Saturday, July 17, 2004

Arise Sir Tim Berners-Lee

I know what you are thinking, who is Tim Berners-Lee?  Well without him you wouldn't be able to view any web page and very possibly the Internet as we know it probably wouldn't exsist.
 
So who is he then I hear you all asking, well he is the recognised father of the web, and in 1991, he came up with a system to organise, link and browse pages on the net or as we know it now the World Wide Web.
 
More information about Sir Tim Berners-Lee here:-
 
I think there is lots of information about the World Wide Web available elsewhere......

On an unrelated note, Blogger has had another bit of an overhaul and the post creation page has all new features many of which I intend to try out at one point or another.  By the way another retro game review is on the way soon.

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

Stay Safe Out There (Act 2-Spam)

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam......

If I was to say to you spam what would you think of? A tin of luncheon meat? A Monty Python sketch? or perhaps that nuisance of the email inbox junk email.

Now if you have an email account you probably will have a bit of spam in there somewhere, usually ranging from offering degrees in a variety of subjects to free health advice to making certain bits of you bigger! But how does it get there?

Simple, as soon as you use your email address for anything whether it is for online shopping or signing up for a online newsletter you become fair game to the 'Spammers' and they don't waste much time before they start flooding your inbox. But what can done to eliminate spam?

Well it's almost impossible to eliminate spam entirely but it can be reduced. A simple thing to do is have two email accounts, one where only friends and family know the email address and one that you use for anything else and hopefully this will localise the spam into one email account thus making it easier to clean out. Alternatively most email clients (including web based) include filters that can be set up to block emails that contain certain terms in it's subject line so you never receive the email it just goes straight into your deleted mail folder but it's not always entirely successful.

One thing is certain though spam will find a way into your email inbox one way or another, and the thing is spam like junk mail is not illegal.

Rant over......... Again.

More information on the increase in spam can be found here:-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3893363.stm