...according to some graffiti on the M25 between junctions 16 & 15. So someone, somewhere, is pissed off enough at Carl that they've taken the trouble to paint abuse at the side of a motorway. I'd love to know who wrote it, who Carl Moggford is and what he's been lying about, but I guess I'll never know.

As an outsider, I've never quite understood the way that American presidential elections are run. Why do the potential opposition candidates spend the first half of an election year attacking each other, drawing attention to each other's weaknesses? Surely this just helps the incumbent President? I just hope that whoever wins the race to be the Democrat candidate can go on to beat George Bush. I won't go in to why now, but take yourself here (Bush Watch) or here (CNN) to read more about the US President.

After seemingly ignoring him for the past year, President Bush has decided to go after Osama Bin Laden again; it's amazing what capturing a wanted man can do to your approval ratings. So, when will he be caught? The most likely dates are:

w/c Monday 19 July - Just in time to pour cold water on the Democrat national Convention.
w/c Monday 23 August - The week before the Republican Convention.
w/c Monday 18 October - Two weeks before the election. A pretty handy time to get an approval boost.

Other likely times are the weekends of any US holidays, so that's the weekends commencing Friday 28 May (Memorial Day), Friday 2 July (Independance Day), Friday 3 September (Labor Day) or Friday 8 October (Columbus Day).

My money is on the Memorial Day weekend. George Bush has received a lot of flack over his military service (or lack of it), and for not attending any of the military funerals of those killed in Iraq. I can hear him now: 'See, those that lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq didn't die in vain... the war on terrorism is being won' etc, etc. Or am I just a little too cynical?

I have to give it to the spammers, they're getting cleverer. Referer Spam started off nice and simple - the spam site spoofed the http referer when visiting your site so it would appear as a link in the 'recent refers' section of your site. Lots of links to a site = a high Google page rank and a higher placing in Google searches. Site owners soon got wise to this though, and after a quick check of the page the referer would be banned using a .htaccess file on the server, and the link deleted.

The spammers are now trying to make it harder to spot, by spoofing an http referer of an interim site which in turn links to the sites that the spammers are trying to raise the page rank of. Theoretically, if enough sites are linking to the interim site, it's page rank increases, which in turn raises the page rank of the target (links from highly ranked sites count for more).

Have a look at this site - *http://www.synapseiowa.com/ (* added to prevent a hyperlink). At first glance this isn't the type of site you would wish to block refering traffic from, a genuine site from a legitimate business. A genuine site apart from the 'Site Hosted' section in the bottom left corner which are links to porn sites. Now refresh your browser - the links are gone!! The first time you visit it writes a cookie, and on subsequent visits the links are not shown, so if you miss the links the first time you won't see them again. Googlebot doesn't store cookies so will always see the links.

Synapseiowa is by far the most sophisticated, but there are a number of others that have hit my logs in the last couple of weeks:

*http://www.skipme.com
*http://www.evesmith.com
*http://www.skipme.com
*http://www.jennyknicks.com
*http://www.princessnina.com
*http://www.tawnygirl.com
*http://www.veronicabee.com

all of these contain similar links to porn sites.

The question is, how have the spammers managed to hijack these interim sites? What seems to be happening is that the spammers are making of copies of sites on domains that are about to expire. As soon as they do, they register the domain themselves, and upload the copy. That way they have real looking sites that don't look like normal spam.

The moral of this is two-fold. Firstly, if you have a domain expiring soon and you don't intend to renew it, make sure you remove any old, out of date content. That way your site and name won't be associated with spam. Secondly, if you run a weblog, check your referers carefully so you aren't unwittingly helping the spammers.

The new release of Mozilla Firebird, 0.8, is out today, and to take advantage of all the positive publicity that Firebird has had... they've renamed it Firefox. Crap name, but a great browser. First impressions are that it's much quicker, both starting and rendering pages. Don't be put off that it's only beta - I've been running 0.7 for the last few months with no problems. Once you try it you'll find it very difficult to go back to Internet Explorer.

The main ftp site is swamped at the moment, but you can grab it from this mirror.

Are the people working for the record industry born stupid or do they put them through some kind of training course? Whilst the Record Industry Association of America is busy suing people who download music using file-sharing programs, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) have managed to go one better - by forcing retailers to raise their prices.

Read about it here (BBC) and here (The Register).

When is a security code not secure? When it's only 1% as effective as it should be.

I recently applied for an account with Intelligent Finance, the online arm of Halifax, and because of some problems at their end I ended up having to ring them a number of times. To verify your identity they ask you for your full name and address, both publicly available, and two random digits of a 4 digit security code.

Except they don't. Every time I've rung them (6 times in 2 weeks) it is always the 1st & 3rd digits; if you've got an account with them try it and see. So from a possible 10000 combinations it is down to 100, which doesn't exactly fill me with confidence - it's like having a 2 digit pin number for your cash card. Perhaps I've been exceedingly (un)lucky, but if that's the case then I'm going to start playing the lottery again. More likely they figure that as it's an Internet-based account you're unlikely to ring them that often so no-one would cotton on.