UnixPoet

This is the new home of AccessCrawler: a free tool to index mdb files so you that you can search the content via the excellent tool that is Google Desktop Search.

AccessCrawler is easy to use: just download, run the setup and that’s it! Google Desktop and AccessCrawler work together to index all the mdb files that you configure Google Desktop to index.

A couple of notes: indexing databases is very resource intensive so AccessCrawler only indexes the first 1,000 records of each database. And no, AccessCrawler has no spyware/adware/viruses. I provide it free simply because I believe it is a useful tool that fills in a needed feature for what is otherwise an excellent desktop search tool.

Apple is going head to head with Sony and Microsoft. Sony has had crap execution in the last few years, Microsoft has mediocre design and Apple has not yet released the iPhone. It may skip having a dedicated digital camera (Nokia is the biggest camera maker in the world) but I don’t think Apple can do without a console leveraging the iPod.

Image spam is a big problem. It is a problem for our clients who rightly complain about the amount of image spam, mostly pump and dump scams, making it through.

And its a big problem for GFI, specifically, me. Catching such spam is damn hard. We have MailEssentials installed, obviously, and the Bayesian filter catches a significant amount of this kind of spam.

The problem with image spam is that its very hard to check for. We can just block all spam containing gif files. But clients would complain because of the false-positives and spammers can always use jpgs of which I am seeing increasing numbers. As most people email photos in jpg format blocking this format too is unthinkable.

OCR’ing the image is out of the question; CPU intensive and trivial to bypass.

Hashing the image is trivial to evade. Even fuzzy hashing algorithms can be evaded without too much trouble.

Etc, etc…

Due to the difficulties we couldn’t just release some half-baked solution to clients. It would be a pain to rev MailEssentials each time spammers change something in image spam.

For the record we are testing internally a couple of ideas; they are promising and keep false-positives low. We’ll try to have something public next week.

The last few months things were getting boring in the spam field (which is how we like it) but this pump ‘n dump epidemic is making things, er… interesting again.

I attended the two day Computer Science Annual Workshop organized by Dr. John Abela from the University of Malta. Programme here. Bunch of interesting papers.

Great people (thanks David & Angelica!) helped fix up a slot for me to give a presentation. Which I duly did. The presentation was about the various technologies GFI uses to help filter spam, with a couple of slides on what its like to do research in a SMB environment. It was the first time I used Keynote and the Mac to make a presentation. These and the Apple remote worked beautifully

I follow the Steve Jobs “philosophy” of keeping slides to the bare minimum, putting the key points on the slides complementating and emphasing the talk rather than being the talk.