting stupid work done that computers won't do and the Amazon Mechanical Turk seems to be a good prototype for such a generic task distribution platform.

After all, I hope the story comes to a good end and Jim is finally found even if chances are decreasing with every day.

Update

More than 12,000 volunteers participated in the image analysis and completed altogether more than 560,000 asignments. Unfortunately no signs of Jim's boat were found. Since the other search efforts had no luck as well, the active search has been suspended.

Neues Zuhause

nospam@example.com (Peter) — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 15:21:09 +0100

Seit dem Wochenende haben wir eine neue Wohnung in der
Hofer Straße 9, 04317, Leipzig.
Das ist natürlich gleich ein günstiger Zeitpunkt mal GoogleMaps auszuprobieren..

Hallo Welt!

nospam@example.com (Peter) — Tue, 30 May 2006 12:00:00 +0200

Hallo Welt! Da man ja inzwischen nicht mehr um eine eigene Website herumkommt und anno 2006 auch ausgelacht wird, wenn man seine Website "noch" mit vim zusammenschreibt, habe ich also eine Weblog-Engine installiert. Ich kann auch die Vorteile nicht leugnen:

Man kann die Inhalte nur über das Web-Interface ändern.
Leser können Kommentare zu den Beiträgen hinterlassen,
Es gibt viele vorgefertigte Designs, für mich als Informatiker sehr wichtig

Als Engine habe ich mich spontan für den Underdog Serendipity entschieden, in der Hoffnung, dass es nicht so schnell ausstirbt und irgendwann zur Über-Blog-Engine aufsteigt (da kann ich dann müde lächelnd behaupten, ich nutze es schon seit Jahren).
Ich bin schon gespannt, wie oft neue Inhalte in mein Blog einfließen..
Viel Spaß beim Lesen und Kommentieren!