Daily Cup of Tech

It has now been ten days since the beginning of The Spambox Experiment and I thought that I would provide you with a bit of an update.

It only took one day for the first piece of spam to find its way into my inbox. A wonderful offer from one Mr. Tanzo offering me a wonderful offer to give me a portion of the money that he needs to get out of his country if I am willing to give him my bank account information so that he can borrow it for a while!

As you can see from this graph, there hasn’t been a massive deluge of e-mail coming into this e-mail box.  In fact, it even looks like some of the spammers took some time off for Easter!  I always suspected they were a religious bunch! (Not really!)

But, there seems to have been a bit of a spike on April 15th.  When I looked at these e-mails, they were all in French.  It seems like someone decided to sign this e-mail address up for a couple of newsletters and they were getting sent to me for confirmation.

I also thought that it would be interesting to see what domain names the e-mails were coming from.  This was the result:

Not surprising to see some Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts in there but it is obvious that spammers are using real e-mail addresses as well from real domains.

I also checked into the type of spam that I was receiving.  It broke up into three very clear categories:

I think that it will be interesting to see how these graphs continue to evolve over time.  I think the newsletter things is a bit of an anomoly and will very quickly become a very small and statistically insignificant amount.

I also think that we are going to see the majority of the sending domains to fall into the free w-mail account status (Gmail, yahoo, hotmail, etc.).

I’ll keep you posted as things progress.

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Everyone hates spam.  It wastes your time.  It takes up your bandwidth.  It annoys us by trying to sell us products we don’t want.  And I want to fill my inbox with it!

That’s right!  You read that correctly!  I want spam!  Essentially, I want to find out what find out more about the type of spam that is out there these days.  Who is sending it.  Where it is coming from.  Tactics they are using to get into your inbox. All kinds of stuff.

So, here is what I’ve done.  I have created new e-mail account and I will be posting that e-mail address once and only once.  I will then monitor my new inbox to see what comes in.

I ask that anyone who reads this post to not copy the e-mail address or send e-mail to it.  This will skew the results.

So, here goes!  All spammers!  Please send as much spam as possible to spambox@dailycupoftech.com!

I’ll keep you posted as things progress.

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I ran across this video the other day and I thought, “That’s pretty amazing for a simple Java applet!”

This is a program called Teddy, written by a gentleman from the University of Tokyo ten years ago! I mean, really! Ten years ago I was just getting started in IT and I was really looking forward to Windows 98!This was so cool that I did a bit of research and got the actual Java program applet! If you want to play around with Teddy, the fully functional program is running below! (You will need to have Java installed on your computer for this to work!)

Left click and drag to draw, right click and drag to rotate.A full tutorial is available online.

Sorry, but I do not have the example models online.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/08/24/teddy-3d-art-from-2d-drawings/trackback/

I have been racking my brains for some time now trying to figure out a better way for people to interact with the information overload that is constantly coming at them. One of the ways that I have discovered is through augmented reality. And now, there are even tools that are available for free that can help with this.

Microsoft has released some technology that, when combined with heads up displays and GPS tracking could provide a very useful and informative way of seeing the world. When you combine the mapping capabilities of Virtual Earth with trueSpace, a 3D development environment, you can modify the way you see the virtual world.

Now, take this modified virtual world and add a heads up display in the form of glasses which interacts with very precise GPS systems, you have a very good start at something amazing!

Here is a demo that has been put together to show what a trueSpace building looks like in Virtual Earth:

The implications of something like this are astronomical! Some potential uses include:

• Tourist attractions to historical areas showing where building once existed
• Military real-time monitoring of a remote mission
• Real estate agents showing future expansion and growth of a neighborhood
• Architectural businesses performing a virtual walk-through of future building

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