Why hide your email address?

I am regularly contacted by people who want to hide their email address on their web page. This comes up regularly in discussions of web-page policies. For those who are new to the internet, this might be a good way to hide from spammers. For graduate student, professors (like the members of CIM) and software or web developers, there is often no real point. This is because if you have published academic papers or participated in other public activities, your address is probably already floating around the net in quite a few other places, so one more appearance on your home page will hardly matter. For me, for example, the appearance of my address on this pahe adds just one per cent more to the availability of my address.

You can check this out yourself using google. Just search for your full email address in quotes (e.g. "mailme@example.com") and if the number of hits is more than 10, your own homepage is only a minor contributor to the availability of your address. Moreover, your home page is probably one of the most useful pages for it to occur on, so why hide the most useful occurrence? The solution to spam has to come from someplace else.

That said, it explains why I get so much spam. I wrote a program to check the addresses of myself and some colleagues and notable names. Here are a few of the results from google.ca, just for fun.

Note that these are not good estimates of the google rank or popularity of the actual people involved. Bruce Willis (famous actor) is at the bottom of the list, Robert Sim (a researcher) had a comparatively few (37) email address hits, but a google search for "robert sim" returns a whopping 24000 hits; only half the number for Luc Devroye whose email address returns over ten times as many hits. Wozniak is close to the bottom of the list.

' (Addresses have been obfuscated by putting them in the Tuvalu (tv) domain.)
Number of hits    Address

137000 ['xxx@xxx.com.tv']
122000 ['president@whitehouse.gov.tv']
93700 ['abc@abc.com.tv']
44600 ['xxx@hotmail.com.tv']
42500 ['bill@microsoft.com.tv']
21600 ['pm@pm.gc.ca.tv']
20000 ['xyz@example.com.tv']
17400 ['spam@hotmail.com.tv']
14300 ['abuse@aol.com', 'abuse@aol.com.tv']
13600 ['xxx@com.com.tv']
13200 ['abuse@hotmail.com.tv']
12800 ['xyz@abc.com.tv']
10400 ['billg@microsoft.com.tv']               supposedly the correct one
9860 ['bill.gates@microsoft.com.tv']
6910 ['bugs@microsoft.com.tv']
5780 ['senator@clinton.senate.gov.tv']    Hillary Clinton
3360 ['abuse@microsoft.com.tv']
3010 ['spam@aol.com.tv']                             Automated distribution?
1670 ['nobody@hotmail.com.tv']                Is nobody listening?
1180  ['root@whitehouse.gov.tv']              Here's the boss.
878 ['george@whitehouse.gov.tv']             not even the correct address!
712 ['person@example.com.tv']                  not a real address
579 ['george.bush@whitehouse.gov.tv']   it's actually president@whitehouse.gov
574 ['somebody@example.com.tv']            an example of an address
566 ['luc@cs.mcgill.ca.tv']                      one of various notable professors
515 ['tonightshow@nbc.com.tv']
487 ['@dudek.org.tv']
452 ['hottie@hotmail.com.tv']
353 ['prakash@cs.mcgill.ca.tv']
279 ['leo@leoville.com.tv']       Leo Laporte Journalist, podcaster
229 ['sue@cs.mcgill.ca.tv']
220 ['info@belinda.ca.tv']         well known  Canadian government figure
201 ['denis@cs.mcgill.ca.tv']      
200 ['godfried@cs.mcgill.ca.tv'] 
184 ['dudek(various alternate addresses).tv']
167 ['dudek@cim.mcgill.ca.tv']
150 ['hayward@cim.mcgill.ca.tv']   
110 ['jenkin@cs.yorku.ca.tv']            
94 ['xyz@xxx.com.tv']
85 ['ferrie@cim.mcgill.ca.tv']
64 ['newborn@cs.mcgill.ca.tv']
62 ['seinfeld@nbc.com.tv']               Jerry Seinfeld
61 ['tsotsos@cs.yorku.ca.tv']
56 ['@recommendz.com.tv']
43 ['levine@cim.mcgill.ca.tv']
37 ['simra@cim.mcgill.ca.tv']    older address [Note: still effective, as per comment below]
27 ['woz@woz.org.tv']
5   ['BruceWilis@aol.com.tv']      yes, it's really supposed to be legit

  

The iPhone is just as sweet as they say

Well I finally got my hands on an iPhone and it's just as nice a device as all the media frenzy would lead you to believe. I am lucky enough to have a project that needs exactly such as device, so I can rationalize the purchase (in fact it's actually less costly than alternative solutions that provide the key feature set, and that was before the big price reduction of Sept 6th).

The user interface is genuinely very satisfying and the whole experience in really nice. Just as a mobile web client and PDA, it totally blows the socks off my prior Palm Treo and/or Windows CE (iPAQ) devices in terms of both aesthetics and usability. One slightly frustrating feature relative to the Treo is that the key on the on-screen keyboard are rather difficult to type with. This, apparently, improves with familiarity and is alleviated by a built-in automatic spelling correction engine; we'll see about that.

Activating the phone was tricky (without an AT&T subscription yet). In principle, the software does not permit this (and you can't get AT&T here in Canada), but inspired hackers have come up with a work around and now there are lots of tools for doing this. (I recommend the progran called iNdependence.) I would not recommend this for people who are not technically skilled and willing to risk an a few hours debugging, though. Better to get one of the (very attractive) AT&T phone plans, or (outside the USA) suffer it out until a carrier in your own country is available.

Activation was fairly "easy" on the factory-installed firmware (or I was just lucky). Once I installed Apple's 1.0.2 firmware update, however, the activation tools became very fussy and consistent told me that activation failed with an error code of -402653165 (i.e. "Activation failed with code -402653165") . I tried numerous tools and tricks. Simply attempting it several times in a row is supposed to work. I think getting it to work may well involve a random process since the set of alternative "solutions" people have reported on the web seems diverse to the point of being ridiculous. Key issues seem to be to (1) make sure all iTunes applications are stopped, (2) generating the proper home-made "plist" using the correct device codes, (3) re-enter jailed mode just while activating, and (4) making sure no other programs (such as iTunes) are using the same USB ports. I also though it was a good idea to kill USB camera demons (such as the PTP daemon for my Canon camera). The technically inclined should use "ps wax" and "kill" from the terminal window. Even so, getting it to work seemed to depend on an apparently random enabling and subsequent disabling of "jailbreak" mode (i.e. write enabled or protected modes) .