Software

For over a quarter of a century I have been using and producing software. In 2004 I founded joewein.de LLC ("yugengaisha joewein.de" in Japanese) as a company to produce and market software. My company is one of the main sources of anti-spam data for SURBL.org (SpamURL Realtime Blocklist), an anti-spam ressource used by ISPs, corporates and institutions worldwide. Our "JP" spam domain list documents websites advertised via spam in near real-time.

I have been programming since I first started using a computer (actually, I wrote my first program on a 50-step programmable calculator), working for international companies such as Digital Research (who created CP/M, GEM and DR DOS) and Novell. I enjoy writing software because it is a creative activity, not unlike writing articles, novels or painting pictures, but the products I write also become tools for common and not so common tasks. Knowing that the code I wrote serves a useful purpose to other people (in some cases, more than a decade after I wrote it) gives me great pleasure.

In the early 1980s, when I became a commercial programmer, very few people I knew were using computers and it was difficult to even explain to most of my friends what it was that I was doing. Since then, computers have become appliances like phones, photocopiers or VCRs. For me and many others they are indispensable communication tools that can bridge gaps between continents.

But this communication tool is also being abused. Spam has grown into a deadly threat to the medium email. Criminals use email for online scams, globalising crime. On our website you will find information about spams, scams and viruses and about jwSpamSpy, our product to fight these threats.

• Spam: How to fight it.
  Since 2003 I have been publishing anti-spam information on my website. New additions to my domain blacklist feed into SURBL, a public blacklist of domains that can be used for blocking undesireable emails.
  

• Digital Research, Inc., the maker of the first industry standard OS for personal computers

• Software that I use, available for download
  
• Software notes – assorted useful notes