News You Can Bruise for 2004 March 23

Tue Mar 23 2004 08:23: I forgot to thank Feed Validator, the pedantic friend of Atom and RSS developers, for its help on NewsBruiser last night.

Tue Mar 23 2004 10:28 (From Impeach Central): Quasi-spam:

Read the Books that Will Impeach Bush & Sign the Petition

Them are talented books!

Tue Mar 23 2004 11:14 Steal This Idea: A solution in search of a problem, the OveractiveWeb's answer to the LazyWeb. I thought of a way to make this useful, but Spamgourmet does the same thing in a more intuitive way, so that's out the window. The only thing this idea has on Spamgourmet is that Spamgourmet keeps your real address on file and this putative service wouldn't. So what is it good for? Absolutely nothing?

Idea follows. Compute a one-way hash of your email address. For instance, "8zhkqqkZ.A9tg" is a crypted version of "leonardr@segfault.org". "b83aaa5e5c8129987c8c54f2974e84d3" is the MD5 sum of "leonardr@segfault.org". You get the picture. Then give out "b83aaa5e5c8129987c8c54f2974e84d3-whatever@mysecretemail.com" to someone from whom you want to hide your true email address. When you want to see if they sent you mail, go to mysecretemail.com and say "Hey, I'm leonardr@segfault.org". mysecretemail.com thinks "Oh, that's good old b83aaa5e5c8129987c8c54f2974e84d3.*@mysecretemail.com," and forwards you all the accumulated mail.

It's cool and secret-agent-ish, but like I said I can't think of a real use for it. Also you could break it if you had a way of generating a specific hash collision, which you kind of do.

PS: more useful, less cool variant: leonardr-at-segfault.org-whatever@mymyriademails.com. This lets you get get infinitely many forwarding accounts for one email address.

Tue Mar 23 2004 17:35 robotfindskoan:

One day, robot asked the head monk how to find kitten.

"The kitten that can be found is not the true kitten," said the head monk.

"Then why do we search for kitten?" asked robot.

"Why did you drop kitten?" asked the head monk.

At that moment, robot found kitten.

(3) Tue Mar 23 2004 20:42 The Rothe Hits!: New NewsBruiser release. It's Atom-licious! And Sumana-compliant!