Spending most of this week knocked out by a cold had the predictable effects on my productivity, but at least my schedule was clear. That’s not the case this week, which features one day in which I won’t be able to do any work between 5 a.m. and 9 p.m.–Tuesday, when I’ll be working as an election officer for Arlington.

2/25/2020: Here’s how hard it is to spot a fake email address or phone number, Fast Company

This post started with an interesting talk I saw at the ShmooCon security conference at the start of February. I’d meant to write up this EmailRep system for automatically rating the credibility of e-mail addresses right after, but breaking news kept intruding. That worked out in okay when a pitch from an old PR rep about did not land in my inbox–because Google thought it belonged in my spam filter, thereby providing the perfect demonstration of how hard it can be for software to decide if an e-mail is suspicious or not.