What is the budget and head count of the office of accountability?

How do people actually make money with porn?

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your emails.

I was wondering whether you would like to link to my site http://www.frixo.com from your page?

http://steve.pugh.net/cv.html

Frixo is a road / motorway traffic reporting site and think it may be a useful resource for your readers. It gives users up to date information as the site gets updated every 3 minutes via feeds from various sources including the government's official Highways Agency site.

Thank you for your consideration.

Kind Regards,
Mike

I'm afraid that won't be possible. That's my CV page and unless you're asking for me to come and work on your site it wouldn't be fair of me to claim your site as my own work.

I was wondering whether you would like to link to my site http://www.frixo.com from your page?

http://very-true-thing.livejournal.com/tag/spam

This I can do. In fact I can also add it to http://www.stevepugh.net/VTT/category/spam/.

cheers,
Steve

Yesterday I did something that made me feel like a total plonker. I was using a social networking site (I won't say which one - though many of you will know by now) and as these sites do it has the feature to check your webmail address book for existing members and send invites to other people. I avoided the "Auto-invite" option and went to "Manually invite". The next screen presented me with the title "Find your friends who are already on XXXXX" and a button labelled "Next", and a list of addresses with a pre-ticked checkbox next to each (and no uncheck all option).

Oops. Pressing that Next button did not find which friends were already members. It sent invites to everyone.

I'm really sorry if I spammed you.

Usability lessons

• Don't use "Next" as a label for the final step. To me, and I think to a sizeable number of others as well, "Next" implies that you'll be going onto the next step of a multi-step process. The final step that actually does something meaningful should have a more meaningful label.
• Give every page or every step of a process a unique page heading.
• Limit the number of emails a single user can generate at one time.
• Provide tools to help users manipulate large sets of data (i.e. an uncheck all option).

User lessons

• Don't assume that the people making the site have got the above right.
• If you're even slightly confused as to what will happen, assume the worst rather than the best and act accordingly.

After this I had a look at my Gmail address book. It was full of rubbish. People I had emailed just once (all those unsubscribe@ or abuse@ addresses for example. Irony.); people who had left the companies and email addresses in question behind; lots of people I didn't recognise at all; at least six of my own email addresses.

How many of you ever manage your Gmail address book? There's a bunch of features in there for doing so, but one of the selling points of Gmail is that you never need to manage anything - there's enough storage and enough processing power on the Google servers to keep everything, forever.

We're trapped in a half-way world where the computing power allows us to never delete or manually manage anything but the interfaces and mashups only really work if you do.

What is up with all the spam comments that reference prayers? They've been popping up for a few months now and this one, plucked from the Akismet filter, is fairly typical:

I like this website. This website helped me with prayer learning. Good job. Thank you. Please provide more French prayers. Bye-bye.a

Hi there!
My first post at this great blog!
I wanna show u my dayly updated blog: [adjective adjective verb noun]
Have a nice day!
BB!

P.S. if you dont want to see this message please write me to [email] with subject NO ADS and URL of your forum

Thank you for cooperation!

السعودية تبني سوراً بمليار دولار على الحدود العراقية; الخل يساعد في الكشف المبكر عن سرطان عنق الرحم

E-mail I just sent to Lloyds TSB:

> Dear Valued Customer,
[snip]

Hang on a moment. I closed my account with Lloyds TSB in 2001 or 2002. I really shouldn't be in your system anymore. Please fix it so that I don't keep on receiving these e-mails. It was funny for the first year or two, now it's just spam.

Back in 2005 or so I did actually test whether I could still log onto their systems. I could, but as there were no accounts associated with the login I couldn't do anything. But it's nice to know they still value my custom after all these years.

We're introducing XXXXX – the business card 2.0. You are part of a select group of blog owner/publishers that we are inviting to take an early "neak peek" at XXXXX. We see your blog as a major delivery vehicle for news and information and hope you'll have a willingness to cover our launch (good or bad).

NOTE: AS REGARDS HOW I GOT YOUR EMAIL,IT WAS A SPECIAL REVELATION FROM GOD,WHO REVEALED THAT YOU WOULD USE THIS FUND PROFITABLY FOR HUMANITARIAN PURPOSES

Name: partyboy
Date: 10th September 2006

dear Steve Pugh

You're statment to the idiot named ffffff is 
so very true, there are so many people out 
there that really are dead set idiots. I live in 
Australia and the people here are total idiots.

well thats my opinion so ffffff the people of 
australia say that "your a fucking idiot".

Name: ffffff
Date: 10th September 2006

shut up stupid heads

Name: Ozzy Ozzy Ozzy Oi Oi Oi 
Date: 10th September 2006

dear ffffff.

my little sister is more intelligent and can say 
can insult people alot worse than you and some 
of them cry, well i could imagine what you feel 
like right now you sitting in a corner crying to 
you're mother 

thanking you for a great laugh of you stupidity,
Ozzy Ozzy Ozzy Oi Oi Oi

Got a good one today.

Dear Webmaster,

We found your web site, stevepugh.net from the internet and liked it very much! We hope you'll consider exchanging links with our site, Octopus Links.

Our web site provides cutting edge Automated Link Exchange Services.
Lifetime membership to our services is currently FREE!
Please DOWNLOAD the attached web file to visit our site....

When you exchange links using our system, you can also exchange links with ALL our members. No more begging for links!

Have a nice day!
Jay, the Octopus

P/S: link exchange the fast and easy to to boost your web site search engine ranking and get an avalanche of free web traffic!!

There was no attachment for me to download to "visit their site" (i.e. get infected with a nasty virus). Fairless clueless even by spammer standards.

I decided to visit the domain used in the e-mail address, expecting to see either a link farm or something totally innocent and unrelated to the spam. Instead I saw a one page site with broken links and this:

Yesterday, I received a typical piece of link farming spam:

Dear Webmaster,

My name is Richard Volt, and I run the web site Online Dating with ManWoman.com.au | Find Your Perfect Match Online:
http://www.manwoman.com.au/

The other day I wrote you to let you know I'm very interested in exchanging links. I'm sending this reminder in case you didn't receive my first letter. I've gone ahead and posted a link to your site, on this page:
http://www.manwoman.com.au/links/weblogs_3.html

...

Before deleting the message I clicked on the link to the page supposedly containing the link to my site (it's safe to look at that page,I can't speak about the rest of the site). As expected it did no such thing. However, I did spot one familiar link:

Stephen Pollard
A daily news commentary/blog, using newspaper columns and internet sources for analysis of the days events.

Now, it's been stated that Pollard is an Ignorant Git, and who am I to argue with people who read his drivel regularly?, but in this case is he an innocent victim of the spammers? Or has he resorted to acting in cahoots with them in order to expose his hackery to a larger, unsuspecting audience?

[Update] - I spoke too soon, my site is linked to from the next page in the link farm. Damn, I was just too slow in getting around to dealing with my spam and it had been moved downwards by the flood of new submissions.

Dear Sir/Madam:
 
Can you Please provide the name of the person 
in charge of your marketing or sales department, 
phone number, or e-mail address.
...

From: 	"Sue A. Bentley" 
To: 	stephen@pugh.net	
Date: 	Fri, 23 Sep 2005 11:46:05 +0000	
Subject: 	Alpha male

Finally!

I have always worried about the size of my penis.  
When I have sex, even though she says that the 
sex is good, I know that what she really wants 
is an extra inch!