So I've been very busy the past few months. Barely time to do anything but seeing clients, working and lapping a little sunshine now and then. The farthest from Sweden I got was to Oslo (Norway) to spend a week there hanging out with friends and trying not to think about how expensive it was.

I've been posting earlier about spam, and the measures taken to stop it, as well as the counter-measures taken by spammers. It's a war that has civilian casualties just like any other war, and in this case the users are the civilians. The measures to prevent spam introduce captchas and other methods which are making websites less and less usable and accessible, methods that make using many sites become a challenge for many.

When the idea of the World Wide Web was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee it was the idea of the hypertext web. A network of documents with contextual links forming a mesh of information which supported retrieval and authoring of documents. Today with the popularity of blogs, wikis and the advent of AJAX and realtime interfaces we're seeing the way people use the WWW taking a new direction, a hybrid system that merges the document browser with the application viewer, a hybrid I'd like to call the "hyper-application system".

You might have noticed more and more spam getting through your email filters these days. If you ever read one of these spams you might have seen that instead of text, these spams contain images that are attached to the email. Since OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is decent at best there's no method presently to automatically identify these messages based on their content. However what is highly ironic about it is that anti-spam software has used the same method to stop spam and prevent automated sign ups at websites and forums by so called spambots that post junk and advertising. The hunted is now using the weapon of the hunter...