Don’t call me DOM

So, while exploring the world of Web video, after having successfully transcribed a one hour long video of one my presentations, and turned that transcription into an HTML 5 video with subtitles, I started to look in more details as to what HTML 5 brought to the table that made this synchronization possible.

The rather obvious change that HTML 5 brings to the table is the HTMLMediaElement DOM Interface, and in particular the currentTime property, which at any time reflects the part of the media content that is played.

The spammers have striken again, and we received reports that one of our extremely useful public service was used to work around URL matching techniques for spammers. In other words, a spammer who would have been identified (in email messages, blog comments) as using http://example.net/ as a URI in his spam could workaround it by putting a link to http://our-useful-service.example.org?uri=http://example.net/ instead, and given that the said service more or less entirely preserves the content as is, this allowed indeed to put a link to the incriminated content.

A little more than 9 months ago, I ran some statistics on the rate of spams I receive, and given that our anti-spam set up was recently improved to reject even more buggy messages than before, I decided it was a good time to see what the evolution over the past 6 months was:

The blue line is the number of messages that are directly trashed when arriving in my mailbox because their SpamAssassin score is greater than 12; the pink line is the number of messages that goes into a separate mailbox that I review periodically to find false positives, which still happen from time to time. The graphics doesn’t show the number of spam messages that I get in my final inbox; it’s never more than one or two a day, usually zero.