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Comment: Refine your definition of spam (Score 2) 265

by christopherfinke (#48133021) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Why Can't Google Block Spam In Gmail?

Some of it is UCE, partially due to a couple dingbats with similar names who apparently think my gmail account belongs to them.

This isn't spam; at worst, it's bacn with a case of mistaken identity.

As someone whose full-time job is preventing spam (I work on Akismet, which checks about 380MM Web comments per day for spam), my general response to these kinds of questions is this: Fighting spam is hard because what's spam for you is not always spam for someone else, and spammers are continually changing tactics -- what worked to prevent spam yesterday may not work as well tomorrow, so it's a constantly moving target.

In my experience, GMail's filter is just ok. I see about 50 spam per day end up in my spam folder, 3 or 4 that make it to my inbox, and maybe one false positive per month (when I bother checking). That's a 94% success rate with a 0.3% FP rate (based on my ham email activity), assuming that they're not instantly discarding blatant spam that wouldn't even merit ending up in the spam folder (which they very well might be doing). If Akismet had this same success rate filtering comments on my blog, I'd have to manually mark 230 comments as spam each day instead of Akismet's missed spam average of about one per day. I don't complain about it though, since fighting spam is hard (see above).

Comment: Re:Someone needs to lose their job over this (Score 1) 224

by christopherfinke (#32794104) Attached to: YouTube Hit By HTML Injection Vulnerability

reject any comment with the < or & characters in it.

What if you want to comment about AT&T or write a mathematical equation stating that x < y.

Users should be able to enter anything they want; htmlspecialchars() and nl2br() ensure that it will be displayed exactly as they entered it.

Comment: Re:Why then (Score 2, Informative) 164

by christopherfinke (#32014102) Attached to: Firefox Arrives On Android

If the mobile version supports plugins, and those plugins are in the same format as the desktop ones. There's no guarantee of either, though.

It does, and they are. There are a few tweaks that add-on authors should make to their add-ons to support the mobile versions (mainly UI-related), but those are trivial for most cases. I say this as someone who has ported more add-ons to Firefox for Mobile than anyone else (as far as I know).

Comment: Re:Beta is terrible (Score 1) 278

by christopherfinke (#30481680) Attached to: Firefox Mobile Threatens Mobile App Stores, Says Mozilla

No inertial scrolling.

The nightly I'm using has it.

One window per instance, no tabs.

The betas have had tabs for a long time. They're in the left toolbar.

Package is not "optified" - it installs to the device root instead of /opt

Fixed 3 weeks ago

Currently there are only three add-ons not marked "experimental"

I myself have written five add-ons for Mobile that are out of the sandbox, so I don't know where you're getting your numbers.

even in experimental there's no AdBlock Plus

Support added 2 weeks ago

It sounds like you haven't tried Fennec since the early betas. Might be time to give it another shot.
