Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Ok, I have been caught in a phishing attempt. Not that I used a wrong url to give my password or anything but I simply didn’t get it. This one was a mail seemingly from PayPal and it didn’t have any links to none PayPal sites in it. The thing is that it didn’t have a clickable link either, so there couldn’t be a hidden a href there somewhere, or so I thought. But let’s start with the eMail. This is what I received:

As you might notice it does seem quite reasonable even though it says nowhere why I did do something wrong with my account. As the url was not clickable I didn’t think about it much. I later looked at the source after not finding anything wrong with the account in question and here is what I found:

<P align=left><a href="http://cddvdmp3.50megs.com/cgi/index.html " value="New Window!" onClick  ="window.open(’http://cddvdmp3.50megs.com/cgi/index.html’, ‘window_name’, ‘window_options’); return false"        >    https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_login-run   </a><A href="http://cddvdmp3.50megs.com/cgi/index.html" target=_self></A></P><P>&nbsp;</P>

Aha… there are some fake thingies around the URL but it might be that they are just exploiting some problem in Outlook or something because it didn’t turn up anything in GMail. I have to admit though that I have been caught.

Steve just sent me to a BBC News article entitled Screensaver tackles spam websites. It talks about a new Screensaver that Lycos has brought out at Make LOVE not SPAM.  What’s that you ask? Simple. You download the Screensaver and it queries blacklists for sites that host spam sites and then starts requesting those sites. You personally will just be downloading 4MB or so a day but emm… there are lots of other people that will do that too and that means that there will be loads of traffic on those spam sites. It was comforting to know that Lycos does have people checking out the sites if they really host spam, because some sites might just be used by spammers as some fake gateway or whatever and shouldn’t have the burdon of a huge bandwidth bill. Interesting concept though

Update: It seems that the Lycos site is now under constant denial-of-service attack and that several spam sites are down, even though that was not intended. More here.

First if were products, then came services and the next thing will be Design. This or something similar can be found in Tom Peters Re-Imagine, the Design chapter. Now one of my tutors in the MBA, Ralf Beuker, has linked to an article in BusinessWeek entitled Q&A With Samsung Design Boss Chung Kook Hyun and it’s a great read. Ralf Beuker is actually working on growing the awareness of Design Management and he was one of the people that really made me realize the importance of it, much before reading Re-Imagine. The article itself is very good at showing that design is really all encompassing, all around us and amazingly important. As Ralf says, who’s not at least thinking about the Apple iPod for himself or as a gift?

Thanks go to Perun for initiating a blogger meeting in cologne. We are the media city, or so they say, and we should get going here. As he mentions in his post (German) the second or third weekend in January is currently when it is planned. I am voting for the third weekend. He set up a special wiki page where you can voice your interest. Go register everyone.

Ok, so I installed Blog Torrent and now I don’t know what to do with it. The thing is that this system is not server based. I create a torrent on my desktop and then upload the torrent but need to stay online for it to seed. At the moment there is only a windows version for the client side but a linux and mac version are sure to come. Then I might use it some more, for now be free to use bt.thylmann.net as a trial system. Everyone can create accounts and upload things.

But this actually got me thinking again about Bittorrent. What if we create a bittorrent like system with a bit of Akamai in it. I mean a server based system that seeds large files in the network. This in itself isn’t too wonderful but what if you could also publish your bandwidth cap saying for example that you have 10GB of bandwidth per month on your server and you have 8 set aside for your Bittorrent. When everyone says that everyone can more efficiently use all their bandwidth. I doubt it would work for images within a page due to latency but for files like videos, pdf, etc. there might be a real use there.

The only problem I see at the moment in installing this system on my server would be that it could blow my bandwidth allowance out of the water within a few hours if it maxes out the connection. So all we need is a bittorrent like system, server based, with meta data on bandwidth allowed, used, limited or something like that. Then I can post a file to my network or even the network and it will be picked up. Add to that some geo targetting or bandwidth monitoring or both and I will be served the file from the nearest server(s). Maybe a little JavaApp might allow the system to not require an application on the user side. Ideas over ideas.