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Others

Crazy weekend of spam

Never had I experienced spoofed email bounce like I did this past weekend. It started on Friday evening, and I received about 7000 bounced email that were spoofed using my quantumwave.com domain.

The problem was, the hosting company did not have SPF (Sender Policy Framework) set up, and I had a catch-all email account that accepted *@quantumwave.com. All the spoofed email were sent using some random account names selling illegitimate software or other goods.

I contacted the hosting company and they suggested that I turn off my catch-all email account and activate SPF on the email server.

One little problem with the catch-all account: Whenever I register email at a website, I usually use their domain name as my email account (e.g. at somecompany.com I’d use somecompany@quantumwave.com as my registration email). This made it easy for me to filter email, track the source of spam and know which company distributes email to third parties (I was surprised by a few big name corporations doing that).

Anyhow, before I could terminate the catch-all account, I had to set up all previously known email aliases I registered at every website I used. The last count is 330 aliases; so it took some time to track all those down and add them to the server. After that was done, I terminated the catch-all account and it was back to normal.

I’m sure I’ve missed some email aliases and those accounts will no longer work (senders will get notification that those email accounts do not exist). A rough estimate of the time I spent on this madness is approximately 5 hours (racing with/deleting incoming email, adding aliases, setting up server-side filters).

One important piece of information I learned: Activate SPF on the email server.

Categories
Mobile & Devices Silverlight

Silverlight on Mobile Devices

Here are some information on Silverlight for mobile devices: Microsoft .NET Compact Framework product manager demonstrates early Silverlight prototype on Windows Mobile device.

My first question is: Will they port Silverlight to multiple mobile platforms or just Windows Mobile?

One major difference between the mobile and desktop world: Microsoft doesn’t own most of the mobile OS/platform market. If Silverlight only supports Windows Mobile, it’d be a tough sell for Flash Lite developers. Unless the deployment platform is not a factor and the development team relies on Microsoft products or languages, I see little reason to invest in a new development platform if the options for deployment are limited.

However, two potential advantages I see in Silverlight: It *may* have better device hardware integration – something the current standard Flash Lite Player lacks, and the use of .NET programming languages.

From a development standpoint (as devices get faster and more powerful), there should be little difference in development between Flash for the desktop and Flash for devices. They should both be using the same high performance virtual machine and ActionScript 3+, and support 2D/3D hardware acceleration (many devices have embedded 3D chipset already). Developers shouldn’t have to rely on third-party solutions or hacks accessing hardware and system resources – the standard player should provide these with a common API.

I’m sure Adobe is aware of these issues. Hopefully we’ll see better performance and support for device hardware integration in a near future version of the Flash Lite Player.

Categories
Events Flash News

Flash on the Beach

Flash on the Beach

Keith Peters leaked the speaker list of Flash on the Beach, to be held from November 4-7 in Brighton, UK. According to the list, I’m one of the confirmed speakers.

Here’s the list so far:

Andries Odendaal
Aral Balkan
Branden Hall
Brendan Dawes
Carlo Blatz
Carlos Ulloa
Carole Guevin
Chris Allen
Chris Orwig
Craig Swann
Dave Williamson
Dave Yang
Erik Natzke
GMUNK (Bradley Grosh)
Grant Skinner
Hillman Curtis
Hoss Gifford
Jim Coudal
Joey Lott
John Grden
Joshua Davis
Keith Peters
Kristin Henry
Lisa Larson
Marcos Weskamp
Mario Klingemann
Michael Ninness
Mike Jones
Neville Brody
Niqui Merret
Renee Constantini
Rich Shupe
Richard Leggett
Rob Chiu
Robert Hodgin
Robert Reinhardt
Seb Lee-Delisle
Tink (Stephen Downs)

Confirm or deny? (Sounds like Apple’s Vista ad…)

[ May 7th update: The Flash on the Beach 2007 site is now live. And I can confirm that I’ll be speaking there this November. Looking forward to it! ]