Posted on: September 12, 2024, 11:15 am

The spam and fraudulent messages being sent from Gmail are at an all-time high, and it’s time for providers and reputation lists to stop coddling them.

My work at Antispam Alliance mostly entails dealing with abuse from Gmail because there is just so much of it. Our statistics show Gmail to be the top spam sender leaps and bounds over any other email provider.

Other IP reputation lists like Spamhaus and Barracuda should stop whitelisting Gmail. This only exacerbates the issue by making Gmail a spam heaven. They need to be held to the same standards of all other mail providers and given their size they have a higher level of responsibility to get the spam under control.

It’s only when they are held to account will they take the necessary steps to resolve this extraordinary amount of mail abuse. Reputation lists exist to hold networks to account for mail abuse and Gmail should be no exception.

Posted on: September 5, 2024, 12:50 am

There’s been another shooting, this time at Apalachee High School in Georgia.

I think it’s about time we either abolish or drastically reform public education. The current system is broken and unnecessary when everyone has a device with all the knowledge of the world at their fingertips. The public school system is simply obsolete and dangerous, both physically and mentally.

There’s also a war against cell phones that appears to have come about after the Uvalde school shooting in south Texas, where children calling 911 for help were left abandoned by cowardly law enforcement officials. Other schools don’t want the same embarrassment and shame upon them. It "makes them look bad".

Cell phones are a competitor to education systems when you already have more knowledge and learning tools in your pocket than a school education could ever dream of providing. Cell phones "make them look bad".

That’s what it’s about for the public school system in America: appearances.

In a sane world, safety for school children would be the paramount concern, but that's too much to ask from our public school system.

Posted on: August 29, 2024, 9:26 am

As I work on Fynd, I’m seeing a trend among social sites like X (Twitter), Reddit, and Wikipedia blocking their user-generated pages from being indexed.

I agree with preventing or licensing content that would be used for AI purposes, but I disagree with putting up a blanket wall, a paywall in some cases, or an API, to access and index user-generated content. This is unethical, in my opinion, and goes against the open nature of the internet.

Fynd will not participate in this practice to index content.

Posted on: August 28, 2024, 3:30 am

Fynd has reached its first short-term milestone of 10 million pages indexed—a great accomplishment since starting the project several months ago.

Yesterday, I also overcame a major hurdle in performance scaling. The most glaring problem search engines face is scale, being able to index hundreds of millions of web pages or more to a database while maintaining speed. I am now confident that Fynd can scale to meet performance needs.

Going forward, I foresee handling spam sites as the most glaring issue. I cannot stress how easy it is to spot web pages, sites, and link farms built to try and game the system from a search engine perspective. I don’t know why people waste their time and money; it’s futile.

The next milestone is 20 million pages, where we hope to release a public beta so people can get accustomed to Fynd.

Posted on: August 26, 2024, 5:17 am

I was thinking about social circles recently and how I often see them succumb to negativity.

I’m led to believe, based on my life experiences, that human nature was just not meant to exist in any type of large and persistent social circle.

One major example of this is public schools, and the major stigma surrounding public schools is bullying.

Ultimately, I think social circles are meant to be small and intimate. Large social circles can certainly exist but are only healthy with limited interaction.

The old saying “keep your circles small” is without doubt based on life lessons.