Hi, Laporte Report subscribers.

Happy Valentine's Day Week/Mardi Gras/Chinese New Year/Lincoln's
Birthday!

I've got two new blog postings for you from Leoville...
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http://www.leoville.com/mt/archives/000295.shtml#000295

February 12, 2002
Darn all spammers to heck!
(11:52 AM) Category: Leoville

Several of you have emailed me about a spam message you've received
with the subject line:

Fw: http://www.leoville.com/mt/archives/

I have also received that spam message. The company sending it out,
www.trafficbbs.com, is spamming - they have nothing to do with me.
Apparently they're harvesting addresses from blog comments. I will
attempt to get them to stop but I don't have high hopes. The company
slogan is:

Offer you great data of 50,000+ search engines & 120,000+ BBS!
Present you to a magic world of instant & effective online
communication!

And there's no phone number on the web page. Just a fax number.

These things happen all the time. The best defense is to not use
your email address anywhere on the web. As long as a page is
publicly accessible, a spammer can harvest the addresses.

Since most of the time they use automated programs to do the
harvesting, it's possible to use a human readable address that
confounds the robots. Something like:

leo at (die spammers die) leoville.com

I'm sorry that that's necessary, but that's the way of the web, alas.

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http://www.leoville.com/mt/archives/000294.shtml#000294

Saturday, February 09, 2002
Net Facts (09:45 AM) Category: Links

I was looking at my list of referrals (something new I added to the
front page, http://www.leoville.com/referrals.shtml, mostly as a little Perl
project) and I noticed a link
from NetFactual.com. (http://www.netfactual.com) Turns out they were
probing my site as part of a study they're doing on every first page
on the web!

The site itself is kind of interesting if you like Internet
factoids. Did you know that 71.8% of web sites are active? Or
that .NET is the fastest growing top level domain? Kind of a fun
site. I look forward to seeing the results of their latest survey.

Leo

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