Miscellany
Miscellaneous articles
The Scourge of Spam
Spam used to just a nuisance. A little bit of junk email here and there. Hit delete and forget it. Now it is turning into a major headache. Some spam contains viruses. A lot is just plain fraud. The fraud ranges from spam proporting to be from your bank asking you to click a fake link to supply your net banking login and password, to the Nigerian scams, to advertising products that have doubtful claims.
Why Bother With Web Standards?
Standards make things standard. I know it's an obvious statement but it's meant to be. The reasons for having standards should be obvious too. The web used to be designed for Netscape or Internet Explorer. You either designed to get the best for one browser or you designed a compromise to suit both. The other way around it was do two designs and set a javascript routine to sniff the browser and direct the use to the appropriate files. This is extra work and what happens if you decide to incorporate another browser into your design? Another set of files?
Enough is is enough. The nature of the web is changing. More and more portable devices are connecting to the net. Handheld computers and 3G phones are but 2 examples. Standards based web pages should display
quite adequately on these devices. Moving to a standards based design helps to future-proof your web site. There is also the issue of accessibility to consider. A standards based web site can be rendered by a speech based browser. By not having your web site accessible, you are not only shutting out part of your audience, you could also be breaking the law in some legal jurisdictions. Moving to a standards based design also helps web designers. As part of the redesign of this site, we separated out he content from the layout. The html files
contain the test and graphics. The layout is handled by cascading style sheets. The beauty of this approach is that if I want to change the look of the site, all I need to do is change the style sheet and voila... a new look site.
Melton South Community Centre Revamp
The Melton South Community Centre did have a free website which was put together as part of the Federal government's “Work for the Dole Program”. The site was not particularly up-to-date and had a few other problems. It was time for an overhaul. Drupal came to the rescue.
11 Spammers Indicted in a US Court
A US federal grand jury in Detroit on the 3rd of January, 2008, indicted 11 people over a wide ranging international fraud. The people included: several Americans, a Russian and a man with Canadian and Hong Kong citizenship. The fraud involved spamming, sending out millions of messages in a "pump and dump" scheme.
Google Adwords Phishing Scam
We recently received an email asking us to to update our Google AdWords. This is clearly a phishing scam that has nothing to do with Google. This makes a change from the regular banking or eBay ones we get.
The link says http://adwords.google.com/select/login while it really points to http://www.adwords.google.com.0lks.cn/select/Login. Note the extra bit in the URL.
Don't get caught out.
The message reads below.
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This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does
not accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
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Dear Google AdWords Customer,
We were unable to process your payment.
Your ads will be suspended soon unless we can process your payment.
To prevent your ads from being suspended, please update your payment information.
Please sign in
to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login,
and update your payment information.
