Get Paid To Get Spam: Boxbe

I spammed a pal the other day, who happens to have founded [Boxbe](http://www.boxbe.com), a company fighting spam in a neat way. Just like when you sign up for a new account online, someone who hasn’t mailed you before has to copy text from a garbled image. if they don’t want to do that, they can give you some money instead. Otherwise you never see the email. That’s [Boxbe](http://www.boxbe.com) in a nutshell. i still haven’t seen any money from it, but my tide of spam has turned into a trickle. Here’s hoping enough people sign up to make spamming less profitable, and targeted advertising a viable option.

The things I learn from spamming people.

IM Privacy: OTR

There is a tool that I recommend to absolutely everyone – [Off-The-Record Messaging, aka OTR](http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/) which works with [GAIM](http://gaim.sf.net)… err, [Pidgin](http://www.pidgin.im). Mac users can’t use Pidgin, but they get the even-better [Adium](http://www.adiumx.com/) which uses the same code for connections, has a much friendlier interface, and has OTR built-in. In the Adium preferences there is a pref to encrypt conversation automatically. Recommended!

If you’re IMming with me and you see a message that tells you to get OTR, that’s it working to keep the rest of the internet out of our conversation! :)

Life vs. The Panopticon – “controlling your public appearance”

[Another article about "controlling your public appearance"](http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/09/07/controlling_you.html). The article talks about google caches, and the new facebook privacy options for public profiles, and the general idea of the new all-seeing eye. That’s some positive education.

Internet Anonymity: Tor

Unless you’re a security nerd (or paranoiac… wait, is there a difference?), you probably haven’t heard of [Tor, The Onion-skin Router](http://tor.eff.org/). Brought to us by the freedom-loving [EFF](http://www.eff.org/), this program tries to do one-step better than a proxy: it actually randomly shuffles your packets around in its network so nobody can tell where they came from. It’s perfect for whistleblowing, government criticism, or keeping large corporations from building “[psycographic profiles](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychographic)” of you. You can use it for more than web browsing as well – for instance, you can anonymize chat if you want to talk in a rape survivor chatroom.