Raphael's Blog

Email scams have changed... for good and for bad (depends on the POV and the case).

I decided to pick two samples that demonstrate two directions scams seems to be taking:

NAME
ADDRESS
TELEPHONE
SEX

As simple as that. Now the subject takes a more important role than the content: "Your email ID has been awarded one million pounds. in our Tobacco Promo". This, I must say, seems to be one of the worst scam emails I've ever seen. Compare it to the following:

Dear Raphael,

This email might come to you as a surprise and the temptation to ignore
it as not serious could come into your mind but please consider it and
accept it with a deep sense of humility.
[...]
The sum of (£10,700, 000.00 Million Pounds), has been floating as
unclaimed since 2002 in my bank as all efforts to get across the
relatives of our customer Mr. Ruben Geissert who deposited the money
have hit the stones. Unfortunately, He died of Cardiac Arrest in the
year 2002, without a registered nest of kin.

I've highlighted the important bits of the email; the difference is clear.

I was already wondering some time ago when this kind of "improvements" to the scam (and spam in general) emails would be seen.

What's next?


P.S. if you haven't voted at the Earth Hour website please consider doing so.
If you are having problems voting because of the flash application, here's a direct link.

After looking around the several settings Opera offers I found an interesting one: "Rendering Mode":

Set rendering mode to use at startup
0 = Normal
1 = SSR
2 = CSSR
3 = AMSR
4 = MSR
-1 = Fit to width

I first though "wow, I can make 'fit to width' mode the default, cool", but as I was intrigued by the meaning of the other rendering modes I did a little research and found the following information:

The rendering technologies that ERA utilizes are Medium Screen Rendering (MSR), Aggressive MSR (AMSR), Small Screen Rendering (SSR), Color SSR (CSSR), Television Rendering (TVR), and normal screen rendering.

MSR is generally suited to smaller computer monitors, AMSR is generally suited to PDAs, CSSR is suited to mobile phones and low-resolution PDAs, and SSR is suited to low-resolution mobile phones. Each of these applies more aggressive reformatting and scaling, restructuring pages to remove the minimum widths enforced by tables or fluid designs. TVR is suited to most televisions, where problems caused by small fonts, interlaced displays, and high contrasts can also be avoided.

After reading the documentation of "ERA" I wanted to give MSR mode a try.

So I made the change, restarted opera, opened my DDPO page which usually requires an ugly horizontal scroll bar and immediately noticed the difference: all the content was adjusted to fit in the screen.
Although the effect is quite similar (if not identical) to the "fit to width" option, it is a great improvement over normal web browsing in a "small" screen (1024x600).

I am not completely satisfied by the results, but at least happy. I hope this technology is going to be improved, and that even other browsers start developing such kind of technology.