On Message with Ben Gross

Reuters Calais: Reuters news service announced an interesting new web service called Calais. The service takes unstructured text and returns structured metadata with semantic markup in RDF. The results included entities, facts, and events. The service is built on technology from it’s acquisition of ClearForest and Mashery’s API management. It will be interesting to comparisons [...]

The fifth annual Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS 2008) will be held August 21-22, 2008 at the Silicon Valley offices of Microsoft Research in Mountain View, California. I have attended all of the prior conferences and I can highly recommend them for anyone interested messaging and messaging security research. The conference web site hosts [...]

Interview with Nitesh Dhanjani and Billy Rios, Spies in the Phishing Underground: the interview is well worth reading if you are interested in the current state of the phishing industry. Dhanjani and Rios say that most phishers are unsophisticated as they are using pre-made toolkits that often send an additional copy of collected identities to [...]

ROBOT9000 and #xkcd-signal: Attacking Noise in Chat is a description of a novel system built for the XKCD community chat that attempts to balance the needs of the community to keep the quality of discussion high with the overhead of moderating a community. (Tip of the hat to for On Message editor Jeff Ubois)
First Look: [...]

Official Gmail Blog: Create personal mailing lists through contact manager: Google has added a simple group alias feature (not really a mailing list) to the new contact manager interface. This makes it straightforward to send a message to a consistent group of individuals and it is straightforward to create groups and add or remove members. [...]

Shelf - Context for MacOS - jerakeen.org: the software is still in proof-of-concept stage, but the idea is promising. Shelf runs in the background and polls the currently running application to see if it can find information about people you are currently interacting with. Shelf uses additional information stored in Address Book to make the [...]

Recently, the OpenDNS, a free public DNS resolution service, recently launched DNS-O-Matic that allows users to register and push changes to their dynamically assigned IP addresses to multiple dynamic DNS services.
The majority of consumer broadband services assign users dynamic IP addresses rather than static IP addresses. These addresses routinely change. Typically devices on a home [...]

How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time: A New York Times piece on the upward trend of employers learning about employees off-clock activities via the employee’s online postings, photos, and other traces of online activities. The cultural, ebthicial, and legal implications for these trends are not well established.
Email checksums The Fastmail.fm weblog describes [...]