Wohl bekomm’s!

Anbei fand ich auch ein Informationsblatt mit einer Auflistung aller Tarife.
Allerdings kann man ja mal schauen um wie viel Ökostrom teurer ist, schließlich haben wir die Erde ja nur von unseren Kindern gemietet. Und jetzt kommt der Hammer: Es gibt einen Wasserkraft-Tarif der sogar billiger ist als der Standardtarif! Gibt’s da einen Haken?

Also beim Kundenzentrum angerufen, Warteschleife, Warteschleife, Teledialogsystem:
“Wollen Sie Ihren Tarif ändern?” – Nein
“Wollen Sie Ihre Bankverbindung ändern?” – Nein
“Wollen Sie Ihre Anschrift ändern?” – Nein
“Wollen Sie uns eine Nachricht hinterlassen?” – Ja (Na Endlich)
Namen, Telefonnummer und Nachricht hinterlassen und gewartet. Und gewartet.

Am nächsten Tag ein Anruf:
“Haben Sie und heute morgen eine Nachricht hinterlassen?”
- Nein, das war gestern morgen.
“Um was geht es denn?”
- Das hatte ich gestern auch schon gesagt, aber ich erkläre meine Frage
“Nicht alle wollen Strom aus Wasserkraft, auch wenn der billiger ist”
- hä? Hab ich was verpasst?

Strom ist doch gleich Strom – zumindest für den Endverbraucher. Wieso sollte jemand keinen Strom aus Wasserkraft wollen wenn er noch dazu billiger ist? Oder steh ich auf dem Schlauch und kann mir bitte jemand die Motivation erklären keinen billigen Strom aus Wasserkraft zu wollen?

xrumer ist die beste!!!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/—/thumb/—/—/XRumer—screenshot.gif/—XRumer—screenshot.gif*

;)

* link obfuscated

The link showed a screenshot of some software that tends to be a powerful spamming tool for forums/blogs/wikis/guestbooks/linklists/whatevers. Others report that it automates the complete workflow:

1. register email accounts
2. find forums etc. through search engines
3. register forum/wiki/… accounts
4. click the links in the activation mails
5. post spam messages, pm other board users, overcoming captchas and other anti-spam techniques

Officially the package is sold as a “link building tool” and the vendor even declines calling it a SPAM tool, solely for the fact that it does not send emails. But in my opinion SPAM refers not only to emails but every unwanted advertisement.

I knew those software was around for a long time since forum spam is not a new problem. But this is the first time I heard a name and was able to find a website advertising for it. As with email spam, the visibility of such tools will further increase and so will the problem of spam in (web-)applications with user generated content.

The web took several years to evolve from bulletin boards (which in the meantime look a bit outmoded sometimes) to the current web 2.0 with social software. How long will it take until spammers manage to jump over?
Are there other free anti-spam services like Akismet (or libraries for local use) that could be integrated into any type of software? What advanced techniques do those services make use of? Honeypots? Bayesian filtering? The problem with email spam filtering has shown that each appraoch has it’s drawbacks and now best-for-all solution had been found so far.

Hint: If you do not have anti-spam technology in ANY ONE application that accepts user input you should think about integrating it NOW. Right after parsing and sanitizing the content.

Note: I am not affiliated with Akismet. It’s just the only one service I am aware of and it works well for my blogs. However I know and dislike that each comment is sent to their servers.

Update (19.03.): Today I read about defensio which seems to be a similar service as akismet, but maybe with a better UX.

What’s The Problem?
UltraEdit by default writes a so-called Byte-Order-Marker (BOM) at the beginning of each UTF-8 file it saves. The BOM, which consists of three bytes (FF FE BE specifically), allows older programs to detect unicode encoded files. PHP however does not recognize the BOM and passes these three bytes directly to the output. In many cases this is no problem, as most browsers are capable of handling it. But if you want to send HTTP headers from that PHP file – e.g. by a session_start() – they will fail, because “output has already started”. Furthermore I noticed a strange behaviour with IE 6 that did not recognize the BOM and interpreted it as (non-printable) data before the DOCTYPE – which is invalid XHTML and caused IE to render my page wrong. Note that this error was also detected by the W3C XHTML validator, thus it is obviously not a bug in IE, but FF is maybe just a bit more relaxed.

OK, What Can I Do?
Starting from version 10.10a it is possible to disable the writing of BOMs by UltraEdit. To do that one has to alter its configuration file (usually at C:\Windows\UEdit32.ini) manually. In the section [Settings] add the following lines:

Write UTF-8 BOM=0
Write UTF-8 BOM NF=0

(The first line disables writing of the BOM for edited files while the second one disables it for new files.)

These two lines did the job for me and I am happier than ever with UltraEdit now.

I found this tip at Vladimir’s homepage.

Ein Kaktus ist eine zusammenhängende einstellige Funktion, bei der die in den Zyklus mündenden Bäume höchstens Gebüsche der Höhe 1 sind, also Bouquets von Stacheln. Auf einer endlichen Menge X, wie lang muss der Zyklus mindestens sein, damit der Kaktus moch starr, d.h. seine Symmetriegruppe die 1, werden kann?

(Aus: Prüfungs-Abschrift “Einführung in die theoretische Informatik” vom 16.09.2003, Aufgabe von Prof. Leeb)