Spam

I have a dream. Where one man can sit at his desk and look upon his inbox and feel proud that it is empty, nothing in it but whitespace, every little task……but wait! What’s this? An advertisement for Viagra? That’s just what I needed, I’ll get my credit card out right away, and while I’m at it I’ll check my bank details as apparently my account has been hijacked and I need to verify my details….meanwhile <ring ring> “My mobile phone contract up for renewal is it? Oh great, what fantastic offers do you have for me?”.

Why are we so tolerant of this? Why aren’t we slapping the people who respond to this rubbish, they’re only encouraging them? It won’t be a shock to learn that over 25% of spam comes from the USA. What may come as a surprise is they know who these people are and yet they haven’t been shot (’cause that what they deserve IMHO).

How true this next statistic is I don’t know, as it was commissioned by a company who produce anti spam software, but over 92% of all emails sent are considered to be spam. Irrespective of the source of this information, this sounds about right to me – but for arguments sake, let’s imagine it’s 80%.

OK, so if 80% of all email is spam, does that mean that criminals, as that is exactly what they are – this is an illegal activity, are forcing businesses to stump up the money for email servers FIVE TIMES bigger, or FIVE TIMES more servers than they need? That’s just mail servers, I haven’t even touched on network traffic. So, for the tree hugging soap dodgers amongst you who care about the planet and its fluffy greenness, what about the ol’ carbon footprint then? Indeed, spammers are costing businesses and individuals time, money, energy, pretty green trees and cuddly dolphins. Why aren’t we doing more then?

In December 2003, our wonderful British government, right hand on chest whilst parping out the National Anthem, introduced a few rules and regulations that prevent spamming individuals in all cases – but not businesses, we’re still fair game. The terms ‘Opt in’ were developed and various other rules. ‘Oh great’ we all thought, well – those of us to naively believe the government would do anything properly thought that. The rest of us were thinking that the government has sorted itself out with another huge bill out of taxpayers money and gone in totally half cocked again. So what can you do if you’re being spammed and want to take this up with the government? You’ll like this….you fill out a 6 page generic form to the best of your abilities and submit it to the Information Commissioner’s Office. Wow…..I know……of the 62 spam email messages that I woke up to this morning (which is a fraction of what I receive in a day), I now have to prepare 372 pages of documentation to report it….if I wanted to do anything about it that is.

Trouble is, you see, that we can all spend lots of time reporting this stuff, which is wasteful and time consuming, but the maximum penalty, wait for it, is a £5000 fine WITHOUT any possibility of prison for repeat offenders. Lets’ put that in an economical context: So if I spam thousands of people regularly, it costs me a lot of money to do it, but I get enough business through this channel to cover the cost of my expenses and fines to still make a profit then, well, that £5000 can be put down to ‘Cost of Sales’ and whoopy doo, there’s no real financial risk in me doing this (apart from the occasional ‘Cost of Sale’ expense) and there’s no court that would imprison me. So I guess I’ll just carry on.

So, what can we realistically do? Ignore this stuff – and that’s about it. Sorry, no great solution for you. If I had the time to think about it, I could probably come up with a great solution but I’ve got a 372 page report. Oh bugger, 2 more arrived while I was writing this.

Website Link Building

You do have one, don’t you? If you have a website, you should be working every day on building relevant links to your website. Contribute in forums, comment on blogs, write your own blog (that links to your site) and market that too. Write an article, a guide, a product review – and link to your website. Keep it focused on the subject of your website / company and keep going…

If you post a comment, article etc, Tweet it – get that exposure. Inbound links to your website are so important, it cannot be understated. You may have to think outside the box to build those links.

Start with a list of your online competitors and, in Google, type ‘links:www.competitorwebsite.com” (replace that with the name of your competitors website). Find out who’s linking to them and see if you can get a link there too, can you see what your competitors are doing from this?

Use Google Reader, or other newsreading software, to follow blogs, Google news etc. Comment on articles (not forgetting to provide your link). Some websites have the ‘nofollow’ attribute set so your rankings won’t benefit, but if its relevant and popular, that won’t stop you getting additional traffic you didn’t have before will it?

Tweet everything you do, don’t forget to add the personal touch. Build up your Twitter following.

Internet marketing is such a huge subject, which you really need to think about and be pro-active about. Could you build one link per day? Sure you can. If you can’t, should you be paying someone to perform these activities for you? What’s the ROI like? Potentially very big!

I’m not a particularly politcally minded sort of person but it strikes me that the country is having one or two issues financially at the moment and that the government needs to claw some tax money in. So here it is:  Tax fast food and processed food. People who live on these foods as a staple diet should pay more towards the NHS and it is the excess weight that these foods create that increases weight in cars and airplanes, hence increasing the amount of fuel needed and, ultimately, emissions (in all forms!).

We all know that bad diet is responsible for so many ailments, and many of them contribute towards the ever increasing disability benefits that are paid out to people who have effectively made themselves ill by ‘troughing’ on rubbish food, drink and fags. Why oh why are hardworking, health conscious people expected to keep footing this bill? We need fuel (petrol and diesel) in our daily lives for industry & recreation etc., but none of us need to eat 10,000 surplus calories a week, unless of course an active job or lifestyle demands it.

So let’s not be stealthy about this tax, let’s petition the government to tax people who are too lazy to cook properly and exercise. Let’s not call it a ‘fat tax’, that was just another stupid idea to tax successful people more to help pay for the lazy (and, in effect, pushed all the money offshore – duh!). Let’s create a stigma about being unhealthy and let’s not be politically correct about it for once. Let’s call it the ‘Bone idle and unheathly’ tax. Perhaps with a proper anti-social message, we’ll see less obesity in children too.

Rant over.

Having recently developed a GIS application which reads data in and identifies the area within which it resides, we struggled to find an existing PHP solution, so developed our own. For those of you who need to calculate whether a location exists within a polygon, here it is:

The polygons are to be defined within the ‘areas’ table:

CREATE TABLE `areas` (
`id` int(8) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`area_code` varchar(10) NOT NULL,
`country` varchar(250) NOT NULL,
`longitude` varchar(25500) NOT NULL,
`latitude` varchar(25500) NOT NULL,
`polyset_id` int(8) NOT NULL default ‘0′,
PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
)

The class:

<?php
class PointInPolygon
{

/* Point in Polygon
* Copyright Blue Lobster IT 2009
* www.bluelobster.co.uk
*/

//Queries the area table to distinguish which area the point is in.
static function CheckPoint($Longitude, $Latitude)
{
//searches areas table for all areas
$sqlPip = “SELECT * FROM areas”;
$qryPip = mysql_query($sqlPip) or die(mysql_error());
$numPip = mysql_num_rows($qryPip);

//begin process

if ($numPip > 0) {

$return = 0;
for ($i = 0; $i < $numPip; $i++) {
$rsPip = mysql_fetch_array($qryPip);
$arrLon = explode(’,',$rsPip['longitude']);
$arrLat = explode(’,',$rsPip['latitude']);
if (count($arrLon) == count($arrLat)) {
if (PointInPolygon::IsPointInPolygon(count($arrLon), $arrLon, $arrLat, $Longitude, $Latitude) == true) {
$return = $rsPip['id'];
break;
}
}else{
echo(”error: lon/lat irregularities\n\n”);
print_r($arrLon);
print_r($arrLat);
echo(”\n\n”);
}
}
}else{
echo(”fixme: error”);
}
return $return;
}

//$nvert            = Number of vertices in the polygon. Whether to repeat the first vertex at the end is discussed below.
//$vertx, $verty    = Arrays containing the x- and y-coordinates of the polygon’s vertices.
//$testx, $testy    = X- and y-coordinate of the test point.

private static function IsPointInPolygon($nvert, $vertx, $verty, $testx, $testy)
{
$i;
$j;
$c = false;
for ($i = 0, $j = $nvert-1; $i < $nvert; $j = $i++) {
if (
(($verty[$i]>$testy) != ($verty[$j]>$testy)) &&
($testx < ($vertx[$j]-$vertx[$i]) * ($testy-$verty[$i]) / ($verty[$j]-$verty[$i]) + $vertx[$i])
){
$c = !$c;
}
}
return $c;
}
}

?>