The Onion produced this 3:00 video report.

“Nigeria was the first nation to report a full economic collapse from the Internet Crash. 94% of its Gross National Product came from Internet ventures.”

From Lifehacker via Karen l. Myers.

Amazing Stories cover — May 1926

The Cornell University Library has built an interesting web-site based on its own collection titled: The Fantastic in Art and Fiction. Sample images above and below. Well worth a visit.

Diable, woodblock, J.A.S. Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal, Paris : E. Plon, 1863.

Hat tip to Amy Crehore.

Internetnews:

Some of the worst spammers in the United States could be in for a rude surprise shortly, as Unspam Technologies has taken the first steps in tracking them down, with help from the ISPs.

The company filed a lawsuit yesterday in the Eastern District of Virginia seeking the identities of spammers under the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act and the state of Virginia’s own anti-spam statute. The suit seeks damages that could potentially reach $1 billion, but Unspam said it would be happy with driving spammers out of business.

The idea of suing spammers may seem as ludicrous as suing God; where do you deliver the subpoena? But Jon Praed, the lawyer on the case, founding partner of the Internet Law Group and one of the top lawyers involved in spam suits, said not to think that way.

“We cannot fight them by treating them as if they are everywhere, because it lulls us into a false acceptance of the inevitability of the outcome,” he told internetnews.com. “If we focus on what they are using or make it hard to use those tools, we’re going to beat them. We are not fighting Acts of God, we are fighting criminal acts.”

Unspam’s secret for dealing with these non-deities? Project Honey Pot, a trap for spammers. Spammers use crawlers to crawl through every page on a Website for valid e-mail addresses, and then add these addresses to their database.

Any Website operator can download the Honey Pot software and it will set up a dummy page that gives a fake, unique e-mail address to the crawlers. When spam comes in to that unique address, it’s a double gotcha; both the IP address of the crawler that harvested the fake e-mail address is known, and Honey Pot also scores the IP address of the sender of the spam.

As a result, Honey Pot has collected 2.5 million IP addresses of spam senders and 15,000 IP addresses of crawlers. Now comes the one-two punch. The company has released what it calls the http:BL, a blacklist of the 2.5 million compromised computers.

Most spam today is sent out by a compromised computer with a zombie, or bot (define) installed on the computer. The users of these computers almost always have no idea they are compromised, because they have no antivirus software installed to stop such infection in the first place.

Well, with the http:BL they will find out. The blacklist can be installed on any Apache-based Website, so when one of the 2.5 million IP address with a botnet running on them visits that site, the site can deny them access to the home page and inform the user of their infection.

Punch number two is for the 15,000 IP addresses of crawlers. Those are the people collecting and selling e-mail addresses. Harvesting is a slow process and botnets are expensive to rent by the hour, so the spammers do it themselves, on their own computers with a constant connection, since one is needed.

Gotcha, said Matthew Prince, CEO of Unspam and Project Honey Pot. “Those will be some of the first targets from this litigation,” he said. “We’ve identified very specific targets. In some cases have a good sense of who these people are. Then we can bring the full weight of the law down on these people who are breaking it.”

The worst offender for spam crawlers is the U.S., with 22.7 percent of harvesting coming from U.S. IP addresses. Romania is second and Japan is third, both with less than ten percent of the harvesting addresses.

The lawsuit grants subpoena power, which the ISPs wanted. …

Russia has the bad reputation for spam and viruses, but Prince said there is a delineation between spam of U.S. and foreign origin. “I would say that in terms of selling physical products, anything that has to be shipped, they tend to be here. Mortgage types are here too. The ones in other countries are committing straight fraud, like the Nigerian princes or fake bank account,” he said. …

Praed doesn’t expect to squash all spammers but he does hope to make life rotten for a lot of them. “We don’t have to catch them. We just have to make it so costly for them that they move on,” he said. “We know we have limited resources and it’s one lawsuit, but we realize acts of spam are not like Acts of God. By targeting the case on the worst of the worst we think we can have an impact.”

Complete article

We Feel Fine is

a data collection engine that automatically scours the Internet every ten minutes, harvesting human feelings from a large number of blogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google.

We Feel Fine scans blog posts for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. This is an approach that was inspired by techniques used in Listening Post, a wonderful project by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen.

Once a sentence containing “I feel” or “I am feeling” is found, the system looks backward to the beginning of the sentence, and forward to the end of the sentence, and then saves the full sentence in a database.

Once saved, the sentence is scanned to see if it includes one of about 5,000 pre-identified “feelings”. This list of valid feelings was constructed by hand, but basically consists of adjectives and some adverbs. The full list of valid feelings, along with the total count of each feeling, and the color assigned to each feeling is here.

A web-site formerly named “Great Firewall Of China,” now Comparitech, will test any website address to see if it is accessible to Chinese users.

My result is:

Your URL is Blocked!

This week the stock market experienced the largest decline in equity prices in four years.

A Tuesday selloff dropped the Dow Jones Average 416 points, and a dismal week ended with the Dow losing 3.3 percent, the S&P 500 4.4 percent and the Nasdaq 5.9 percent. It even cost me money. AP

So, what really caused this hideous and dramatic market downturn?

US News’ senior writer James Pethokoukis thinks he knows.

The observant Mr Pethokoukis identifies the cause as none other than the Blogosphere’s own Matt Drudge, who on Tuesday February 27th, just about the time the stock market’s ship hit the rocks, posted the following headline:

01:28:35 Greenspan Warns of Likely Recession… *

linking to an AP article featuring the same, basically misleading, headline.

As Pethokoukis ruefully notes:

the Maestro was hardly so definitive as Drudge made him out to be. Here is what Greenspan said, according to AP:

“When you get this far away from a recession invariably forces build up for the next recession, and indeed we are beginning to see that sign. For example in the U.S., profit margins … have begun to stabilize, which is an early sign we are in the later stages of a cycle. While, yes, it is possible we can get a recession in the latter months of 2007, most forecasters are not making that judgment and indeed are projecting forward into 2008 … with some slowdown.”

Frankly, Greenspan’s remarks were hardly any more revealing than the opaque testimony he used to give to Congress.

Michael S. Malone, at ABC, read the Pethokoukis article, and agrees. He philosophizes about how we all read news these days, and how markedly the Internet is making the paleomedia obsolete, concluding on the subject of that rascal Drudge tanking the stock market for us:

That’s what Matt Drudge did, and now it seems he can move the entire world economy. When was the last time a New York Times headline did that?

All I can say is: Do us a favor, Matt, please say something positive next week.

The world’s oldest surviving newspaper Sweden’s Post-och Inrikes Tidningar (Mail and Domestic Tidings, subscription required), has gone to web-only publication.

AP:

For centuries, readers thumbed through the crackling pages of Sweden’s Post-och Inrikes Tidningar newspaper. No longer. The world’s oldest paper still in circulation has dropped its paper edition and now exists only in cyberspace. The newspaper, founded in 1645 by Sweden’s Queen Kristina, became a Web-only publication on Jan. 1. It’s a fate, many ink-stained writers and readers fear, that may await many of the world’s most venerable journals.

Meanwhile, the world’s most meretricious and unpatriotic newspaper is losing staggering amounts of money, and Arthur Sulzberger sees the handwriting on the wall, too. Interviewed at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, Haaretz reports that Sulzberger said, “Our goal is to manage the transition from print to internet.”

Given the constant erosion of the printed press, do you see the New York Times still being printed in five years?

“I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either,” he says.

No printed Times? Whatever will we use to line the bottom of our canary cage?

Is it possible to locate a man given only his photograph and first name?

A UK-based game company is testing the theory of six degrees of separation. They have given us a photograph of a man, a name, and the Japanese characters that translate to “Find me”.

We are each only five to seven people away from any target in the world. Someone, somewhere, knows Satoshi. Help spread the word and track down this person!

Project site.

Now here’s a game that is a practical training simulator applicable to real life.

Hat tip to Seneca the Younger.

There is now a web-site collecting those overheard moments of New York surrealism.

Non-Ivy-Leaguer: So where do you go to school?
Ivy-Leaguer: Princeton.
Non-Ivy-Leaguer: California? That’s awesome.

–5th Ave between 26th & 27th
Overheard by: Shocked Onlooker

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The Widely-Shared Janet Reno Fantasy
Hipster #1: Man, she is so hot.
Hipster #2: Oh yeah.
Hipster #1: But sometimes she looks like a guy.
Hipster #2: True.

–Outside Shea Stadium

——————————————————

Grandpa: Honey, take off your shoes and put them on the belt.
5-Year-Old granddaughter: Me?!
Grandpa: Yes, everyone has to take off their shoes.
Granddaughter: But me?! Really?!
Grandpa: Yes, you too.
Granddaughter: What kind of airport is this?!

–JFK

Hat tip to Karen Myers.

Reuters reports:

A social networking Web site for Americans aged 50-plus went live on Monday — complete with an online obituary database that sends out alerts when someone you may know dies and that plans to set up a do-it-yourself funeral service.

Eons.com

What can I say, but Bummer!

—————–
Hat tip to Karen Myers.

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