My total volume of spam emails in GMail is very low - only about one/day (32 spam emails in the last 30 days), yet the false positive rate was extremely high and I was missing important messages on a regular basis. I ended up disabling the spam filter (which has to be done by a filter that matches every message) and haven't looked back since.

These days it's all the rage to abuse unicode control characters to hide the extension, for example a file that appears to be called "big_narcs.jpg" might actually be "big_na<right_to_left_override>gpj.scr". If the extension is shown it just looks like a relatively harmless jpeg image, but in reality it is a malicious windows executable with a .scr extension. Executables can of course define their own custom icon so they can still be made to look like an image file as well.

Anyone with a large item inventory on Steam and public comments enabled on their profile over the last few months has almost certainly been hit with numerous attempts to infect them with malware using this trick with the line "here's a screenshot of my trade offer".

Sometimes their shake compensation does horrible things to the videos that can make me feel physically ill trying to watch them. I don't get motion sickness in real life, but I the feeling I get while watching these is similar to what I imagine motion sickness would be like. I've experienced this when friends baby videos taken freehand have been automatically "fixed" by google - the original was certainly shaky, but it felt natural to watch, while the slow distorted image that you get after google does their stuff just feels weird, unnatural and sickening. I've also seen this happen to some video game let's plays - these videos shouldn't be compensated as the motion it's trying to correct is not coming from a shaky camera at all, it's from looking around and walking in the game. When it gets applied to these it is far far worse than when it is applied to a freehand video and I can't watch these for more than a few seconds without feeling ill. The image just continually distorts in different directions and moves constantly as it tries to correct for the actual movement in the game.

What happened to my paragraphs!? Sorry in advance to anyone trying to read this...

I used to work at a super market that introduced a fingerprint system to clock on & off, and I ran into a much more immediate and serious issue - the majority of the time the scanner just could not read my fingerprints and I wouldn't get paid correctly as a result! A couple of other workers had similar issues, but I was by far the worst affected. I've also had similar issues with other finger print systems - when I used someone's laptop that could show an image of my fingerprints, we saw that there were huge missing sections in the middle. It also delayed my entry into Hawaii (fortunately their finger print system seems much better - it just took it a bit longer than usual to read my finger print). For a while at the supermarket this was OK as I couldn't even register in the system and was able to keep using the old system, but eventually management insisted that I had to register because they wanted to get rid of the old system. So, one shift instead of doing any work I had to stay with one of the office girls trying to register my fingerprints over and over until it finally managed to read one. You can guess what happened next - I wasn't able to use the old system and every single time I came into work or left I would have to try over and over for the damn thing to recognise me - and quite often it just wouldn't - leading to me not getting paid properly. If it managed to recognise me clocking on but couldn't recognise me clocking off the system would assume I worked for three hours (the legal minimum shift), even though I typically worked a five or more hour shift. It also meant that I would often delay the night manager from going home since I was the night-fill captain and we were supposed to leave together after everyone else (they had previously had a problem with a night manager who did their "shopping" after everyone else had gone home). When I couldn't clock on or off I ended up having to manually fill out a time sheet and get it signed by a manager and hand it to one of the office girls - only problem was they went home hours before I did (I was the night-fill captain, remember?) so I couldn't hand it to them in person at the end of my shift and half the time the sheet would go unnoticed by the office girl in the morning. It was a real nightmare and just one of the reasons I'm glad that I no longer work there.

I like how you didn't actually tell us what your card's model & chipset actually is. Anyway, if you happen to have an atheros based card (which, given you mentioning the 3 hardware versions, you may well have), this may help you.

Before I bought my card (CARDBUS D-Link AirPlus DWL-G650, Atheros chipset, hardware revision C3), I looked at plenty of forums and noted that the madwifi (Multiband Atheros Drivers for WIFI - www.madwifi.org) drivers had recieved mixed results from various people, notably the third (C) major revision didn't work yet. I figured I'd risk it, figured that even if it didn't work yet it would within the next few months. Anyway, I got the card home, checked out the latest CVS,
$ make
$ su
# make install
# modprobe ath-pci
# iwconfig ath0 essid my_ssid
whatever else you need to set on the card
# ifconfig ath0 up
Worked first go (though, at that time the drivers were not quite stable with my card revision, good thing I was with Slackware 10.0 (I've noted my success/failures with various distros below). As of sometime late sep/early oct those issues were fixed.)

There are now 2 branches of madwifi, old and ng. Old will often work with most distros without having to modify their scripts, ng may need to, check the wiki at madwifi.org for help. Currently both branches have features missing from the other, when it's finally released, ng will have everything. I have also noticed that ng takes 30 seconds to associate with my AP (Using WPA-PSK, AES), whereas old only takes a few seconds (Also annoying as it needs to re associate everytime the key changes, so I'm currently using old).

For WPA support, you need the wpa_supplicant program (make sure you get at least 0.4.7 to work with ng, at least 0.4.6 to work with old). Deffinately read through the README and INSTALL files compiling from source - you need to copy defconfig to .config and edit it for your particular setup before you can start compiling.

***** Successful distros
* Slackware 10.0 - no problems, I always called the commands directly, but if you want ease of use, apparently the scripts need to be modified for ng but not old.
* Debian 3.1 (Current) - no problems (had to compile the latest madwifi-ng and wpa_supplicant from source. Friend had troubles with wpa_supplicant - repositories didn't have latest version for ng yet, and he had some trouble compiling from source, I think he just didn't install the required -dev packages for openssl, etc)
* Auditor (can't think of the version number, think it's still the latest) - came with drivers that worked like a charm :) No crashes or anything

***** 1 Success, 1 Failure
* SuSE 10.0 Eval - Comes with madwifi drivers checked out before those stability issues with the latest revision were worked out. I had major dramas after compiling from source (NEED to get SUSEBuild script from the madwifi wiki to even attempt it), tried several snapshots, including ones I knew worked, kept getting "The hardware didn't respond as expected". I had other hardware issues with SuSE as well (I don't think it liked my laptop very much), so I gave up. On the other hand, my friend had no issues with it at all, using the drivers it came with (Only eval/bought CDs come with madwifi, OSS CDs do not, if you have them, you'll need to download the non-gpl kernel package from the repository).

***** Failures
* Mandrake 10.1 - Personally didn't try, my friend couldn't get his working.
* Ubuntu - personally didn't try, friend had no luck.

Hope this helps you or at least someone