Miscellany...
Category: Kitchen Sink...
Posted Thursday, February 06, 2003 at 05:39 AM [GMT-6]

In this edition: Oil company stocks: No war premium here...More protection for your email address (Warning: high geek factor)...

OK, I need for someone to explain this "War For Oil" thing - especially the part about the secret deals cut with The Big Oil Companies by the POTUS. Because, frankly, I just don't get it, and I'm a pretty rational guy...as is the stock market (rational, that is; I'm not sure about its gender, and any speculation on my part would surely offend someone).

See, if it were true that the primary beneficiaries of war with Iraq are the oil companies, this would be reflected in their stock prices, wouldn't it? And yet, according to a report yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, the major oil stocks now are trading at their lowest price/earnings ratios in five years. "Giants Royal Dutch Petroleum, ChevronTexaco and BP now fetch 12 to 14 times projected 2003 earnings while smaller integrated operators ConocoPhilips and Marathon trade for 9 to 11 times earnings." Most major oil companies are trading at 30-40% below their 52-week highs. This has taken place even as oil prices have risen almost 70% over the past year.

If it's so obvious to the money guys that there's nothing on the immediate horizon to warrant financial optimism when it comes to oil companies, why do the peace-before-freedom types continue with this annoying refrain? The only conclusion I can draw is that they're intellectually lazy, dishonest, or both.

For a more realistic perspective on the issue, including a logical warning about what the US should not do with respect to Iraqi oil, read Thomas Friedman's editorial in the New York Times (of all places).

Take a close look at the preceding link. Scroll over it and watch it change colors (assuming your browser supports CSS2), and note how the status line at the bottom of the page shows my email address. Pretty slick, huh? What's that? You're not impressed?

Well, take a look at the source code for this post, and see if you can find my email address (the ones in the right hand column and at the bottom of the page don't count). Aha!

Thanks to a clever and free bit of software called Enkoder, from a small company named Hiveware, you can now place your email address on your website(s) and feel [relatively] safe from those nasty address-harvesting bots and spiders which are constantly working on behalf of spammers around the world.

Many website owners have defended themselves against spambots by encoding their email addresses using browser-interpretable decimal or hexadecimal characters instead of simply spelling out those addresses. In this scheme, a appears in the browser as the letter "a," b as the letter "b" and so on. This seems to work pretty well, but we all know that where there's a will, there's a way, and the spammers definitely have a will to grab all the email addresses they can. Many of them have tweaked their bots to recognize and interpret this encoding, and the address is once again vulnerable.

Enkoder puts a clever twist on this approach by using a Javascript array to create the hex equivalents of the characters in an email address. So, not only would the bot have to know how to decode the hex characters, it would also have to be smart enough to figure out the Javascript key to the coding. Obviously, that's not an impossible task, but it may well prove to be more trouble than most spammers are willing or capable of dealing with.

You can download Enkoder as a standalone app (for Mac OS X, and command line versions for Windows, Unix and even DOS), or just do the web-based thing which generates coding that you copy and paste into your HTML.

Even if you're not overly worried about spammers getting your email address, there's something wonderfully cool about including this code in your page!

[Tip thanks to John Gruber's Daring Fireball...]