PROTECTING E-MAIL ADDRESSES FROM ROBOTS

Data-mining, i.e. stealing personal information for gain or malice is big business these days. At the very least, if your e-mail address is mined or "harvested" by something or somebody, you'll start getting lots of the dreaded Spam, as Henry Needham pointed out to us just this week.

SENDING TO MORE THAN ONE PERSON

An e-mail in transit can often be intercepted somewhere. If the header contains many addresses, they can all be harvested. someone can then take all of those addresses and sell them or send junk mail to them in the hopes that you will go to the site and he will make five cents for each hit. That's right, all of that inconvenience over a nickel (tr. 3p)! How do you stop it?

Whenever you send an e-mail to more than one person, do NOT use the TO: or CC: fields for adding the extra e-mail addresses.

Instead, always use the BCC: (blind carbon copy) option for listing the second and following e-mail addresses. This is how people you send to can only see their own e-mail address.

FORWARDING E-MAIL

Even more caution applies to forwarding mail which came to you with a big circulation list in it. Many people leave that list in when they forward, say, a joke to all their friends - and so it goes on. This time, all those addresses are in the message's body itself which is much easier to plunder than the header.

When you forward an e-mail, DELETE all of the addresses that appear in the body of the message. That's right, DELETE them. (You must click on "Forward" first, after which you will have full editing capabilities, both in the body and in the header of the message). Highlight all of the addresses in the body of the message and delete them, backspace them, cut them, or whatever it is you know how to do.

ADVANCED PROTECTION

Any page including these, our own Blog pages, posted on-line can be trawled by "robots" looking for stuff. If it's the GoogleBot, that's OK because your page will show up eventually in their search results. If it's a baddie robot looking for e-mail addresses to sell to spammers, that ain't so good. If you're putting an e-mail address on a page, the easiest but possibly the least reliable way is to not show the "@" or the dot, replacing them with something else. For example, bloggs@anywhere.com could become bloggs(at)anywhere[dot]com. However, I'm sure there are some smart robots that are not fooled by this simple technique. Maybe "bloggs at anywhere dot cee-oh-em" is better? (Looks more like a sentence).

A much better method is to emulate those "captcha" images, like where you are told to type in the letters that you see, in order to post a comment somewhere. To use this method, you need to type your e-mail address into a photo editor of some kind and then edit the image so that it is distorted, colored, but still readable. Here's mine: . Then you put it in with your text by inserting your address image in-line with the rest of your text, as I have just done here.

You can also use JavaScript if you're a true web geek. The principle is to assign parts of your e-mail address to variables and then use a script to display (document.write) your address. Currently, this method is invisible to robots. Even better if you make the script a function and store it in a separate file. You would then 'include' the file in your page header and call the function from your page content. (Well, I tried to show you my JavaScript code for this, but Google's Blog Editor is ignoring my use of the "code" element - so if anyone wants to know, e-mail me at the above address).

Myself, I prefer to use the image method described above because it can be used wherever it's possible to insert an image - which is just about everywhere, these days.

THE 85th ENTRY AND THE OLYMPICS

Could this be our George?

An unknown individual was caught by surveillance camera at VANOC headquarters in Vancouver attempting to purloin the prototype Olympic torch valued at $12,000. He later claimed that he was only attempting to promote the Olympic spirit as he intended to take it to his 85th Entry Reunion at RAF Halton near Aylesbury in England later this year.

A big Russki Flying Machine

Came in an e-mail from Grog Watkins:


In the 1930s the Russian army was  obsessed by the idea of creating huge planes. At that time, they were proposed to  have as many propellers as possible to help carrying those huge flying  fortresses into the air;  jet propulsion had not been implemented yet.  Not many photos were  saved from those times because of the high secrecy levels of such projects  and because a lot of time has already passed. Still, in the photos below you  can see  one such plane - a heavy bomber K-7. Built in Russia during the 1930s, it  flew 11 times before crashing and killing 15 people.
The designer,  Konstantin  Kalinin, wanted to build two more planes but the project was scrapped. Later, Stalin had  Kalinin executed. Evidently, it was not  good to fail on an expensive project  under Stalin . It's  got propellers on the back of the wings, too. You can count 12 engines  facing front. The  size  would be equivalent to the Empire State Building on  its  side, with  cannons. And you think the 747 was big... not only a bunch of engines but  check out the cannons the thing was carrying.

(Amazing how quickly those cannons got added while the "passengers" waited patiently with their modern-looking luggage. You can see more about this giant here Ed.  ;-)

best regards,
Webmaster Ted

8T5th Entry Google Account

As you may have guessed, we now have a Google account, complete with e-mail, photo storage, calendar, blog and all the other good things that Google provides. I'll be taking care of the account but interested individuals can be given access, for example, to the blog as authors. I'll be putting out an email to explain more later.

Anon 682494

Addresses updated again

Gorder Suter sent in a bunch of additionals and a correction or three.

The page has been updated and uploaded.

I've also changed my address both against my name and at the bottom of the page.

TTFN,

Webmaster Ted

Testing a Calendar on the Website

I've put a calendar up on the website, but it's not visible as yet, I'm still learning about how to provide access to you guys other than just reading it. For now, you can see it by clicking here. Do feel free to add comments to this or any other post, for that matter.

Cheers,

Webmaster Ted

RSS FEED

I've put an RSS feed at the bottom of the blog page. E-mail me if you don't how to use RSS. Basically, it allows to see if the blog has new posts without having to actually go to the blog. For example, I have a feed displayed on an iGoogle home page. Right now it's only showing the first post, but that's life in cyber-space, eh?

Webmaster Ted

FIRST POST

Welcome. This is a test post for some old-timers who were trained in the art of aircraft maintenance at Royal Air Force, Halton near Aylesbury in England.

I need a suitable picture for the right-hand side. For now, I've put I picture of a plane I used to part-own. It's a Rollason Condor wood&fabric tail-dragger then based at Sturgate airport in sunny Lincolnshire. Flew like a dream, somewhat reminiscent of a Chipmunk.

Y'all take care now, y'hear?

Webmaster Ted.