Thanks to Pito at salas.com for the link to this site. Very sweet looking speed test site. And you can choose speed test servers all over the world. Of course, they could be downloading malware on your PC, but hey, it is still cool!
Vet
You probably don’t need me to post this since you probably read Martin’s blog if you read mine, but he landed an interview with Bruce Schneier and got it posted yesterday.
Well, to make it even better, Bruce posted the link on his blog today. Martin is seeing some increasing traffic now for the podcast, and he is as giddy as a schoolgirl.
Way to go Martin!
Vet
Since I started blogging, I’ve seen a few people post what blogs they peruse. I guess I’ll hop on that train as well, especially since I just learned how to export my OPML file out of BlogBridge and import it into Bloglines.
There are 60 feeds (this includes news and blogs) pertaining to security that I read. Some of these are rarely updated, some are fairly consistent, and some are in between. Many are common. Some are fairly new and haven’t gained much traction yet. But the sheer amount of opinions and data there is astounding, just in 60 feeds.
So take a look my public Bloglines feed list if you have the inclination.
Vet
Here’s my “poor self esteem” question for the week. Should I be concerned that I have not been getting much comment spam the last two weeks? I am fairly sure my readership has gone up in the last month or so, but the amount of spam has gone down. I use Akismet, and it does a great job. But I was getting 20 and 30 at a time. Now I can go a day or more without one. When I do get them, it is maybe 2 or 3 at a time.
BTW, Mike Rothman’s links to my blog keep getting marked as spam, even after a few times of marking them as not spam.
What are you doing over there, Mike? I’m starting to get suspicious. 
Vet
I saw this article about the rise of image spam, and I started thinking about the image spam I have been receiving. A very high percentage of it (for me) has been stock spam, just like in this article. And the author of the article mentioned that there was a rise in the value of the stock (almost 28%) from the previous day’s closing. This obviously could have been a coincedence, but it got me to thinking.
So, I bought a few penny stocks, connected to my IRC server, got a few bots going,…oh, wait. Sorry, my nefarious personality just reared his head.
Anyway, I thought it would be cool to track the effectiveness of stock spam. Does this actually work? It certainly seems plausible. Unfortunately, I delete all the spam that comes in to me, so I don’t have a good record. I thought I would hit my email gateway’s message log and filter on “stock” to get a list, but that doesn’t work too well because the spammers don’t usually include the actual word “stock” in their emails, and it definitely doesn’t work in image spams.
So, what to do? I don’t want to have to wait too long to gather a bunch of spams, especially since my filter seems to be performing better since I did some tuning. So, I thought I would look around the net for something. Lo and behold, I am not as an original thinker as I thought. Take a look at this site.
Here’s a quick screen shot as well.
Basically, this site is showing the short term gains that a lot of stocks show when a stock spam comes out. It is interesting, but this site shows that almost every stock that has been spammed shows a long term drop. This didn’t surprise me at all, but it is still an interesting point.
Go here to see an excellent FAQ about stock spam and here to see a list of spam-advertised stocks (both of these are also linked at the first site above).
Vet
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