X-Message-Number: 22413 Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2003 19:55:43 -0400 From: "Kevin Q. Brown" <> Subject: Spam SOAP RSS MIME I have appended below summaries of four recent CryoNet enhancements. Enjoy. Kevin Q. Brown -- Spam Problem: Email addresses harvested from web pages now are spammers' top source of spammable email addresses: http://www.cdt.org/speech/spam/030319spamreport.shtml and spambots are harvesting email addresses of CryoNet archives. Solution: (1) Stop direct access to CryoNet archive files via WWW by requiring a username and password for the archive directory and (2) replace all direct references of archive files with references to the "dsp.cgi" script. For example: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=22413 This encodes email addresses in JavaScript that normal web browsers understand but spambots do not. See: http://www.TechieNerd.com/despaminator.html for a description of the JavaScript encoding technique. Side Effect: http://www.cryonet.org/archive/queue/ now requires the secret username and password. SOAP web service for CryoNet search Minor Problem: CryoNet's HTML-based search at: http://www.cryonet.org/ generates output that embeds formatting information with the search results, which is fine for humans reading web pages but makes machine access unnecessarily complex. Solution: Provide a SOAP interface that returns the search results in SOAP XML format, which contains only the search results, not formatting text, too. See: http://www.cryonet.org/soap/ for both Perl and C#.NET CryoNet Search SOAP clients. RSS feed for CryoNet messages Problem: People need a more efficient way to get the latest CryoNet messages as well as their various other news feeds. Solution: Provide an RSS feed of the latest CryoNet messages: http://www.cryonet.org/cryonet.xml (The email addresses in "cryonet.xml" are converted to user names or user IDs to prevent spambots from harvesting the RSS feed.) A recent article on RSS-based news aggregators is at: http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,60053,00.html MIME encoding Problem: Even though the CryoNet software truncates the worst MIME encodings, it still leaves some MIME-related cruft at the beginning of messages. Solution: Stricter MIME filtering in CryoNet software will reduce the extraneous, unreadable MIME-related text at the beginning of messages, effective August 25, 2003. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=22413