Trap Spammers: Project Honey Pot

What Project Honey Pot does is identify spammers that come to your site. What they do is pick up the IP addresses of computers that view your site and then "harvest" email addresses in which they spam.

There are different ways to help and with your participation, you are helping everyone on the internet defeat spam. With Honey Pot, you can set traps for these harvesters and/or you can collect suspicious IP addresses.

Harvesting email addresses is illegal. With your help, Honey Pot can track down spammers and work with law enforcement to prosecute them.

Help stop these penis enlargement emails and join Project Honey Pot.

Here are some statistics (as of January 26, 2008) that you might find interesting

Time From Harvest To First Spam
Slowest: 2 years, 9 months, 3 weeks, 5 days, 4 hours, 29 mins, 37 secs
Fastest: 1 sec
Average: 1 week, 6 days, 8 hours, 24 mins, 32 secs
Std Dev: 1 month, 1 day, 3 hours, 41 mins, 32 secs

Harvester Traffic
7.56% of all honey pot visitors are harvesters

Spams Sent
70.9 messages to the average spam trap address
32,348 messages sent to the most targeted trap

Spam Servers Per Harvester
302.7 spam servers per harvester

Monitoring
11,388,458 IPs
22,287,825 spam traps

Identified
36,052 harvesters
10,911,346 spam servers

Active (This Week)
1,662 harvesters
764,975 spam servers

Received
49,742,163 unique spam messages
3,845,415 unique messages this week

Monitoring Capability
260,845,000,000 spam traps

Where Is Your Website Located in Search Results?

Let's say you've made a blog post about icecream sandwiches and out of boredom (or monetization) you want to find out where your website ranks in a search engine when someone searches for the words, "icecream sandwich."

I tried a website, called Shoemoney serps script, that offers a search to find where I was placed using different keywords, but it didn't find my site anywhere. So, I looked further and found a tool (that you download) here. This one actually works, so I'm liking it thus far. It helps you find your ranking in search results based on keywords you give it. You can find out where you rank in Google, LiveSearch, and Yahoo!
(That's Yahoo! by the way, not great excitement punctuated with an exclamation mark.)

The US Trade Deficit: The Difference a State Makes

I've been thinking a lot about the US Trade deficit today and I know that there really is a lot we can do [as Americans] to do something about our economy. The most important thing that needs to be done for our economy is that we need to stop buying products from abroad. More products that are made in the US need to be purchased by ourselves (and foreigners.)

Next time you have a choice between two products and don't know which one to get, check the label. If one is made in the US, pick that one. Even though it's just one product, it can make a major difference.

If you're really bored (or really interested in the topic,) you can check out the top exports by state, how much was exported (in value) in the last few years, what percentage of US exports the state accounts for, to which countries each state exports, and a lot more. You can do this at the US Census Bureau website here.
This is actually really interesting. For example (statistics for 2006), Michigan's largest export are PTS & ACCESS OF BODIES OF MOTOR VEHICLES, which account for 8.4% of Michigan's exports. Also, Michigan accounts for 3.9% of the US exports. That means it's picking up the slack from another state (not that it's a problem or anything.. just soliloquing, here.) Any state which accounts for more than 2% of the exports, is picking up the slack from another state. I wonder which states aren't exporting as much. Also, the fact that PTS & ACCESS OF BODIES OF MOTOR VEHICLES accounts for 8.4 percent of Michigan's exports and that Michigan's exports account for 3.9% of all US exports means that PTS & ACCESS OF BODIES OF MOTOR VEHICLES account for a little more than 0.3% of all US exports. Those little parts (the ones made only in Michigan, at that) account for more of the US exports than ALL the exports that West Virginia contributes. 0.3% is actually quite a large number considering that the parts contribute directly to lowering the deficit.

On the flip side, we're talking about car parts and not cars as a whole. This means that these car parts are likely being sent to foreign countries to be actually assembled into cars. This action would actually contribute to the rising deficit by negating in part (or in whole,) any "closing in" on the deficit the actual making of the parts (in Michigan) would do.

"Because we don't export as much as we import, we must either curtail our international shopping or continue to buy on credit and add further to our trade debt."
--Lou Dobbs

The Unicru Application

I have applied for about three jobs with the Unicru application and I have learned to avoid any job whose application is through Unicru. I am a person who does not have much time. I can devote probably 10 minutes to a job application, but when it gets to be repetitive questions that go on for nearly an hour, I've got to call it quits. When I am looking for a job, I look several places and when you get to filling out multiple Unicru applications, it gets old really quickly. It's not that I'm lazy either, I'm more strapped for time.

I'm a good worker and pay attention to detail, but I'd rather explore my options and apply to multiple places in the same amount of time it would take to fill out a Unicru application.

Unicru asks a lot of questions that seem pointless, but it's really a personality test to find the most bubbly, energetic person. They give all applicants a score and forward the scores to the business you applied to. The business then interviews the highest scorers. What if you're a good worker and just have a few personal flaws (like everyone does?) Honestly, do companies really believe that the highest scorers are great people... to me they sound too good to be true. I have the integrity to not lie on a job application and because of that, I get excluded from a job. That sounds pretty backward to me. I just think it's wrong that a personality test determines whether or not you get a job. It's like companies don't want diversity, they all just want the same person... just in multiples. Why don't we just all hire robots?

I think diversity makes things fun, you get to learn different points of view and different ways of getting the same work done. I think different people doing work in their own way is more efficient than everyone doing it by "policy" especially when new ways don't deviate from work schedules.

So before filling out an online application, I check to see if it's Unicru, if not then I'm happy. If so, I'm not going to waste an hour of my time filling out an application for a job I'm not going to get because I am not a liar, I'm not going to make up a personality type that no-one has just to appease a company.

Please comment, I am interested in what everyone else thinks about unicru.

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