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.

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