My Home Page

Doesn't contain much information, but it's live anyway:

http://www.noamtamim.com.

- Noam.

Blue Security: Use a Frog to Fight Spam

Everybody hate spam. I bet even the spammers themselves do. It's one of the highest-rated Internet annoyance. It is generally listed together with spyware and pop-up ads, but to me it's much worse. Avoiding spyware is easy (use Firefox and trust no one); avoiding pop-ups is even easier (use Firefox or one of the many IE toolbars that block them).

But spam... that's a different beast. Right now even the best filters miss some messages, or worse - mistake legitimate messages for spam (false positives). At my work there's a corporate spam filter installed on the mail server, and I still get a few spam messages a day.

Now there's a company that tries to fight back. They are called Blue Security, and they operate the "Do Not Intrude Registry". You should read their solution overview, but if I get it correctly, this is how it works:

1. You install a small agent called "The Blue Frog" on your PC (there are versions for both Windows and Linux);
   
2. You forward spam messages you get to Blue Security;
   
3. They (a team of real people) analyze the messages;
4. Using the Frog on your machine, they send complaints to the offenders.
   
5. In addition, they send complaints to government agencies and ISPs (for example: stock-spam is illegal, and so is selling prescription drugs without a doctor note).

One nice thing about this service: if you're willing to run the "frog" on your machine, you get the service itself for free. But if you're a business and don't want to install stuff on your machines, you can pay them instead and get the same protection.

Anyway - I like this idea, and hope this works for the long term. It will work best if many people will join, so I decided to put a permanent link to the company's site on this blog. I want to encourage all my readers to join.

Before you ask: yes, the link to the right includes a "referrer id". But no, they don't pay me anything for that. I really do want more people to join, because I'd like a spam-free mailbox. It's just like my Firefox link.

- Noam.

New site popularizes feed icons

The Firefox feed icon (see below) is going to be the new de-facto standard for feed icons - for both RSS and Atom feeds. A new site, Feed Icons, has been set up to popularize the icon and provide high-quality versions of it.


- Noam.

Performancing: blogging extension for firefox

This post is edited and published from Performancing for Firefox. This is an extension for blog publishing, straight from the browser - without going to blogger.com first. It's way cooler than Google's "Blog This!".
It also allows me to see (and edit!) previous posts - and almost completely replaces Blogger's dashboard. Very nice UI!

Still missing: a spell checker.

Thanks, Asa, for the link.

Noam.

Firefox Extensions

I'm trying to think of creative uses for del.icio.us tags. My first one - that's also practical - is recommending Firefox extensions.

I have tagged the installation pages of my favorite extentions as my-firefox.

- Noam.

Moving my paper

The problem with finishing college, is that they don't let you keep your home page. At least that's the case in my college.

So as of now, the paper I wrote with Dr. Iaakov Exman, "Compact Comparison of Competing Software Designs", is hosted in Yahoo!'s Geocities instead.

Update, 29/Apr/2006: another copy can be found in Google Pages.

- Noam.