Everyone hates spam, right? Right, well maybe except for security researchers – it pays their bills. But the rest of the sane world does, and so do I, and while gmail has figured out a way to deal with the problem 99.9% of the time, nobody invented instant messenger anti-spam solutions yet [I think].
Lately I have been getting increasingly annoyed with a certain unexplainable, persistent, and surprisingly intelligent botnet on AIM. From time to time I would get messages from some sort of a fish variation. My list so far consists of the following IM names: CroppedCoho, FortifiedTrout, FreshenedupTrout, FrozenSolidTrout, HandcuffedCoho, KissableCoho, PreferentialCoho, SmarterCoho, TentativeCoho, WantedCoho, and YoinkedTrout. Does it look annoying already? Well, it is.
Each of the …
Google Helps Break Down The Language Barrier (In A Brilliant Way)
Today Google announced the release of 29 translating robots that you can just add to your friends list in Google Talk. Then you can talk to them, getting instant translation in return. You can also enter a group chat and use the bots as translators between other people and yourself.
The only downside is that the Google Talk client doesn't seem to support group chats just yet, so you have to use the Gmail in-page one.
I think it's a brilliant idea if you ever deal with foreign languages. How many times have I forgotten a word while translating a paper or trying to talk to my mom back in Ukraine? A quick IM to the en2ru Google bot and …
beer planet is a blog about technology, programming, computers, and geek life. It is run by Artem Russakovskii - a local San Francisco geek who is currently pursuing his own projects and regularly enjoys hacking Android, PHP, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, Perl, and regular expressions, working on Wordpress plugins and tools, tweaking MySQL queries and server settings, administering Linux machines, blogging, learning new things, and other geeky stuff.
