Posts by Mario Thomas

Judgment Day prophet resets doomsday clock

Interview?

I've asked him to be available for an interview on 22 October - as I should think he would be free then. No response yet.

UK.gov to spend hundreds of millions on snooping silo

Don't worry it'll never work....

Don't worry everyone....if the NHS project is anything to go by, we'll all have been drowned by rising sea level's before they get this 'project' live.

VOIP and the web baffle Brit spook wiretappers

Packets come back together at some point

When packets arrive at their destination they essentially get put back together and probably all go through the same last hop.

So surely all MI5 and GCHQ need to do is put their intercept equipment on that last node in the route? Problem solved.

And if they want to find out the destination, just take a peek in the destination header of any one of those pesky packets.

Merchants remain angry over Protx outage

Mixed Messages about 3D Secure

As a digital agency specialising in ecommerce websites we have over 50 merchants who's online operations rely on us day in day out.

The 3D secure roll out has been a total disaster in terms of planning, customer information and implementation.

As an example, we have 8 customers who use Barclaycard Merchant Services (BMS) for settlement. Four of those customers have recently started receiving statements from BMS for increased transaction fees - in some cases as high as 5% - even though we've rolled our 3D secure to all of our merchants!

When our clients raise this with BMS, the charges are then removed.

This is an odd play for a high street bank - tell everyone that 3D secure is not due to be rolled out until June 2008, but then start charging if your transactions are not 3D secure!

We've got plenty more examples of how other banks have handled this whole process.

With regards to ProTX - it seems they still haven't sorted out their systems after all this time. We dropped them in 2003 after two VERY painful years of explaining to our merchants why payments weren't working.

Why is Hotmail so bad at spam?

SPF is the way

Not sure I agree with your view that charging people to send email is the way forward. I fully agree with the view that the poor will be the losers in that particular model.

Far better for everybody to get SPF set up correctly first. This is bound to reduce the amount of spam. Imagine if everybody did have SPF enabled and an automatic reject if no SPF or no authorised IP was sending the email.

Add to that the magic of spamhaus and you've got quote a powerful defence against spam. Anything else that gets through is fairly easy to deal with with server side or client side spam filters (spamassassin, thunderbird, etc).

Just my two cents!