Month: October 2025

SPAM Wars

On By rolcottIn Computer science2 Comments
  • I’ve received a spate of bogus emails lately so I did some research. I hope you’ll join me in the defense effort. Sy and the gang will be back next week.

I hate electronic SPAM. You’re probably with me on this – Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages in your email inbox, cluttering up the place and getting in the way of communications you really want or may even need to receive.

The SPAM tide keeps rising – legit and fake ads, legit and fake charity pleas, legit and fake political pitches, fake personal notes, any of which may be phishing attacks or vehicles for malware.

You can do something about that.

When I get an email, I wonder: Is that email really from who it says it’s from? Does it carry hidden malware? Will that clickable thingie do exactly and only what it says it’ll do? If I reply, will my reply go to the sender and nowhere else?

Those questions bother the communications infrastructure, too. SPAM parasitizes server and carrier resources that cost real money. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is on the case.

IETF’s defense strategy tries to snuff SPAM early in the transmission process. The part of an email address after the @-sign is called its domain. Each domain has an owner who is responsible for protecting their domain’s output. If a mail item’s FROM: address names a domain it’s not authorized to use (called “spoofing” in the trade), IETF-supplied protocols (if you’re curious, they’re SPF, DKIM and DMARC) can block the item –  IF the domain owner has properly configured their system to block spoofing.

But suppose a slippery item aimed at you gets past that defense. Here’s where self-defense comes into play. You have help, but that help depends on you and many other email recipients raising penalty flags on the bad guys.

Your Mail User Agent, the place you go to look at your emails, is another gate-keeper along the path. These range from huge (Outlook, gmail, Apple Mail) to tiny (maybe you have your own personal mail server).  Your MUA may be configured with filters that can inspect and block incoming emails before you see them.

Inspect? Sounds like Big Brother, right? In some places and at some times it might be, but these inspections have a different intent. What’s important is that they depend on penalty flags. Different filters (a MUA may use several) look and feel different, but basically the system records a penalty flag against every email you’ve marked as “Junk” or “SPAM” or bounced to your MUA’s abuse@ or fraud@ mailbox. Check whether they have one — if so, save its address.

Conversely, it’s good to mark “Not SPAM” on something you find in your Junk or SPAM folder that shouldn’t be there. In the trade that’s a “false positive”; your “Not SPAM” lowers the penalty level.

Each filter has its own way to use our flags – some build a blacklist of heavily‑penalized domains; some look for suspiciously hidden links or known malware attachments; some use pattern matching to suss out significant phrases or graphics shared among groups of flagged emails, tactics abound. The tricksters are tricky, though, so catching SPAM is a continuously‑escalating game of whack‑a‑mole.

The threats have created a demand for A.I. in this application. I don’t want A.I. that’s been trained on the unpaid work of legitimate creators, but I do want A.I. that’s been trained on SPAM. Even A.I. needs real‑time updating, which is why we’re a vital part of the feedback loop. Our self‑defense is in recognizing and flagging each speck of SPAM we see.

What do we look for? Some caution signals:

  1. If it asks for money AND it’s in a hurry. OK, political email does that, but so do scammers. (Yes, they may overlap, but.)
  2. Poor grammar and spelling. Believe it or not, this is often on purpose. The idea is to make the recipient feel smarter than the sender, too smart to fall for anything, and thus actually a little bit less leery.
  3. Requests for personal information, including as part of an online “survey.”
  4. FROM: or REPLY: addresses that don’t look right. If it comes from gmail.com it’s probably not really from your bank.
  5. Related: Links via bit.ly – you never know where they’ll take you until you’re there.
  6. And this is basic: If it looks too good to be true, it generally is too good to be true.

Please use those flags aggressively and help us stay safe out there.

~ Rich Olcott

A No-Charge Transaction

On By rolcottIn Cosmology, Crazy Theories, Physics: Light and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“I ain’t done yet, Sy. I got another reason for Dark Matter being made of faster‑then‑light tachyons.”

“I’m still listening, Vinnie.”

“Dark Matter gotta be electrically neutral, right, otherwise it’d do stuff with light and that doesn’t happen. I say tachyons gotta be neutral.”

“Why so?”

“Stands to reason. Suppose tachyons started off as charged particles. The electric force pushes and pulls on charges hugely stronger than gravity pulls—”

“1036 times stronger at any given distance.”

“Yeah, so right off the bat charged tachyons either pair up real quick or they fly away from the slower‑than‑light bradyon neighborhood leaving only neutral tachyons behind for us bradyon slowpokes to look at.”

“But we’ve got un‑neutral bradyon matter all around us — electrons trapped in Earth’s Van Allen Belt and Jupiter’s radiation belts, for example, and positive and negative plasma ions in the solar wind. Couldn’t your neutral tachyons get ionized?”

“Probably not much. Remember, tachyon particles whiz past each other too fast to collect into a star and do fusion stuff so there’s nobody to generate tachyonic super‑high‑energy radiation that makes tachyon ions. No ionized winds either. If a neutral tachyon collides with even a high-energy bradyon, the tachyon carries so much kinetic energy that the bradyon takes the damage rather than ionize the tachyon. Dark Matter and neutral tachyons both don’t do electromagnetic stuff so Dark Matter’s made of tachyons.”

“Ingenious, but you missed something way back in your initial assumptions.”

“Which assumption? Show me.”

“You assumed that tachyon mass works the same way that bradyon mass does. The math says it doesn’t.” <grabbing scratch paper for scribbling> “Whoa, don’t panic, just two simple equations. The first relates an object’s total energy E to its rest mass m and its momentum p and lightspeed c.”

E² = (mc²)² + (pc)²

“I recognize the mc² part, that’s from Einstein’s Equation, but what’s the second piece and why square everything again?”

“The keyword is rest mass.”

“Geez, it’s frames again?”

“Mm‑hm. The (mc²)² term is about mass‑energy strictly within the object’s own inertial frame where its momentum is zero. Einstein’s famous E=mc² covers that special case. The (pc)² term is about the object’s kinetic energy relative to some other‑frame observer with relative momentum p. When kinetic energy is comparable to rest‑mass energy you’re in relativity territory and can’t just add the two together. The sum‑of‑squares form makes the arithmetic work when two observers compare notes. Can I go on?”

“I’m still waitin’ to hear about tachyons.”

“Almost there. If we start with that equation, expand momentum as mass times velocity and re‑arrange a little, you get this formula

E = mc² / √(1 – v²/c²)

The numerator is rest‑mass energy. The v²/c² measures relative kinetic energy. The Lorentz factor down in the denominator accounts for that. See, when velocity is zero the factor is 1.0 and you’ve got Einstein’s special case.”

“Give me a minute. … Okay. But when the velocity gets up to lightspeed the E number gets weird.”

“Which is why c is the upper threshold for bradyons. As the velocity relative to an observer approaches c, the Lorentz factor approaches zero, the fraction goes to infinity and so does the object’s energy that the observer measures.”

“Okay, here’s where the tachyons come in ’cause their v is bigger than c. … Wait, now the equation’s got the square root of a negative number. You can’t do that! What does that even mean?”

“It’s legal, when you’re careful, but interpretation gets tricky. A tachyon’s Lorentz factor contains √(–1) which makes it an imaginary number. However, we know that the calculated energy has to be a real number. That can only be true if the tachyon’s mass is also an imaginary number, because i/i=1.”

“What makes imaginary energy worse than imaginary mass?”

“Because energy’s always conserved. Real energy stays that way. Imaginary mass makes no sense in Newton’s physics but in quantum theory imaginary mass is simply unstable like a pencil balanced on its point. The least little jiggle and the tachyon shatters into real particles with real kinetic energy to burn. Tachyons disintegrating may have powered the Universe’s cosmic inflation right after the Big Bang — but they’re all gone now.”

“Another lovely theory shot down.”

~ Rich Olcott

Got To Be Good-lookin’ ‘Cause He’s So Hard To See

On By rolcottIn Cosmology, Crazy Theories, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’ll be sorry when Acme Building’s management swaps out our old‑style door locks for electronic ones. Vinnie has such fun lock‑picking his way past my office door in the morning. “Morning, Vinnie.”

“Morning, Sy. Hey, I got a new Crazy Theory for you. Nobody knows what Dark Matter is, right?”

“Right. All we know is that it has about five times as much mass as normal matter so it participates in gravitational interactions. Some of it seems to gather in spherical halos around galaxies and some of it seems to collect in spikes near their centers. Cosmologists are arguing about whether or not Dark Matter is particles, much less how they’d be quantized. And we call it Dark because it absolutely doesn’t care about electromagnetism.”

“That’s what I thought. I remember you said if Dark Matter did play with light waves at all it’d block our view of the CMB. So yeah, absolute. Good.”

“I gather your theory is about Dark Matter.”

“Mm-hm. I thought of a way that all that mass could be hiding in plain sight except we can’t see it.”

“Alright, I’m listening.”

“Tachyons.”

“Come again?”

“Tachyons — particles that fly around faster than light. I read an article about ’em. Some people say they can’t exist but hear me out, okay? The reason they’re not supposed to exist is ’cause it would take an infinite amount of energy to boost something up past lightspeed. I got that, but suppose they were born above lightspeed, back when the Big Bang singularity had energy packed so tight the Physics laws we know don’t apply. A lot of particles got flung out below lightspeed, but maybe even more got flung out above it.”

“What does this have to do with dark matter?”

“I’m gettin’ there. The thing with tachyons is, the article said it’d take infinite energy to slow one down to lightspeed. A tachyon rock hits a slow rock, it don’t stop ’cause the slow rock don’t have the juice for that. The collision may take a little energy from the tachyon rock but that just changes its trajectory.”

“Mmm, those tachyon rocks can’t be a thing. The — what can I call it? slow matter?”

“The article called ’em bradyons.”

“Thanks. We know that 92% of all … bradyonic atoms in the Universe are hydrogens. Rocks are made of silicon, oxygen and other atoms that are even heavier. Everything heavier than hydrogen and maybe some helium was created by nuclear reactions inside a star. Tachyonic atoms zooming beyond lightspeed couldn’t gather together to form a star or even join one. No significant tachyonic fusion, no tachyonic rocks.”

“Okay, they all stay tachy‑hydrogen, still not a problem. The point is, there could be a lot of them and they could add up to a lot of mass. So the next thing I asked is, where would tachyons hang out? Gotta be around galaxies, but being tachyons going super‑lightspeed they can’t just hang, they orbit around the centers. They’d spend the most time where they go slowest which is where they’re farthest away ’cause that’s how orbits work. But they’d be thickest close in ’cause of gravity but that’s where they go fastest.”

“Cute, so you’re predicting galaxies with halos of tachyons, plus spikes of them at each center. That just happens to be the dark matter distribution the astronomers find.”

“It gets better, Sy. I’m not so sure of this because math, but it feels right. I don’t think tachyons can do electromagnetism things.”

“Why not?”

“No blue glow — you know, that blue glow in nuclear reactors when electrons go through the cooling water faster than light?”

“Cherenkov radiation, happens when fast electrons polarize the water. The polarizing slows light in water relative to a vacuum.”

“Right, but tachyons in space travel through vacuum. They ought to polarize the vacuum like what fast electrons do to water. Electromagnetic tachyons orbiting galaxies ought to make a blue glow but there isn’t one, so tachyons don’t do electromagnetism things and that makes them Dark Matter.”

“You’re going to have to do better than that, Vinnie. Absence of evidence just might be evidence of absence. Maybe they’re not there to begin with.”

~ Rich Olcott

Properties of Space

On By rolcottIn Cosmology, Physics: Electromagnetism, Physics: Waves, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Vinnie gives me the side‑eye. “Wait, Sy. Back there you said Maxwell got the speed of light from the properties of space. What does any of that even mean?”

“Do you remember Newton’s equation for the force of gravity between two objects?”

“Of course not. Lessee… the force’d be bigger when either one gets bigger, and it’d get smaller when the distance between ’em gets bigger and there’s some constant number to make the units right, right?”

“Close enough, it’s the distance squared. The equation’s F=Gm1m2/r². The G is the constant you mentioned. It does more than turn mass‑units times mass‑units divided by length‑units‑squared into force‑units. It says how many force‑units. For one pair of objects at a certain distance, turn the G‑dial up and you get more force. Make sense?”

“Yeah, that looks right.”

“The value of G sets the force‑distance scale for how two objects attract each other everywhere in the Universe. That value is a property of space. So is the fact that the value is the same in all directions.”

“Huh! Never thought of it like a scale factor. Space has other properties like that?”

“Certainly. Coulomb’s Law for the electrostatic force between two charged objects has the same basic structure, FE=–(q1q2/r²)/CE. In any units you like you replace the q‘s with object charge amounts and r with the distance between them. For each set of change‑ and distance‑units there’s a well‑researched value of CE to convert your charge and distance numbers into force‑units. Under the covers, though, CE is a scale factor that controls the range of the electrostatic force. It’s the same everywhere in the Universe and it’s completely independent of Newton’s gravity scale factor.”

“Hey, what about ‘like charges repel, opposites attract’?”

“That’s what the minus sign’s in there for. If the q‘s have the same charge, the force is negative, that’s repulsion; opposite charges make for positive, attractive force.”

“If there’s a CE for electric there’s gotta be a CM for magnetic.”

“Sort of. The electrostatic force doesn’t care about direction. Magnetism does care so the equation’s more complicated. You’re right, though, there is a similar universal scale factor we might as well call CM.”

<chuckle> “Electric, magnetic, I don’t suppose we could mix those two somehow for an electromagnetic scale factor?”

<grin> “Did you read ahead in the book? Yes we can, and Maxwell’s equations showed us how. If you multiply the two C‘s together, you get one over the square of the speed of light. Re‑arranging a little, c=√(1/CECM), so c, the electromagnetic scale factor for velocity, is based on those space properties. Einstein showed that no material object can have a velocity greater than c.”

“I’ll take your word for the arithmetic, but how does that combination make for a speed limit?”

“There’s an easy answer you’re not going to like — it’s a speed because the units come out meters per second.”

“That’s a cheat. I don’t like it at all and it doesn’t account for the limit part. Explain it with Physics, no fancy equations.”

“Tough assignment. Okay, typical waves have a displacement force, like wind or something pushing up on an ocean wave, that works against a restoring force, such as gravity pulling down. Electromagnetic waves are different. The electric component supplies the up force, but the magnetic component twists sideways instead of restoring down. The wave travels as a helix. The CE and CM properties determine how tightly it spirals through space. That’s lightspeed.”

“And the limit part?”

“Einstein maintained that anything that happens must follow the same rules for all observers no matter how each is moving. The only way that can be true is if space is subject to the Lorentz contraction √[1-(v/vmax)²] for some universal maximum speed vmax. Maxwell’s electromagnetism equations showed that vmax is c. Okay?”

“I suppose.”

~ Rich Olcott

  • * Vinnie hates equations even with regular letters, Greek letters make it worse. Hence my using CE and CM instead of the conventional ε0 and μ0 notation. Sue me.