Spam King Arrested

Todays news that the spam king of Seattle has been arrested, also brought hope that the level of spam in our mailboxes would be less. However, I would not get your hopes up too high yet. He is only one of the top ten.

Many of the spams on the Internet today originate in places outside the control of the US Government. So what makes them think that with all of the spam originating in China and Russia and other Eastern European countries, that the level of spam will decrease significantly with the arrest of just one operator. In a 12 hour period my spam box had over 2000 spams and it does not seem to be decreasing. Instead it is just the opposite.

So what can you do? Make sure that your ISP has spam blocking software. If they dont, insist that they get it. Most of them these days do implement some type of blocking software.

Turn on your junk email box. In Microsoft Entourage, this has the effect of catching some things that still get through but keep an eye on this as well as sometimes there are false positives.

If you are completely overwhelmed, you can do a White List, which will allow only those on the list to email you. Although a bit draconian in nature, it does work and is completely controllable.

Hammer Man on Google Maps

Google today announced that they will be having street level views of the google maps. So I thought I would check it out. But I found that my location in Seattle was not available with the new features. But what I did find is that the shadow of the famous "Hammer Man" at the Seattle Art Museum is viewable in the satellite photo of the corner of University and First Avenue in downtown Seattle.

There is even a bus turning on that corner in the satellite photo so you cant miss it when you are looking, but be sure to go down to the lowest viewable level in google maps.