Jakub Korab

Spam filters are pretty good these days. Most of the spam you get gets blocked either by your email provider or by your mail program of choice. But every once in a while scam emails have a tendency of slipping through. You know the type - “WINNING NOTICE - CATEGORY A WINNER”. The great Nigerian 419 scam. Most of us would simply delete it or leave them in our Junk mailbox, but there’s a better option.

What makes them different to standard mailbox crap is that they require someone to reply to them, which means that they can be traced back. The mailboxes in use are normally temporary accounts on a free email provider (AIM/Yahoo/MSN/Google). Most email providers have someone sitting checking for abuse of their systems. This is typically done by scanning the abuse@ mailbox. When you get a scam mail, check which provider is listed in the FROM and REPLY-TO fields of the message (there may be two different ones involved). Then forward the mail to the abuse mailboxes on those services with a message along the lines of “This scam email uses a mailbox on your service. Please take whatever action you feel appropriate.”.

Why bother? Most of these emails are targeted at the Unsavvy. The Unsavvy does actually think they have won a lottery they never entered, or that Nigerian astronauts are stuck on an abandoned space station and need money so the Russians can get them down. It’s not their fault really. Your Grandma could be Unsavvy. We the blog readers of this world, tend to be a bit more clued in, and have an obligation to help the Unsavvy - or at least to screw the Spammers. Forwarding to an abuse email address means the offending mailboxes will be shut down before Grandma or Jim-Bob can send Njembe the Ousted Oil Tycoon who needs to recover his $60 million their bank account details. It’s the right thing to do.

Same applies to banks, paypal etc. The minute you get a phishing site, send it on to the abuse mailbox at the bank in question and they will go after it.

It would be cool to write a Thunderbird plugin that does this automatically. Another pet project to do as soon as I finish the 100 others…

Ahmed Hashim from the Egypt JUG wrote an excellent post a while back
about how to run a successful JUG. Great post, I'll probably use it as a
checklist.

http://egjug.org/hashimblog/2006/10/14/how-to-make-a-successful-java-user-group/

Since posting last week on the name change I have been approached with
offers of sponsorship, as well as help from other JUGs. Greatly appreciated.

The people have spoken. The Dublin Java Meetup Group is now officially changing its name to the Dublin Java Users Group.

I’ve been going over ideas for pushing the JUG ahead over the coming months. So far pie in the sky stuff, but you have to have an agenda:
- meetups (of course - the forum over pints isn’t going anywhere)
- regular presentation sessions
- all day code workshops dealing with a particular technology (byo laptop)
- a one day mini conference (Java RIA anyone?)

I feel the ball is starting to get rolling.

Over the coming months I’m going to be relaunching the Java Meetup that I organize. Hopefully rebranding it to a JUG will get a few more eyeballs on the group’s activities as it expands from a monthly drinks and discussion format. Some of the ideas I’m hoping to try out are coding workshops and perhaps even a mini-conference.

Already the change of name seems to have support, and I’ve even had offers of help in moving the idea along. Any ideas, comments, or help would be greatly appreciated.

Here's one in case anyone is pulling out their hair trying to work out
why they get the following message in their apache error.log:

PHP Warning: Module 'Zend Optimizer' already loaded in Unknown on line 0
PHP Warning: Zend Optimizer: module registration failed! in Unknown on
line 0

It seems that dbg somehow conflicts with Zend in a XAMPP installation,
and needs to be installed as a Zend extension. Here are the instructions:

http://rilnet.org/en/node/14

Don't believe installation instructions