A California rich media company has launched the Popstitial, a new way for advertisers and Web publishers to serve popup style advertising to web users who have popup blockers on their computer.

The "Popstitial' has been developed by FPBA Group, a rich-media technology company. While the popstitial doesn't defeat pop blockers, it instead determines whether a popup blocker is being used. If so, Popstitial then serves up a full-page advertisement that can either be a separate ad - using Flash, video, animation or static images - or the same style as the missed pop-up/pop-under.

The latest installment of the CodeCon trilogy has been unveiled, as the coders DIY technical conference brings a mix of old hands and bedsit coders to San Francisco next month.

Highlights of CodeCon 2004 include FunFS, a low latency, userspace file system; the in house source code management system that's been used by DEC/Compaq's microprocessor design team for the past five years, Vesta, and a presentation from Roger Dingledine on a second-generation anonymizing overlay to TCP/IP. "Freely available unpatented Onion Routing code has been a cypherpunk goal for more than a decade," note the organizers.

The event takes place over a long weekend (February 20 to 22) and registration is $95, with a $20 early bird discount. For value for money, it's one of the highlights of the calendar. Highlights of previous CodeCons have included the Peek-A-Booty anonymous browser, and Alluvium "swarm radio", a peer to peer broadcasting infrastructure that reminds the RIAA that their problems have only just begun.

"Daphnia blue-crested fish cattle, darkorange fountain moss, beaverwood educating, eyeblinking advancing, dulltuned amazons...."

This is not a failed attempt at free-form prose. It's a snippet of a spam message intended to promote a sexual stimulant, a deliberate crack at sneaking past and spoiling some of the most popular antispam filters.

By throwing a hundred or so random words rarely used in sales spiels into each e-mail missive, spammers hope to thwart Bayesian filters by making the spam appear to be personal correspondence.

The strange strings of words, which usually appear at the bottom of spam and sometimes in the subject line, are automatically added by spammers' mass-mailer software, according to Steve Linford of Spamhaus, an antispam advocacy organization.

"This random noise is technically known as a 'hash buster,'" Linford explained. "Hashing" is a technique used by some spam filters to quickly compare incoming mail to known spam.

As expected, spammers don't seem too impressed with the US Can Spam Act, which was enforced on January 1. Nor have they changed their tactics.

However, Spamhaus plans to fight back. Yesterday, it released its Exploits Block List (XBL), a real-time DNS-based database of IP addresses of illegal 3rd party exploits, including open proxies, worms/viruses with built-in spam engines, and other types of trojan-horse exploits utilized by spammers. This list is designed to sit alongside the Spamhaus Block List (SBL), which blocks incoming spam from direct spam sources. The combination of SBL and XBL enables ISPs to safely reject a high volume of incoming spam outright, Spamhaus says.

Despite efforts to stem the billions of spam e-mails flooding inboxes, unwanted messages are still turning e-mail into a quagmire of misery.

Spammers send out tens of millions of e-mails to unsuspecting computer users every day, employing a myriad of methods to ensure their pills, loans and "requests for our lord" pleas fox e-mail filters.

The development has been called the Penny Black project, because it works on the idea that revolutionised the British postage system in the 1830s - that senders of mail should have to pay for it, not whoever is on the receiving end.