Click on the picture for full details of the camera and to buy online if you’re tempted.  It looks like a great gadget, but I must confess, the fact that it uses film puts me off a bit.  I wonder if you can get such a thing in digi?  Does anyone know?

If you were to be spending money on cameras or equipment what would be on your wish list?

Author: Kay McMahon

Kay has been an expat for over 20 years. She set up the British Expat website more than 10 years ago, whilst living in London and missing the expat life. These days she spends much of her time lugging computers and cameras around the world. (Dave gets to deal with all the really heavy stuff.)

It’s been a while since any individual virus, trojan or other Web-based nasty made the news, so you might be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the scam merchants, hackers and crackers have gone away. Not a bit of it!

As regular readers of our newsletter will know, we’ve spent quite a lot of the last few months developing other websites – as well as keeping British Expat updated, of course. Many of these new sites are run using blog software. (For those of you who don’t know, a “blog” – short for web log – is something like an online journal where the owner can hold forth on pretty well any subject that takes his or her fancy. They’ve become immensely popular; so much so that mainstream websites like the BBC, The Guardian and even the FCO now have several bloggers publishing regularly.)

One big innovation that makes the blog format so attractive is that blog sites are designed to interact with each other. So if Alice decides to write a blog entry about widgets, and discovers that Ben has already blogged about widgets, Alice can include a link to Ben’s blog entry. Her blog software sends an automatic message to Ben’s blog software, which automatically adds a link to her entry (and a brief excerpt of it) to Ben’s blog entry in return. That way, anyone interested in widgets who finds one of the two articles can find the other article more easily and thus gets more information readily to hand. These links are known as “trackbacks”. Pretty neat, eh?

Er, no. Unfortunately some unscrupulous bloggers have taken this facility and subverted it, so that they can get a free link to their site without actually writing a full article. So, for instance, Damian can spoof an article by writing a little snippet of an article and adding a link to his own site, send it off to Gabriel’s blog software, and thus get a one-way link to his own site. Needless to say, the people who use this tactic generally aren’t doing it to provide a useful service to the Web user – they’re doing it to try to make money. Of course there are ways to prevent these spammy links from appearing, but it takes time to wade through them. One of our sites, British Newspapers Online, has had well over a thousand automated link requests in the six months following its relaunch in October 2007. Guess how many of them were genuine? (Clue: you can count them on the fingers of one foot.)

It gets worse. There are many popular blog applications which can be used to run a blog. Unfortunately, the most popular ones are the ones most likely to attract efforts to defeat their security measures – in other words, “crack” them. (Contrary to popular belief, people who do this are “crackers”, not “hackers” – “hackers” are interested in rewriting programs, not breaking into websites, although the two often work together.) This means that the owners of all but the most straightforward, simple websites face an ongoing battle to keep their site software as up-to-date as possible so that “crackers” don’t exploit known flaws in the software to take over the site. The problem doesn’t just affect newbies, either – even experienced webmasters have been caught out when they’ve failed to update their software as soon as a new version has been released.

The moral? If you get an annoying message popping up on your monitor warning you that a new version of some program or other that you use is available, don’t ignore it. Check first to make sure that it’s genuine (never assume it is – there’s always the possibility that somehow you’ve picked up a virus or some other internet nasty!), then install the new version as soon as you conveniently can. It might save you a lot of hassle later on.

Author: Dave McMahon

Dave left school at the age of 30 with the odd O-level (like Ancient Icelandic) and a doctorate in something so obscure even he can't remember what it's about. He then joined the FCO. Dave has travelled to most European countries (including several that don't exist any more, though he denies responsibility), as well as Bangladesh, Barbados, Thailand, St Vincent, UAE, Laos, and many more. Having managed to escape from London in 2001, Dave's now resorted to taking unpaid leave to stave off the evil day of his return.

Whether you miss the accents, the banter, or just the deep-dive information that only a local can bring you, podcasts can help you stay in touch with your homeland and soften bouts of homesickness.

A podcast is a series of MP3 files that are freely downloadable on the internet. Most podcasts consist of people talking about a subject they love, or “podsafe” music from unsigned bands, happy for the exposure. The producer will periodically release new shows, but you are free to listen to them whenever you want to.

All you need to listen to a podcast is a computer with an internet connection and speakers. Installing Apple’s iTunes will make it easier to keep up-to-date with your favourite podcasts. Add an MP3 player and you can listen to your shows wherever you like.

The iTunes app will also let you browse the Apple store to locate and subscribe to podcasts that match your interests. Don’t let the terms “subscribe” and “store” mislead you – with one or two exceptions, all podcasts are free to download.

It’s important to understand the difference between podcasts and streaming Internet audio. The subscription model of podcasts means you never need miss an episode of your favourite show, and the MP3 format – compatible with iPods and other MP3 players – let you take the shows with you and listen to them at your convenience. The technical and financial barriers have also been significantly reduced, which has led to an explosion in amateur podcasting.

While I find the amateur podcast scene more interesting, let’s cover the professional world first. The BBC is going on a huge podcast kick, making a wide selection of radio shows available shortly after their broadcast. Virgin Radio is also podcasting about half-a-dozen of their DJs. In newspaper-land, the Guardian and the Telegraph are leading the way.

So now to the amateurs: Just as you might read an Internet message board as well as the BBC website, you might want to find a few amateur podcasts to provide a refreshing alternative to what the “big media” are making available.

The first place to visit is the Britcaster website. This is a directory where British podcasters can sign up in order to promote their shows.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention my own podcast: Soccer Shout. A mate and I do a daily twenty-minute show that covers football match reports, previews and news from England and Scotland . We try to be both informative and also provide a bit of the banter that many expats miss.

One of the more popular Britcasts is Top of the Pods. It’s a daily dose of silliness driven by listener-submitted Top Ten lists. Recent subjects range from favourite sweets, to ambassadors for England, to human-animal hybrids.

I’ll throw in one more, because there are hundreds of podcasts produced by Brits and we could be here all day: The Aycliffe Podcast. It’s a fine example of what is almost an audio version of a blog. It’s nothing more than a couple of lads having a chat from their village in north-east England, but a nice reminder of life back home.

Many podcasts – ours included – encourage their audience to get involved and contribute in much the same way as fanzines and websites do. As well as email, podcasts have the added dimension of accepting listener voicemails and cutting them into the show.

While these are early days for podcasting, it is also a golden time when amateurs are on a more or less equal footing with the big boys. This means there are delicious slices of “home” available for your consumption, if you know where to look.

About the author

Phil creates his podcast, Soccer Shout, from a basement in Maryland, USA.

Author: Kay McMahon

Kay has been an expat for over 20 years. She set up the British Expat website more than 10 years ago, whilst living in London and missing the expat life. These days she spends much of her time lugging computers and cameras around the world. (Dave gets to deal with all the really heavy stuff.)

In addition to affiliate agents there are some other programmes which are well worth joining to make some extra cash.

Google Adsense is an excellent programme and free to join. The money is good and they pay on time. You can earn a good income from displaying their contextual ads, which are offered in a wide variety of formats. Plus there are lots of additional ways to make money from AdSense – eg, AdSense for search and AdSense for mobile content. Don’t miss out on this one!

Whilst we don’t do much business with individual affiliate programmes (we prefer to use affiliate agents), there are one or two that really are worth joining.

Currency UK is a good one, with good earnings, excellent support, and prompt payment. All you have to do is place some code on your site and earn commission on transactions referred by you.

Join Currency UK’s programme

Intasure is a great programme, if you have a website for expats in Spain, France, Portugal or any of a number of other EU countries. Again, all you have to do is post a few links to their home insurance products on your site. They sell home insurance for expats in Spain, France and Portugal, and holiday home insurance in these and several other EU countries (including unoccupied property in the UK).

Here’s a link to their B2B site:

Sign up as an Intasure affiliate

From there choose where you’re based. This will take you to a page with all the info you need and a link to the introducer’s application form. Please include our Introducer number: 202848, and recommended by “British Expat”. Thanks, as we get an over-ride commission for introducing you. You’ll also get this on anyone you sign up.

Don’t forget – if you do decide to join any of these, please do so using the links here as we’ll earn a commission.

Part One: Affiliate programmes

Author: Kay McMahon

Kay has been an expat for over 20 years. She set up the British Expat website more than 10 years ago, whilst living in London and missing the expat life. These days she spends much of her time lugging computers and cameras around the world. (Dave gets to deal with all the really heavy stuff.)

Spam is a very real problem that many people have to deal with on a daily basis. For those that have decided to do something about it and start to investigate the options available in spam filtering, this article provides a brief introduction to those options and the types of spam filters available.

Despite the bewildering array of spam filters available today, all claiming to be “the best of its kind”, there are really just five filtering methodologies in general use today. All products rely on one, or a combination of these:

Content-based filters

“In the beginning, there were content-based filters.”

These filters scan the contents of the email and look for tell-tale signs that the message is spam. In the early days of spamming it was quite simple to look out for “kill words” such as “Lose Weight” and mark a message as spam if it was found.

Very soon, though, spammers got wise to this and started to resorting to all kinds of tricks to get their message past the filters. The days of “obfuscation” had begun. We started getting messages containing the phrase “L0se Welght” (notice the zero for “o” and “l” for “i”) and even more bizarre – and sometimes quite ingenious – variations.

This rendered basic content-based filters somewhat ineffective, although one or two now on the market are clever enough to “see through” these attempts and still provide good results.

Bayesian-based filters

“The Reverend Bayes comes to the rescue”

Born in London 1702, the son of a minister, Thomas Bayes developed a formula which allowed him to determine the probability of an event occurring based on the probabilities of two or more independent evidentiary events.

Bayesian filters “learn” from studying known good and bad messages. Each message is split into single “word bytes” or tokens, and these tokens are placed into a database along with a record of how often they are found in each kind of message.

When a new message arrives to be tested by the filter, the new message is also split into tokens and each token is looked up in the database. By extrapolating results from the database and applying a form of the good reverend’s formula, known as a “Naive Bayesian” formula, the message can be given a “spamicity” rating and dealt with accordingly.

Bayesian filters typically are capable of achieving very good accuracy rates (>97% is not uncommon), and require very little on-going maintenance.

Whitelist/blacklist filters

“Who goes there, friend or foe?”

This very basic form of filtering is seldom used on its own nowadays, but can be useful as part of a larger filtering strategy.

A “whitelist” is nothing more than a list of e-mail addresses from which you wish to accept communications. A whitelist filter would only accept messages from these people and all others would be rejected.

A “blacklist”, conversely, is a list of e-mail addresses – and sometimes IP addresses (computer identification addresses) – from which communications will not be accepted.

While this may seem like a good idea from the outset, a whitelist methodology is too restrictive for most people and, as virtually all spam emails carry a forged “from” address, there is little point in collecting this address to ban it in future as it is very unlikely to be the same next time.

There are bodies on the internet that maintain a list of known “bad” sources of email. Many filters today have the ability to query these servers to see if the message they are looking at comes from a source identified by this Internet-based blacklist, or RBL. Although quite effective, they do tend to suffer from “false positives” where good messages are incorrectly identified as spam. This happens often with newsletters.

Challenge/response filters

“Open sesame!”

Challenge/response filters are characterised by their ability to send an automatic response to a previously unknown sender asking them to take some further action before their message will be delivered. This is often referred to as a “Turing Test” – named after a test devised by British mathematician Alan Turing to determine if machines could “think”.

Recent years have seen the appearance of some internet services which automatically perform this Challenge/Response function for the user and require the sender of an email to visit their web site to facilitate the receipt of their message.

Critics of this system claim that this is too drastic a measure and that it sends a message that “my time is more important than yours” to the people trying to communicate with you.

For some low traffic email users, though, this system alone may be a perfectly acceptable method of completely eliminating spam from their inbox – one step above the “whitelist” system outlined above.

Community filters

“A united front”

These types of filters work on the principle of “communal knowledge” of spam. When a user receives a spam message, they simply mark it as such in their filter. This information is sent to a central server where a “fingerprint” of the message is stored.

After enough people have “voted” this message to be spam, then it is stopped from reaching all the other people in the community.

This type of filtering can prove to be quite effective, although it stands to reason that it can never be 100% effective as a few people have to receive the spam for it to be “flagged” in the first place. Just like its similar cousin the Internet black list (RBL), this system also can suffer from “false positives”, or messages incorrectly identified as spam.
Hopefully you are now armed with more knowledge to be able to make an informed decision on the best spam filter for you.

For more information, consider reading the reviews and articles found at http://www.whichspamfilter.com
Alan Hearnshaw is the owner of http://www.whichspamfilter.com, a web site which conducts weekly in-depth reviews of current spam filters, gives help and guidance in the fight against spam and provides a useful community forum.