Good Practices to Shoo... Spammers

Now a days, every communication is on internet which is very vulnerable but a fastest means of communication. There is a possibility that some un-unknown sender will send a junk mail to you. A junk mail is called spam, it can be an un-wanted SMS in your mobile or a comment on your blog, mail in your inbox. Did you got a mail from a person, whom you do not know and did not met with. This is spamming, read the History of spam.








Any thing which is un-knowing or which you do not want is a spam. This could be a mail, a comment on your website etc. Spam can be from a individual sender or an organization.

Organizations ???

Yes there are some organizations which send spams to the e-mails addresses harvested by spammers. Offcourse that is not spamming for organizations rather seen as a means of advertising, but that is a spam for us.

Why do people do Spamming




There is nothing specific about this, but sources say that spamming is a hobby for some spammers and it is also a source for promotion of a product or a company. Like creating a virus and infecting a pc is a Fun for some of its creators, in the same way, spamming is fun for some.



Volume of Spam on Internet

According to Microsoft present CEO, Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates receives four million e-mails per year, most of them being spam. At the same time, Jef Poskenzer, owner of the website acme.com was receiving over one million spam emails per day. According to Sophos developer of e-mail, and network security products such as anti-spam, anti-spyware, anti-virus, last year US topped the rank of most spam receiving state. When we compare the statistics based on the continents, it was Asia with 40 percent.



Spamming is illegal in some countries and legal (with some guidelines) in some. Infact, in Australia, there is a penalty of 2000 USD for individual spammer or 900,000 USD for corporate spammers.








SPAMHAUS hosts the updated list of all the top spammers across the world.


How Do Spammers Get your E-mail Address ?


As we have read above, there are different types of spammers, some do this for fun, some to take revenge etc... Some spammers will be professionals like virus developers. These spammers will create a script or program to find your e-mail address. These programs are called spambots or spam spiders which will crawl through your site to find any @ symbol or any .com like word. If they find such things on your site, will store it to harvest the e-mail address to be spammed. There are other ways in which your e-mail address can be spoofed like hackers spoof your IP address.


How Do I Stop Spamm



We cannot stop spam but we can protect our e-mail address from being spammed. But remember, once you are on the database of spammers then it is very difficult to get out. There are steps in which you can work even if your e-mail address is spammed. Thanks to some of the free services on web which I will be mentioning below

There are many anti-spam softwares, most of them free downloads are available for download on net. Detecting spam based on the content of the e-mail, either by detecting keywords such as “Viagra”, “Cialis” or by statistical means is very popular. If your anti-spam engine is tuned with these type of keywords then you have stopped 10 percent of spamming. But if the word is say (specialist) then this can be mistaken with "Cialis" by some anti-spam engines. That means, if your friend send a joke mail to you mentioning a word “Viagra” in it, them that mail will be treated as a spam by these anti-spam softwares.


Tools to Protect from Being Spammed


As I have mentioned above, Spam spiders look for symbols like @ or .com, to harvest your e-mail address in their pool. So, when ever you mention your e-mail address on a website or blog, write it as

Virasat Dot Khan AT Google Dot Communication.

More such techniques are mentioned by Amit in his blog Digital Inspiration
Postini is a paid service for mail forwarding. This is generally used by corporate organizations today.

Hide your e-mail address published on websites from Spambot. Spambots are the spam spiders which will crawl your site to spoof your e-mail address to hack it or to spam it.

Spambox and mailexpire are also a useful tools. Not to protect from being spammed rather to get important mails from un-known senders. Spambox and mailexpire creates a temporary mailbox in their domain which will direct all the mails sent to that temporary address to your official e-mail address. So, you can give this mail address to the un-known vendor. The best part of this mail address is that, it will expire within the period which you have mentioned. This is a free service, check it out. Thanks to Amit who covered these tool on his blog.

One of the tools CAPTCHAs covered by Amit in his blog is also a good tool to protect your inbox from spammers.

Read more about Spamming

Make your e-mail address less vulnerable to spammers

Hide your e-mail address on websites from spammers

Spam Hunters become a Digg Spammers Best Friend

Spam (Electronics) by Wikipedia

Another Beta Product from Microsoft

When Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates arrived At WinHEC 2007, he had a role in his mind. This was to announce the New server operating system from Microsoft i.e... Windows Server 2008. WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) is a trade show organized by Microsoft were the top level speakers from Microsoft speaks about the future of their company and announces any new product if launched.


After windows Server 2003, its chance for Windows Server 2008. Infect the R2 version of this server is in market. This new server OS has more than 4,000 policies which can applied by an administrator. Last week, Longhorn was officially named as Windows Server 2008. Microsoft has also announced that this would be the last 32 bit operating system. As we are moving into the new era of 64 bit computing, the next operating systems will be 64 bit.


Microsoft has announced its new server operating system “Windows Server 2008”, the code name of this was Windows longhorn. Till now, it has gone through 3 Beta stages. Beta 1 was released in 2005, Beta 2 was released last year and Beta 3 was released last month this year. I will mention the unique feature of



A New Role to Active Directory

The most important is the Windows Server Virtualization, which is used to Virtualize the server covered in my previous post about Global Warming. This Server has got a new role assigned it its Active Directory. This is Active Directory Domain Service, the features of its is the same, allowing network to manage the resources centrally, to set group policies for the users and centrally deploy applications to multiple computers. Apart from this overlapping features, it also has a special AD service called Federation Service using which the credentials of one enterprise can be shared with other trusted partners. As a result, a consultant can use his company’s user name and password to log on to client’s network.

No Need for a VPN

The Terminal service supports RDP 6.0. Now it is possible to share a single application instead of the whole desktop. Microsoft has given a straight competition to the VPN vendors like Avaya, CICSO and Check point by introducing feature of remote controlling a desktop over internet using its Terminal Services like Gateway, Web Access. They allow a desktop to be controlled over RDP or HTTPS over internet connection without any VPN deployed.

Some New Features

The new Virtual Domain controller, A read only Domain Controller resides in a low physical security area which will re-direct all the write attempts to a Full Domain controller.

The local administrators can login to a Server for maintenance task, no need for special domain admin privileges.

Policies using which administrator can restrict the network and other resource access on the individual level.

A powerful command line, called windows power shell.

Apply patches without re-booting the server, this service was also introduced in Windows Vista

This server is facilitated with improved IIS 7, and High-availability clusters.

Change the partition size without re-booting the server. Infact you can also change the size for primary partition.

Self healing NTFS, a new system service that runs in background and monitors the NTFS partition, detects any failures and automatically recovers the data, without the need to restart the server.



So What's Next from Microsoft....There is also the R2 Version of Windows Server 2008 in Market...Microsoft Will never Stop.

Gmail has Increased its Attachment Limit to 20 MB!

Google is flying with all its colors. Earlier this week, Gmail, one of the most popular free email client has announced that it has increased its attachment limit to 20 MB from 10 MB. This means, now you can send share your favorite pictures and songs with your friends. Gmail is emerging as a leader in free email and pop3 email service providers. Earlier it was released as a private beta by invitation only, but in February this year, it has gone purely public. According to Google, they are increasing the storage capacity of Gmail with a rate of 145 MB a year and the team hopes that the storage capacity will reach a mark of 3 GB by the end of 2008, imagine then we can use gmail as our hard disk.



Gmail Drive In your Windows Explorer

Download this gmail driver to get the Gmail hard disk. . It comes as one of the drives in your windows explorer, in which you can drag and drop your files. This feature is really cool, you just need to open the gmail drive in your explorer and login to your account then start drag and drop.



The main aim of Google is to provide a rich user experience, with programming like Ajax and java scripts, Google is delivering this very efficiently. Gmail also offers spam filtering system, through which a message marked as spam will automatically get deleted after 30 days. They have recently launched a downloadable version of Gmail for mobiles.

Funny Story

Gmail was a project begun by Google developer Paul Buchheit a year before it was announced to the public. For several years, the software was available only for internal Google employees. Gmail was finally announced in 2004, this news came as a rumours. They day being an April Fool’s Day, nobody believed this news. As Google was knows for making April Fool’s jokes (such as Pigeon Rank . Then finally Rosenberg, Google’s vice-president of products was interviewed by BBC News as saying, “We are serious about Gmail”.


The major competitors of Gmail were Hotmail, Yaboo, AOL. There were many ups and downs with the storage capacity offered by all these email clients. But finally Gmail managed to get on top with the attachment doubled this year to 20 MB. But as far as storage limit is concerned, earlier this month, Yahoo has announced their un-limited storage capacity.

Global Warming A Growing Concern

I hope, every one know about Global Warming and the its increasing effects.

No, No, do not get surprised, I am not growing to write about the climatic changes of our Earth in my post, but rather I will stick to my title which is “Technology”. In this post, I will be writing about how Technology can help in reducing Global Warming and its ill causes. The WHO is organizing many campaigns to create awareness among us regarding the hazards of Global Warming.


Hardware


Dell’s Contribution




Do you remember, Last year, in the month of December, Dell has introduced its new range of servers called Energy Smart Servers to reduce power consumption. The Dell PowerEdge Energy Smart 1950 and 2950 can deliver up to 25 percent greater performance per watt while reducing power consumption by 20 percent. According to Dell, these improvements can save hundreds of dollars per server every year, which can translate to millions of dollars per year in large data center deployments. They also disclosed that the New PowerEdge Energy Smart servers combined with Dell OptiPlex desktops and Dell's industry leading-services, partnerships and sustainability programs deliver on our commitment to drive energy-efficient solutions that increase performance and reduce power consumption from the desktop to the data center. If your company uses Dell hardware, you might be aware of the recently announced OptiPlex 740 and 320 desktops joining Dell's Energy Smart technology. Especially, OptiPlex 740, which can use 70 percent less power than its predecessors. The new hardware from Dell include low-flow fans with a power speed control mechanism, higher-efficiency power supplies, low-voltage processors, and factory-integrated BIOS designed for increased efficiency and air flow


If the hardware from Dell would have come a year earlier, enough electricity could have been saved to avoid about 12.5 million tons of CO2 emissions, the equivalent of removing about 2.5 million cars from the road. The potential savings for customers about $1.6 billion in operating costs. If we consider this percentage all over the world, the cause for Global Warming will be drastically reduced. The Dell Power and Thermal Lab in Austin, Texas is a research facility dedicated to the creation and validation of industry standard solutions to today's energy efficiency challenges. By partnering with market-leading companies like Microsoft, APC, Liebert, Rittal and Sanmina SCI, Dell is working to address Data Center inefficiency end-to-end. The Dell PowerEdge Energy Smart 1950 and 2950 servers are available today worldwide. Prices start at $2,449 and $2,619, respectively.


Recent Announcements from Dell

Earlier last month, dell has introduced two AMD Opteron based servers, designed to reduce the power consumption. The actual power consumption depends on the usage, but Dell claims that this server will deliver up to 105 percent greater performance per watt over the previous generation servers and hence, Dell calls it as 9th Generation.


Hewlett-Packard

Its Not only Dell that is coming forward to reduce Global Warming, but there are other major hardware vendors as well you might be still using HP’s Blade Servers. Hewlett-Packard came up with a new technology called Dynamic Smart Cooling for datacenters in which, Heat sensors on server racks send signals to a control panel that adjusts the air-conditioning output. According to Hp, this technology will save power of up to 45 percent.

Dell PowerEdge Energy Smart servers also offer an ideal platform for consolidation and virtualization, enabling customers to balance capacity demand within the same or reduced physical space and price range.


Software


Virtualization, a Step ahead to Decrease Global Warming.


Virtualization has been in mainframe for years, there are lot of softwares like VMwar, IBM Advanced POWER Virtualization, Microsoft: Virtual PC and Virtual Server 2005, XenSource – XenOptimizer. Server virtualization means multiple server operating system running on a single hardware.


VMware has gained more importance in its life span of nearly a Decade. It offers, Data Centre products to reduce costs through more efficient use of resources. There are many such products from VMware which offers virtualization. Infact, VMware offers some Free products like VMware player using which you can start your own virtualization now.


Recent Announcements from VMware

VMware announces VMware ACE 2 Enterprise Edition, using which you can deploy or create a Virtual image for a pc or a server, infact you can edit it with your IT policies to protect the contents, package it into a virtual machine and deploy it on any managed or unmanaged licensed client. This is the only Edition of VMware using which an IT administrator can manage thousands of VMware ACE desktops and apply policies to all of them using a single console. VMware costs in between $1000 to $15,000



Believe me, Technology can do lot of things to reduce Global Warming. Both Software and Hardware vendors should look into designing such environment friendly products.



For Information Visit the Following links


Moving Beyond Server Virtualization

Microsoft’s Strategy on Virtualization

Server Virtualization

Virtualization Simplified

Rumours: Google To Buy FeedBurner For $100 M

Last Week, rumours prevailed over the Web that Google is looking ahead to buy Feedburner for $100 million, No, it's not at all a bit amount for Google. Though there is no official complements made by Google on this. I think that it should happen and if so, google will integrate this tool with Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a service offered by Google to generate the detailed reports of the visitors who visited your blog or website. It makes use of the heart of google, the webmaster using which you can keep track of your visitors and their geographical location.




Frankly speaking, as a blogger, to promote my blog, I would love to burn a feed using the service provided by same vendor on which I am blogging(Google). But it is very tiresome doing the process of signing in to FeedBurner and then burning our feed and so on. RSS market is a very rapidly evolving as far as advertising is concerned. All the funda of RSS is, Today we are reading blogs via RSS by subscribing to them in a separate windows. Like google reader or yahoo sources. But did you observed that when you are viewing those blogs view RSS, RSS is actually eliminating the use of potential Ads like Google Adsense and Ads from other sources, just try out in Google Reader if you have any doubts. This is generating a huge loss to publishers as they rely on the income generated by the people who view or click these Ads. So if Google goes ahead with buying FeedBurner, then it will be advantageous to both the companies and off course users will feel the touch of all the services under same Google platform. The Blogger, The Adsense, The FeedBurning etc…

Google has proven by buying Doubleclick that it is not going to stop. This deal will come as a new opportunity for Starters who have AdSense accounts but were excluded from the Feedburner feedavertising program because of low subscriber base. Whatever it is but this deal will definitely make $$$$ for Google and Google will Rule this Web without any competitors. I think Google should go for it...