Tales from the Terminal Room

October 2002, Issue No. 36

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Tales from the Terminal Room ISSN 1467-338X
October 2002, Issue No. 36
Editor: Karen Blakeman
Published by: RBA Information Services

Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR) is a monthly newsletter, with the exception of July and August, which are published as a single issue. TFTTR includes reviews and comparisons of information sources and search tools; updates to the RBA Web site Business Sources and other useful resources; dealing with technical and access problems on the Net; and news of RBA's training courses and publications.


In this issue:

  • The Great Spam Experiment
  • Hotmail and BTopenworld adopt Brightmail
  • Pop-ups banned by AOL and Ask Jeeves
  • Information Resources
    • Gigablast search engine
    • Infoline Spain
    • QuickerWit - UK directory of hardware, software and product reviews
    • Directory of Information and Market Research Specialists
    • Marketing Source Directory of Trade Associations
    • Eurochambres
    • British Chambers of Commerce
    • Top 10 sites
  • Gizmo of the Month
    • eCloaker
  • Training and Meetings
    • Key Business Resources on the Net
    • Market Research on the Web

The Great Spam Experiment

We all suffer from junk email, also known as spam, to some degree and for most of us accept is part of Internet life. But Phil Bradley, a well known Internet consultant, wanted to find out more and decided to spend his summer finding out why and how spam reaches his mailbox. He created some Hotmail accounts and placed the addresses in a number of places on the net:

1. This was kept as a control and not posted anywhere
2. Published in the Hotmail Directory and Internet White Pages
3. Published on Phil Bradley's Web site
4. Used to post to the LIS-LINK discussion list
5. Used to post to a Usenet newsgroup
6. Used to post to a Yahoo! group
7. Used to subscribe to a pornographic newsletter
8. Used to opt out of a mailing list, with a request not to be sent any more emails.

After 2 months he received 691 spam mails. Top of the league were "financial" newsletters with a final tally of 231, pornographic spam came second with 185 and health related spam were third with 108.

Even more interesting though is which of his Hotmail addresses generated the most spam. The one that was used to opt-out of junk emails came top at 350. So by far and away the most spam came as a result of requesting not to receive any more! The moral of the story, then, is NEVER click on the remove option in spam: you'll only get more, which is something that many of us have long suspected.

Phil completed his study just in time, though, because Hotmail have now signed up to the Brightmail anti-spam service. It would be interesting to repeat the experiment with this in place to see how effective it is.

More information on Phil's experiment and a more detailed analysis of the data can be found on his Web site at http://www.philb.com/spamex.htm


Hotmail and BTopenworld adopt Brightmail

BTopenworld has signed up Brightmail to tackle the junk mail bombarding its users' accounts. The service also includes Symantec's anti-virus server side software. Brightmail, currently used by six of the top ten ISPs in the US, claims that its service blocks between 93 and 95 per cent of spam. They also recently signed a deal with MSN to filter spam before it reaches Hotmail in-boxes.

According to Brightmail, spam is on the increase. In September 2001, 8 per cent of the email it scanned was rejected as spam. Last month 38 per cent of 3.1 billion messages, that is a total of 1.2 billion messages, were junk mail.

Brightmail identifies unsolicited commercial email from decoy email accounts that are seeded to attract spam, but it has recently added a new feature. The technology has been tweaked to detect "polymorphic spam attacks", where the spammer makes subtle differences in punctuation or spacing between messages in an attempt to escape spam filters. My own ISP Telenor uses Brightmail, and its ability to pick up the so-called "Nigerian scams" has improved dramatically over the last couple of weeks. A totally spam free email box is probably not achievable without losing real mail in the process, but Brightmail manages to catch about 98 per cent of junk coming into my inbox and that is good enough for me.


Pop-ups banned by AOL and Ask Jeeves.

America Online is to ban third-party pop-up advertising. It will also make it easier for users to find and change their marketing preferences, and opt-outs will no longer expire on an annual basis. But AOL will continue to use pop-ups on a limited basis to notify customers about key features on the service and special offers from AOL Time Warner. Unfortunately, this only apply to US users. An AOL UK spokesman has said the company is still debating whether to adopt the US stance when it launches AOL 8.0 in the UK.

Ask Jeeves has already banned pop-up advertisements, and is to cut back on banner advertisements that appear throughout the site. It will now rely largely on paid advertising links within search results for extra revenue.

According to Nielsen Netratings, who measure and monitor Internet traffic patterns, the number of pop-up ads rose from about 3.9 billion in the first quarter of this year to nearly 5 billion in the second quarter.

The number of pop-ups that we actually see may not decrease, though, as spammers have found a way to hijack an administration feature in Microsoft's Windows operating systems. The messenger service allows, for example, a network administrator to send warnings to users about service downtime or problems on the Net. But now some advertisers are using it to send bulk messages to anyone connected to the Internet with an accessible address. How do you stop them? Make sure you have a firewall installed on your PC. There are plenty around and some are free for personal use, for example Zone Alarm (http://www.zonelabs.com/) or Sygate Personal (http://www.sygate.com/).


Information Resources

Search Tools

Gigablast http://www.gigablast.com/

A new search engine called Gigablast has appeared on the scene. It has a relatively small database of approximately 151 million pages but this seems to be growing day by day. The default screen is minimalist with no fancy graphics or advertising and it is very fast.

In the results list it has copied Google's feature of having a link to its own cached copy of the page next to each entry..

The default search option is to look for any of your terms but you can change this by using the Advanced Search or the "+" sign before terms to make them mandatory. The minus sign for excluding pages that contain a term and double quote marks for phrases are supported. Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) and wildcards are not supported.

Advanced options also include searching for linked pages, site search and title search.

A very useful feature is the option to sort your results by date, which can be specified on the Advanced Search screen.

Definitely worth a test drive and one to watch.

Business Information

Company Financials and Annual Reports http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/finars.htm

Infoline Spain http://www.infoline.es/
Infoline specialises in Spanish and Portuguese companies and has a collection that goes back to 1968. It includes more than 5.5 Million documents from around 80,000 companies in 60 countries. Since 1990, Infoline provides annual reports and other documents of public and private companies. The documents are black and white scanned copies of the originals, stored on CD-ROMs. Requested documents are printed and immediately sent via courier or regular post, or in electronic format via e-mail in PDF format. You cannot search directly online but orders can be placed via email or telephone. This is a priced, pay as you go service.

Trade & Service Directories http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/trade.htm

QuickerWit http://www.QuickerWit.com/
This is very useful free searchable directory of 2000 UK software publishers and hardware manufacturers, including phone numbers and links to their Web sites. It also lists their products. This is a useful site for tracking down manufacturers of old kit, drivers and technical support.

You can either list everything in the directory or search by manufacturer, product name or category. Information about product reviews are displayed with the results.

QuickerWit has information on every product review published in the major UK computer press over the last three years. Publications that are currently included are Database & Network Journal, PC Magazine, PC Plus, Personal Computer World, PC Pro, Software World and What PC? There is also a searchable reviews index going back to 1994. It does not provide the full text to the article, but gives links to the Web sites of the magazines. The article may not be available online, but enough information is given to enable you to either purchase a back issue or track down the article via your library.

Business Information Brokers http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/brokers.htm

Directory of Information & Market Research Specialists (DIMARS) http://www.dataresources.co.uk/
This is an excellent and free searchable, online directory of information specialists covering a wide range of expertise and subjects world-wide. Search by name, organisation, subject, country, services and working language.

Statistics http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/stats.htm

Trade Associations and Chambers of Commerce sometimes provide information and statistics on their sectors of interest, local industries, and the economy.

Marketing Source Directory of Trade Associations http://www.marketingsource.com/associations/
This directory covers over 35,000 trade associations and claims to be a "comprehensive source of information on associations and professional societies including business and trade associations, 501c non-profit organizations, and other charity and community associations from around the world". It does admit, though, to being heavily US biased - 90% of the entries are from the US and 10% are international.

Eurochambres http://www.eurochambres.be/
Claims to be the "largest European business representation" with 37 National Chamber Organisations, 1,500 Regional and Local Chambers of Commerce and Industry and 15,000,000 Enterprises. To track down your national Organisation click on "Our Network" to browse the directory by country

British Chambers of Commerce http://www.chamberonline.co.uk/
Useful national economic surveys and comments on the state of the UK economy and a "Find Your Chamber" option. Some Chambers also have a searchable directory of members.

Top 10 Sites http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/top10/

The delegates on the Key Business Resources on the Net workshop held on October 8th came up with the following as their Top 10 sites:

  • Corporate Information http://www.corporateinformation.com/ - good starting point for locating business information of all types for countries world-wide.
  • Telephone Directories on the Web http://www.teldir.com/ - links to telephone directories across the world organised by country.
  • Trade Association Forum http://www.taforum.org/ - searchable database of UK Trade associations.
  • Google http://www.google.com/ - excellent general purpose search engine with a useful option to view its own cached copy of a Web page, Advanced Search facilities, searching PDF files and other file formats, News and Usenet
  • Bureau van Dijk Bvd Suite http://www.bvdsuite.com/ - free information from Amadeus on the top 20 European companies and a free directory of companies (free display of information is limited). Also Web access to BvD's priced company information products .
  • Official Statistics on the Web http://www.auckland.ac.nz/lbr/stats/offstats/OFFSTATSmain.htm - one of the best starting point for statistical sources by country, topic or subject.
  • Companies House http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/ - essential starting point for information on UK registered companies.
  • Hemmington Scott http://www.hemscott.net/ - good selection of free information on UK listed companies plus priced services for more detailed information.
  • BBC News http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ - access to news on events world-wide plus links to background information and relevant sites.
  • RBA Business Sources on the Net http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/ - this site!

Gizmo of the Month

eCloaker

http://www.codefoot.com/software/ecloaker/

Email Harvesters - programs that collect email addresses for spam by trawling Web sites - are on the increase. Web page designers use various combinations of images, javascript and forms to try and protect addresses from being harvested.

Another approach is to code the address in such a way that it is invisible to harvesters but can be read correctly by an email program. For example, part of the code for joeblogs@gizmo.co.uk might look like mailt&#111. This is what eCloaker does.

eCloaker can be downloaded free of charge and is very easy to use.

1. You fill in the Email Address, for example joeblogs@gizmo.co.uk

2. Type in what you want to appear on the screen, for example Email Joe Blogs

3. Press the Make Code button to create the cloaked link code

4. Press the Copy Code button to put the code in your system clipboard.

5. In your HTML editor, paste the code into your page HTML where the link should appear.

Two colleagues of mine have been using this for 6 months. They remain blissfully spam free whilst legitimate enquirers are still able to contact them via the links.


Training and Meetings

Workshop: Key Business Resources on the Net
Organiser: RBA Information Services
Course leader: Karen Blakeman
Venue: Reading Business School, Reading, Berkshire UK
Date: Tuesday, 26th November 2002, 9.30 - 16.30
URL: http://www.rba.co.uk/training/bii.htm

This one day workshop concentrates on Internet resources relevant to business applications, and in particular portals and the so-called "invisible web". The emphasis will be on pay-as-you-go and free services. The workshop will benefit anyone who plans to use, or already uses, the Internet for gathering essential business information.

Cost: GBP 195 + VAT (Total cost GBP 229.12)
Discounted rate for those also attending the Market Research workshop - GBP 165 + VAT (total cost GBP 193.87)


Workshop: Market Research on the Web
Organiser: RBA Information Services
Course leader: Karen Blakeman
Venue: Reading Business School, Reading, Berkshire UK
Date: Wednesday, 27th November 2002, 9.30 - 16.30
URL: http://www.rba.co.uk/training/markres.htm

This one day workshop offers practical guidance on how to find and evaluate Web based statistical and market research information, both free and fee based.

Cost: GBP 195 + VAT (Total cost GBP 229.12).
Discounted rate for those also attending the Key Business Resources workshop - GBP 165 + VAT (total cost GBP 193.87)


TFTTR Contact Information

Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services
UK Tel: 0118 947 2256, Int. Tel: +44 118 947 2256
UK Fax: 020 8020 0253, Int. Fax: +44 20 8020 0253
Address: 88 Star Road, Caversham, Berks RG4 5BE, UK

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