Sender-ID Back from the Dead
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With the closure of IETF&#39;s MARID group a month ago, many of us have left Microsoft&#39;s Sender-ID standard for the dead. After being rejected by the Apache Foundation and the Debian Project over licensing issues
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Storm Worm pursues more &quot;members&quot; &gt;&gt; Advertisement &lt;&lt;  ALERT: "How A Hacker Launches A Blind SQL Injection Attack Step-by-Step"!" - White Paper  Blind SQL Injection can deliver total control of your server to a hacker giving them the ability to read, write and manipulate all data stored in your backend systems! Download this *FREE* white paper from SPI Dynamics for a complete guide to protection! https://download.spidynamics.com/1/ad/bsq.asp?Campaign_ID=701600000004c29
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Sara Golemon describes the path she took in a search for an OpenID library to work with in PHP. The trip took her through both PEAR and PECL with no promising results. Heading off to a Yahoo! search she comes up with one good result - Auth_OpenID.   Now, granted, this is the first OpenID system I've looked at, and I haven't really dug into it in depth, but I've got to say, this is some clean, well written code and the author clearly understands the maths involved (or at least fakes it shockingly good).   Knowing this, she asks "why isn't this in PEAR" if it's so well-structured and useful? It works with any version of PHP from 4 up and is smart enough to adapt itself to whatever the structure of your application might be.   There's also some great comments on the post where it's explained why the library isn't in PEAR, another OpenID package for PHP and suggestions for alternate distribution methods (PEAR channel).
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Microsoft&#39;s earlier attempts at a specification for Sender ID, the technology which is used for verifying the authenticity of e-mail with Internet Protocol records
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Although frankly I really didn't feel the need to read the entire thread, I can tell you that the posting to the PHP 3 mailing list is related to the Smarty Templating Engine back in the day. In fact, I believe this was the original spec Andrei proposed before Smarty even existed. Although I don't remember the exact e-mail, this posting reminded me that there was a point in time I thought exactly this way... quoting myself:
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Tycho:  To the great delight of a vocal percentage of the readership, Div has returned.  Briefly.  Now he can return to attic storage, there to languish in oak, resting in close proximity to my Spelling Bee medals and an black baseball mitt (unused).
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A ll William Kim has left of his only son is a new kind of life after death: Daniel's electronic remains. A cellphone with its address book -- the father calls each number on the list, hoping to connect to someone who knows something. An instant-messaging account. Online game rooms, filled with...
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By Garry Bushell  A BIG thank-you to Virgin for closing my email account without warning. All the nice reviews I'd written of Jo Brand and Louis Walsh were lost forever. Any company able to supply a better internet service, please feel free to get in touch.
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People who think their instant messages disappear after being sent should think again.
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Q A couple of times in the past month, my e-mail address has been hijacked and used to send out spam. One day, I opened my mail to see more than 100 returned messages, all of which were using my e-mail to send spam! How can I prevent this?
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Digital tracks may help pinpoint Potter leaker &gt;&gt; Advertisement &lt;&lt;  ALERT: "How A Hacker Launches A Blind SQL Injection Attack Step-by-Step"!" - White Paper  Blind SQL Injection can deliver total control of your server to a hacker giving them the ability to read, write and manipulate all data stored in your backend systems! Download this *FREE* white paper from SPI Dynamics for a complete guide to protection! https://download.spidynamics.com/1/ad/bsq.asp?Campaign_ID=701600000004c29
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To curb spam, getting your Hotmail via Outlook/Express won&#39;t be free much longer ... posted 12:49pm EST Tue Sep 28 2004 - submitted by Christopher R. Anderson.
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SPAM has been one of the major turn offs for most web users. Checking emails have become a hassle when you cannot be sure the mail you received is from the actual sender!
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THE BAGLE worm is back from the dead with three new variants which are different enough to avoid some AV scanners. McAfee, Symantec and Sophos also reported intercepting many samples of the new worms and advised customers to update antivirus signatures.
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There's an old parable that goes like this:A man is sentenced to death by the king. In desperation, he asks that his life be spared if he can teach a pig to sing. The king agrees, and gives the man a year. Walking the man back to his cell, a guard comments that it seems like a foolish bargain; he doesn't really expect to be able to do it, does he? The man replies, "A lot can happen in a year. The king could die. I could die. Or who knows, maybe the pig will learn to sing."(Maybe it's an allegory. Or a fable. I can never keep these things straight.)I'm using the pig story to segu&#233; into Bayesian spam filters. But first, a quick trip back to spam filters in general. E-mail spam has been around for a while, and different schemes have been developed to determine whether a piece of e-mail is (probably) legit, or whether it's spam. One way is to create a blacklist of senders: Nothing from, say, 123junk.com is allowed into your inbox. Another is a whitelist: If you aren't an approved sender (e.g., mom, dad, Cousin Jimmy), you're mail won't go through. A third is the 'word search,' which looks for the kinds of words that rarely make it into a legitimate e-mail: "Viagra" springs to mind, and there are plenty of others that can't be printed on a family Web site. All of these anti-spam techniques have problems, mostly because they were either too narrowly focused to be effective, or because they were too easy for spammers to get around.But then came a different kind of spam filter - one based on the work of an obscure mathematician from the 18th century. One that works.Reverend TomThomas Bayes was an English Presbyterian minister and mathematician who lived from 1702 to 1761 in and near London. He only published two things while he was alive: a paper that tried to prove that God wants everyone to be happy, and another defending the accuracy of the calculus. After he died, though, is when Bayes's most important work was published. Called "Essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances," it was discovered by an acquaintance (one Richard Price, for those of you who like the details) who sent it to the Royal Society which published it in its Philosophical Transactions in 1763.Out of that paper came what's called Bayes's Rule or Bayes's Theorem. It's a formula for guessing how likely it is that something will happen based on two or more independent events. Imagine you want to know what the chances of your 1986 Toyota Corolla making it cross country. Some "independent events" that might stop you are your engine failing, your transmission failing, your tires failing, and so on.To apply Bayesian probability here, you would figure the odds of each of those things, then input those numbers into Bayes's formula (which, by the way, is fairly simple). Let's say you figure the chance of your engine failing is 10%, the chance of your transmission failing is 15%, and the chance of your tires failing is 30%. Popping the numbers into Rev. Tom's formula tells you that the chance of your trip being ruined by any one of these things is actually less than 1%. Happy trails.(Is this counterintuitive? Maybe. Check out another example at Process Software.In 2002, Paul Graham changed the spam war forever when he published an article called "A Plan for Spam". In it, he demonstrated how Bayes's work could be used to sort out spam from legitimate e-mail.Instead of calculating the odds of whether your car will make it across the country, Graham used Bayesian techniques to determine how likely a piece of mail is to be spam. It bases this on how likely each word is to be in a spam message.(By the way, the word "word" is misleading. Bayesian filters also take into account things like Web links, text colors, and font size.)Thus, the more spam messages (and good messages) you get, the more information a Bayesian filter has and the better it gets at identifying junk. A lot of very good anti-spam products are based on Bayesian techniques.And they work very, very well.Basic trainingFirst, a Bayesian filter has to be trained; you need to tell it these are legit messages and these are spam. (Every Bayesian filter has a simple way to do this, usually by having you put all your spam in one mailbox. It then scans that Spam box for spam, and your Inbox for legit mail.)The filter looks at the words in every message to get an idea of what spam looks like. For example, if the word "buy" appears in 100 spam messages and only one legit message, it might be given a score of .99 - there's a 99% chance a message with "buy" in it is spam.On the other hand, the word "column" would (for me) be the opposite; it might appear in 99 legit messages and only one spam, and thus get a score of .01 or one percent.After going through this training process, the Bayesian software ends up with a list of words and their spammish probabilities (often called a "corpus"). When a new message arrives, the filter looks through the words in it and gives each a score based on those 'training' messages. Then it uses Bayes's formula to come up with a score for the message as a whole. If that's above a certain threshold, the message is tagged as spam and either marked, deleted, or separated.But the real beauty of the Bayesian-filter system comes next, when spam gets through. It's bound to do that, because spammers always try new tricks - they put in long passages of poetry, or try to disguise words with odd misspellings, or come up with other ways to sneak by. When a piece of spam ends up in your Inbox, a Bayesian filter has an extra option: one to mark it as junk. Sometimes it's a button or menu choice, other times you just need to move the message to a Spam folder. It also works the other way: Legit messages may land in the Spam box for various reasons, and they must be re-routed. Either way, the filter now knows what the newest kind of spam looks like.Bayesian filters work because they aren't dependent on things that might change: the way words are spelled, or where a message comes from. All they care about is what you say is spam. At least one filter, POPFile, actually lets you set up categories beyond just 'spam' and 'not spam,' so you can teach it to automatically sort out messages on a particular topic.There are a lot of technical ideas out there for curbing the flow of spam, but I'm willing to bet that none of them will work very well. Stopping spam is up to us, and Reverend Bayes has given us a powerful tool.Andrew Kantor is a technology writer, pundit, and know-it-all who covers technology for the Roanoke Times. He's also a former editor for PC Magazine and Internet World. Read more of his work at kantor.com. His column appears Fridays on USATODAY.com.
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Dave Dash has posted a quick script to help with an integration of openID into your application - well, really just to read the response back easily.   I'm working on implementing openID for reviewsby.us and for use in symfony apps. One thing I was having trouble with was parsing key value pairs, which is one of the requirements to reading responses. It's a fairly easy task, but [PHP][] offers so many ways to do this.   He notes the spec for how the results are returned and shares his code (based around a regular expression) that goes through the response and separates things out into key/value pairs automatically.
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Richard Thomas comments on a "funny little PHP 'virus'" that he's noticed coming to him via emails:   Got an email that claimed to be from my host, it used a generic return address and talked about security upgrades and such and how due to new policy to help keep a secure data center I was required to upload and run 1 of 2 files in a zip attachment, the first was a php file the other was an asp file.   Of course, it wasn't from the host, so he investigated a little further to find out exactly what was going on with the file. Basically, it was a modified nsTView file with some added emailing and password discovery code. The code was "hidden" though - through a base64_encode call on one side and then decoded it on the other to cause the server to execute the code. He even posts and example of what the base64ed code might look like.