The spam link itself appears to be the link to a digg entry. I immediately assumed it would be a digg article page, but was actually a redirect service digg offers, similar to http://bit.ly and the like. Above, the link took me to a berry diet site of some kind. Obviously these links are simple to make by just submitting a story to digg, and they immediately look credible. It’s weird how as the web becomes more and more share-y and more susceptible to spam, we’ve somehow managed to make it MORE dangerous with all these redirection services that can fool even the most savvy users. 

You’ll notice that the message from Mitchell includes a reference to “Alana,” which might be simply a random name, but more likely the spambot looked up the mutual friends between Mitchell and I and found the first one (A) and included it in the message going out to his address book. This provides another level of authenticity to the message, and further convinces the user that it isn’t spam.

So this is all fine and dandy, but what I find especially disconcerting is that, while I had seen the two messages this morning, they had disappeared from my Facebook Inbox by tonight. I didn’t touch them, and was going to ask Mitch about them later, but found them gone online. The above image was from my iPod which I snapped before turning my WiFi on. Obviously it’s no big surprise that Facebook, as the totalitarian messenger service, Facebook has the power to wipe out any spam they see cropping up on their network, with or without your consent. This probably isn’t a big deal to most users, but make no mistake that Facebook is by no means a replacement for email, because email by definition works in an adhoc manner. Mail jumps from one server to the next to get delivered, and there is very little one single provider can to to stop the flow of that email, which is not the case with Facebook messages.

I’m no one for huge conspiracy theories, but I haven’t been a huge fan of Facebook’s invasion on my life, despite by habits of using it excessively. Remember that Facebook can screw with your mind more than you think. Stay aware folks!

This photo is one of my favourites  

I realize that I’m not posting enough to the good old jole gallery, which, after all has been the cornerstone of jole.ca since the very beginning and the “jolephoto” monicker. It occurred to me today that there are a fair amount of people who come to my site to look around, but will just go straight to the gallery out of fear of my technical bloggy goodness, so I might as well keep it fresh for them. 

Often I have photos that I’m quite proud of but that simply don’t have enough energy to go through and name and describe. While names and descriptions would be nice, I’m pretty sure it’s the photo that counts. So moving forward, I’ll be just uploading the pictures as-is with just the plain-jane DSC-o-rama title and (no description). I may however provide a brief update such as this one that describes some of the photos in the upload.

• The ones from February 2010 are mostly of Snow Valley which lights up overcast skies beautifully with its bright white light. I’m not sure the photos I took did it justice, but I found it pretty neat.
• Some are from Vancouver such as the one in the post and the trees by the ocean. 
• The sepia-looking shots are in fact not sepia-adjusted but actually the true colour with all the sodium lights illuminating the night at that time of day. I could adjust them to look white but then they simply look like day shots, so enjoy the feeling of a chilly Edmonton at 7pm. 

I’ve been having urges to rework flickrer a bit, which I may or may not do at some point in the future, but for now just enjoy the photos I’ve dug up from 2009 and a few fresh ones from this month, and look forward to more frequent (albeit less descriptive) photo updates.

Finally, a shout out to the Edmonton Journal Student Photo Contest. Submit one photo from 2009 to the journal for a chance to win some cool prizes! (Students Only). I’ve already submitted mine!

Can’t say I didn’t see this one coming…