Boxbe Blog

You may have noticed some changes to the way our junk rating system works in your Waiting List in the last week. Messages that were put in your Waiting List between May 24th and May 31st may have a higher junk rating than you might have expected. NOTE: this should have only affected Yahoo! Mail and Public Email Address users. Boxbe for Outlook users were not affected by this change.

We have since modified our rating systems to behave more like they did before the changes that occurred on the 24th.

Why did this happen?

We had a service outage last Saturday that resulted in a necessary upgrade to the machines that apply junk ratings to incoming email. Upon upgrading those machines to a new version of our software, some of the tweaks that we had been making to our junk ratings got pushed out before they were fully baked.

We think we have gotten everything back to normal, but we may be making tweaks over the next several days.

Feedback please

Let us know if your junk ratings aren’t what you would expect them to be and stay tuned for some big improvements to the way Boxbe handles email.

Email us at support@boxbe.com.

Two terms we spent a little time talking about this year made the New York Times 2007 Buzzword List. The Times takes the last Sunday of every year to review the year. Now, there are a lot of end of the year lists, but the Buzzword list is unique, fun and informative.

Bacn

Bacn, as you recall, is “Impersonal e-mail messages that are nearly as annoying as spam but that you have chosen to receive: alerts, newsletters, automated reminders and the like.”

Congrats to the Podcamp Pittsburgh folks for making “Bacn” one of 2007’s top buzzwords.

Email Bankruptcy

Email Bankruptcy is something most Boxbe users won’t ever have to declare, but we can’t guard against friends, family and colleagues expecting a response to every message they send you.

What you’re declaring when you choose to delete or ignore a very large number of e-mail messages after falling behind in reading and responding to them. This often includes sending a boilerplate message explaining that old messages will never receive a personal, specific response.

Lawrence Lessig and Fred Wilson both famously declared email bankruptcy in the last couple of years. We wish them a better, more productive email life in 2008.

Other tech related terms from this year - crowdsourcing, life streaming, tumblelog, lolcat and one for Mark (our VP of Corp Dev and former CNN producer), I-reporter.

Read

With the recent relaunch of our site, I thought this might be an opportune moment to better explain what Boxbe is and how we can help you.

Beyond Email 2.0

Email is an essential tool that we use in all areas of our lives, personal and professional. Yet it has not kept pace with the way people communicate.

Email as we know it is broken. It hasn’t changed with the times and many people claim to be abandoning email and young people aren’t adopting it.

Boxbe is a service that lets you easily create an email guest list so that you can make sure you receive email messages from people who matter to you.

Boxbe Guest List

A Boxbe Guest List works like lists on popular social networking sites - it protects and guarantees the delivery of email from friends, family, co-workers or even entire domains.

When you first sign up, Boxbe scans your existing email folders and address book to create a Guest List that includes all the people you’ve recently and frequently emailed. The Guest List is live and dynamic and automatically includes new people you want to receive email from, so your friends are already included

When you receive an email from someone you have not already pre-approved, you can opt to approve the sender. She will then be added to your Boxbe Guest List. We are adapting email for the social networking generation.

Boxbe cleans up your inbox

Inboxes are filled with unwanted messages, making it hard to find the things you do want. Or sometimes important messages are marked as junk by an over zealous spam filter.

Boxbe cleans up your inbox and guarantees emails from people who matter, and stops those that are unwanted.

It works with your existing email

Boxbe is designed for the millions of email users who want better control of their email. Boxbe works with Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and Outlook.

Boxbe for Your Domain is in beta testing – it and more services will be rolled out in 2008!

Never miss an important message

Ever miss an important email because it got marked as spam?

Boxbe ranks incoming messages from 1-10, and color codes them. The lower the number, the better the message.

Green messages mean likely good, yellow means caution and red means bad. If your Aunt Hilda just changed her email address, she will likely get a low score marked green. However, a sender that isn’t who they claim to be will get a high score marked red.

Give spammers the heave-ho

Boxbe empowers you to choose which people or businesses can reach you. Anyone who isn’t on your Guest List will receive a request to verify their message before it is delivered to your inbox. Legitimate marketers who want to reach you have the option of paying a small fee that you set so that they can get their message through to you.

Unverified messages are held in your Waiting List for you to review, and approve or decline at anytime.

In a nutshell

Boxbe helps you sift through the barrage of email you receive on a daily basis. We’re here to uncomplicate your inbox and help you get to the messages you want to receive.

The Associated Press is warning email users yesterday to be wary of coupons that they have received via email.

Instead of money saving deals, e-mailed coupons could lead recipients into “phishing” schemes where the consumer is redirected to a copycat site, whose real purpose is to siphon the user’s credit card information, passwords and other financial data, IBM Corp. security executive Christopher Rouland warned.

If you are a Boxbe member and have approved email from say Amazon.com, messages from a an address that claims to be from Amazon, but really aren’t, won’t make it through to your inbox.

Boxbe uses two email authentication methods (DKIM and SPF) to verify that the emailer is who they claim to be. DKIM and SPF are two email authentication standards backed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and AOL. Boxbe blocks messages that come from senders who claim to be someone that they are not

Be safe out there this holiday season and let us worry about your email.
Read

image from Flickr user skrewtape.

A huge thanks to Om Malik, Sonja Thompson and Eric Lai for covering our launch of our redesign and new Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft Outlook plugin. I’ve included links and quotes below.

Three Cool Add-Ons for Microsoft Outlook
Om Malik
“[Boxbe] has come up with a Facebook-style, invite-only guest list that allows you to tightly control and manage who gets into your inbox and who gets left behind. In other words, it lets you you easily create an email guest list so that you can make sure you receive email messages from people who matter to you — friends, family, co-workers and even entire domains.”

Say good-bye to spam for good with Boxbe
Sonja Thompson
“About a month ago, I discovered Boxbe… by accident. It was one of those rare “wow” moments that happens when you run across something that you haven’t seen before and that you think has unlimited potential.”

E-mail ‘guest list’ service Boxbe adds Yahoo Mail, beta Outlook integration
Eric Lai
“Boxbe scans users’ contact lists and archived e-mails to create buddy lists of friends, family and co-workers whose messages are allowed to pass through its virtual gateway.”

It’s been a while since we’ve posted any news about other places here on the blog, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been watching. Here’s the latest and greatest from the world of email.

Happy 10th Birthday, Yahoo! Mail
We’ve had a great time working with the team down in Sunnyvale on the new Yahoo! Mail application and wish them the best on this momentous occasion. Congrats!

Yahoo Mail to block fake eBay and PayPal e-mail - CNET News.com
Good news for eBay and Paypal users, Yahoo! will be blocking spoofed emails from senders claiming to be Paypal and eBay. We have to applaud Yahoo! for taking steps to curb these phishing emails.

Mac e-mail showdown: Which program delivers? - Computerworld
Looking to switch email apps on the Mac? Or maybe coming from the PC world and wanted to know what your Mac options are? Computerworld takes a look at Mail.app, Thunderbird and Microsoft Entourage desktop mail applications for OSX.

Techies take on spam zombies -San Francisco Chronicle
“Computer scientists in Menlo Park are releasing a free diagnostic program today to help network administrators find PCs infected with an insidious new type of virus that has already tainted millions of computers.” Strangely, SFGate doesn’t link directly to the software page, but if you want to check it out, go to the BotHunter Free Internet Distribution Page.

Ok, this one is completely for Thede, but if you’re interested in looking at finding spammers and other ne’er do wells using an economic angle. This a fascinating look into the minds of malware producers.

From the abstract:

“Computer security has recently imported a lot of ideas from economics, psychology and sociology, leading to fresh insights and new tools. I will describe one thread of research that draws together techniques from fields as diverse as signals intelligence and sociology to search for artificial communities. “

[via Akismet]

Ever wonder where spam, viruses and malware come from? Apparently, it comes from the mob.

Tony Soprano, spammer?

Auckland, New Zealand based computer security expert, Peter Gutmann has an informative presentation on the subject here. Malware, it seems, has become quite an industry and Gutmann posits that much of it is being ran by various mafias around the world.

Organized crime recruit so-called “script kiddies” that are writing malware and viruses for fun and pay them to turn their software into money making machines. Gutmann cites a number of internet business practices that have been employed by such as “Malware as a Service,” making it easier than ever to spam people.

A deal you can’t refuse

Gutman, the self proclaimed “professional paranoid,” goes into a high level of detail of exactly how people in the malware industry make money.

Here are a few examples:

• $1 per credit card numbers down to the verification number
• $40 credit card, with date of birth and social security number
• $1000 for 10,000 compromised computers.

Additionally, he takes a technical deep dive into how malware authors hide what they are doing.

If you are an aspiring spammer or virus maker, this is must read. For everyone else, read the end of the document about how to keep yourself safe.

Peter Gutmann
Economics of Malware pdf
[via Metafilter]

Boxbe does a great job of getting rid of spam, but what about bacn (pronounced bacon)?

This is a bit of a tougher problem. As I’ve been testing Boxbe for Yahoo! Mail, I’ve realized that I get a lot of bacn and adding those senders to my list of approved emailers isn’t fun.

What is bacn?

If you’re like me ten minutes ago, you might be scratching your head. bacn, according to this video from Podcamp Pittsburgh last weekend, is the email that you want to receive, but it’s not immediately valuable. There has been a lot of discussion on the web of this “middle class” of email in the last few days.

People who add you as a friend on Facebook, shipping notices from Amazon, or bill pay notices from Wells Fargo could all be classified as bacn.

A few people in the blogosphere have protested the term, but as good as the real bacon might taste, it sure is something you shouldn’t eat all the time.

What to do with bacn?

What do you consider bacn? Better yet, what do you do with bacn?

Do you set up filters in your email? Do you just let it sit in your inbox? Personally, I use Apple Mail and have a number of filters set up to take these messages out of my inbox and into their own special little place.

Update: there is a great bacn discussion over at Lifehacker.

photo from Flickr user bahkubean

“Stopping spam [using Bayesian filtering] is a bit like trying to stop the rain by catching every drop before it hits the ground.”

You had me at hello, Michael Specter.

If you want a well written, literary non-fiction description of the worldwide spam problem, Michael Specter at the New Yorker serves one up this week.

Productivity

Specter takes the productivity angle with when looking at spam:

If a billion spam messages elude detection every day—which means that ninety-nine per cent do not—that adds up to a hundred and fifty-nine years of collective time lost hitting the delete button every day.

Not to mention sore fingers….

Legislation

Additionally, Specter shows how little legislation has helped us dig out of our collective spam problem.

In the year after the law was enacted (2003), less than seven per cent of spam complied with the requirements of the legislation, according to MX Logic, an Internet-security firm. Last year, compliance with the law never even reached one per cent.

Finally

A great summary of where we are and where we’ve been, but Brad Taylor, spam czar of Google sums most anti-spam software up best:

“But I wanted to fix the problem and return to the bliss that existed before spam,’’ he said. “Often the fight is fun, like a game. But last year there were some low points. We started getting these image spams, and the spammer would adapt to anything we did. He would write software that cut the image into little pieces that reassembled by the time you opened your mail. When we figured out how to deal with that, he started making text that waved around and curved in odd ways. So we figured that out. Then he started with random images.’’ Taylor laughed. “This went on for a while. But, finally, he just gave up. And that’s our hope. It’s kind of like war. One side eventually gets tired. And we just can’t let it be us.”

To you and me, that sounds a heck of lot like an arms race. I’m glad we’re aiming a little higher than tit for tat in the war on spam.

Read

[via Slashdot]

Now here’s a company after my own heart.

Last week, Greendimes landed $20 million in venture capital funding to expand their business.

Greendimes claims to be able to reduce junk mail landing in your snail mail box by 90%. They contact credit card, catalog and other direct mailers on your behalf to get them to stop sending you unwanted mail.

I haven’t signed up for the service yet, but I can tell you that if it works, at $36 a year, it’s probably worth it. I posted a series about reclaiming your physical mailbox back in March. My attempts to decrease junk mail at home have been only somewhat successful and I’ve spent many hours on the phone and filling out forms. While it does seem like I’m receiving less mail overall, it certainly hasn’t stopped altogether.

Having someone like Greendimes watching your back might be just the trick.

Others talking about Greendimes
GigaOm
Earth2Tech
Brian Berliner

Check out their blog for other green tips.

Should your ISP be able to determine what email lands in your inbox? We don’t think so and neither does Slashdot.

Two recent posts by Bennett Haselton on Slashdot illustrate the problems with the approach that Goodmail and Hotmail have for certifying senders. Bennett’s take is that if you are the little email list owner, small time email marketer or have the wrong political views, you could be shut out of this brave new world of pay-per-email. Most of the little guys can’t or won’t pay fees to be “certified” by either company.

Who do you trust?

As someone who uses email to manage both my personal and business life, the question I have to ask myself is, “Can I trust my ISP to make decisions for me about who can reach me?” Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that question. I do believe that they want to decrease the amount of spam their users receive, but I think this is the wrong way to do it.

Boxbe differs from both Hotmail and Goodmail in two fundamental ways. With Hotmail and Goodmail, the money collected goes to your ISP and they alone determine who can circumvent their spam filter. With Boxbe, the bulk of the money goes to the person who receives the email, and it’s the same person that ultimately controls who reaches their inbox.

Conflict of interest

From a business perspective, Goodmail must seem like a great idea. If someone came along and said, “Hey, we can curb your spam problem and you can make money while you’re doing it,” I could see how it might be hard to say no. But at some point that misalignment of interests is going to play itself out.

The EFF put it best with its position on Goodmail and the whole notion of pay-per-email:

Goodmail reduces the incentive for ISPs to improve spam filters, much less to give end users more control of the filters. It increases the incentives for ISPs to overblock, since they make money when more senders sign up for Goodmail.

Bottom line: they decide who can send you email while at the same time they solicit “protection money” from senders willing to pay.

How Boxbe fits in

So, we’ve got a different philosophy about how this should work. If you’re a Boxbe member, you know we don’t think that payment to bypass a spam filter is a bad thing. It’s our raison d’être.

We believe people should have choices in who they receive email from. More importantly, we believe if money is going to change hands to reach you, you should get most of it. It’s your inbox, you decide who you can trust.

image from Flickr user srish

Today Google acquired anti-spam and security company Postini. Postini offers a host of services for businesses around communications security, but the reason I mention them is they are best known for their hosted anti-spam solution. Sound familiar?

According to the Google blog, Google acquired Postini as Google Apps “needed a more complete way to address these information security and compliance issues in order to better support the enterprise community.”

VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall quotes Google’s Eric Schmidt saying “With the addition of Postini, our apps are not just simple and appealing to users — they can also streamline the complex information security mandates within these organizations.”

More specifically, Bill Burnham thinks that this is a pretty clear signal that Google is going after Microsoft’s Exchange business.

What does Postini do for Google’s bottom line? Om Malik on GigaOm believes that Google’s acquisitions are mirroring Cisco’s “buy and grow” strategy that built them into the networking giant they are today.

Finally, Fred Wilson (aka “A VC”) commented today on what Google ought to do with Postini post acquisition.

1 - allow me to search my quarantined mail…
2 - figure out how to stop grabbing verification emails…
3 - let me manage my quarantined mail in the gmail interface…
4 - let me see the reputation of the sender in the quarantined mailbox…

Thankfully, we’ve got Fred covered on 3 of his 4 requests (and we’ll have #3 for Yahoo! Mail soon).

Congrats to Postini on the acquisition.

More coverage of the Postini and Google announcement:

SearchEngineLand
Huffington Post
alarm clock

Web 2.0 video interviewer extraordinaire, Eddie Codel spent the afternoon in Boxbe offices two weeks ago talking to Thede Loder, Boxbe CEO about our service. Thede explains the ins and outs of Boxbe and gives Eddie the low down on what we’re all about.

Click below to watch the video.

McAfee released an interesting report this week about the mind games that spammers play on people and as eWeek called it, why we click on these emails.

From the “Say “No Thanks” to Unwanted Email” white paper from McAfee:

“Scam spam works best by providing recipients with a sense of familiarity and legitimacy, either by creating the illusion that the email is from a friend or colleague, or providing plausible warnings from a respected institution,” Dr. Blascovich noted. “Once the victim opens the email, criminals use two basic motivational processes, approach and avoidance, or a combination of the two, to persuade victims to click on dangerous links, provide personal information, or download risky files. By scamming $20 from just half of one percent of the U.S. population, cyber criminals can earn $15 million each day and nearly $5.5 billion in a year, a powerful attraction for skillful scam artists.”

For me, I like to keep spam out of my inbox altogether and thankfully that’s what Boxbe does.

The report goes on to talk about how most people are susceptible on some level to convincing spam and attacking base human emotion can fool almost all of us some of the time.

Personally, I’m still waiting on all the money to come in from Nigeria.

photo from Flickr user fabbio

Infernal spam: Blocking e-mails constant struggle - Tulsa World

And apparently, incredibly expensive.

The tools may be effective, but for businesses like Bank of Oklahoma that run their own e-mail servers, they can be expensive. Brian Foster, senior vice president of information security at BOk, said a system to protect the company’s 3,000 to 6,000 unique addresses costs $30,000 to $50,000.

The article goes on to talk about the ever changing face of spam and the efforts at the Bank of Oklahoma to thwart it.

Why is Gmail still in beta
Good question, Esquire Magazine. We were wondering the same thing.

Gmail rolls out PowerPoint preview
Looks like Google might be getting closer to a full office suite. Yesterday, Google unveiled PowerPoint within Gmail. While you can’t create PowerPoint in Gmail, it sure seems like a good place to store them.

Oh, look you’re still getting plenty of spam
Techdirt has a sarcastic (and accurate) article about how putting one spammer in jail really just scratches the surface of the spam epidemic.

And speaking of jailed spammers -

Spam King denied bail
Our man in the can apparently will be staying there.

photo from Flickr user TheAlieness

From the “you win some, you lose some” department, Wired’s Threat Level blog reports that the “Appeals Court Says Feds Need Warrants to Search E-Mail.”

The Good

“A federal appeals court on Monday issued a landmark decision that holds that e-mail has similar constitutional privacy protections as telephone communications, meaning that federal investigators who search and seize emails without obtaining probable cause warrants will now have to do so.”

Which in and of itself is a good thing. In this day and age, email is such an important part of communication between people, having that communication protected like the telephone seems reasonable.

From the EFF:

“Email users clearly expect that their inboxes are private, but the government argues the Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect emails at all when they are stored with an ISP or a webmail provider like Hotmail or Gmail. EFF disagrees and argues that the Fourth Amendment applies online just as strongly as it does offline.”

The Bad

The bad news is that this new ruling is helping a known spammer, Steven Warshak, weasel his way out of a fraud conviction. Steven Warshak is known for launching Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, which sells Enzyte, a controversial “marital aid.”

Read
[via Slashdot.org]

More coverage of the story

EFF’s Case Briefing
Court to feds: Hands off ‘Smiling Bob’s’ e-mail - Network World
Court Protects Email from Secret Government Searches - Privacy Digest
Regulating the Cloud: Warshak v. United States - University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog
Email Protected by 4th Amendment, Court Says - Freedom to Tinker
Email Safe From Government Searches - WebProNews
Appeals court: Feds can’t secretly seize e-mail without a warrant - Ars Technica
The Privacy of Internet Email - Monsters and Critics
Volokh Conspiracy - lots of detail and backstory on the case.

photo from Flickr user heathermariecarr

Guy Kawasaki is my hero.

I’ve been a fan of Guy’s since he was an evangelist at Apple back in the good (and bad) old days.

He had my dream job - go out and tell everyone about products that change the world. Fortunately, I’ve been able to follow in Guy’s footsteps.

Evangelist, Entreprenuer, Author

Guy has had a amazing career. He created the field of corporate evangelism at Apple back in the 1980’s. He has started his own companies. Most recently, Guy Kawasaki spends his days as a venture capitalist, popular blogger and bestselling author.

Reading Guy’s books are like getting an MBA in product marketing (minus about $50k in tuition). From his marketing and strategy doctrine, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, to his manual on creating a startup company, The Art of the Start, to his new product and marketing creation manifesto, Rules for Revolutionaries, Guy is blessed with gift of being able to break through all the BS and boil down the essentials of what you need to do to make your product fly.

Needless to say, Guy Kawasaki’s books and blog postings are extremely helpful when starting a company or building a new product. Given all the help Guy has given us, we’d like to return the favor.

How Guy Kawasaki Could Use Boxbe

Man… so many uses of Boxbe for Guy, I don’t even know where to begin. I could give Guy some of the same advice I gave Lifehacker blogger, Gina Trapani for her blog, but perhaps a more novel approach would be to use Boxbe to filter pitches for his VC firm, Garage Technology Ventures.

Boxbe’s value proposition centers around the age old concept that time is money. Now, Guy Kawasaki is a busy man and it shouldn’t be free to waste his time with unwanted email and pitches for startup companies that are stupid. I bet a lot of these guys don’t even read his rules for pitching a VC.

5 Easy Steps

Guy - here’s what you can do to weed out the people who don’t follow your rules (or are otherwise irritating).

1. Sign up with Boxbe.
2. Set your access price to $99 (our current maximum).
3. Post your new email address on your blog.
4. Wait for pitches (this shouldn’t take long).
5. If the pitches waste your time, collect $99.

You could take one of your other, smarter investments to dinner with the money. Alternatively, you could give the money to charity - or keep it. You pick.

What about everybody else?

Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a VC or famous blogger to use Boxbe. Anyone who has a problem with spam or unwanted email can use Boxbe and just act like you are.

photo by Dave Sifry on Flickr

Ars Technica reported yesterday that a convicted “Spam King may rule prison cell for 11 years after Feds nail him.”

“(Adam) Vitale and codefendant Todd Moeller were arrested by the Secret Service in February 2006 after setting up a scheme to advertise a PC security application in exchange for 50 percent of the profits. Unfortunately for Vitale and Moeller, they were dealing with a government informant.”

Reuters added that “in less than a week in August 2005, Vitale and Moeller sent e-mails on behalf of the informant to more than 1,277,000 addresses of subscribers at AOL, the online division of Time Warner Inc.”

Yow… glad to see the CAN-SPAM Act is getting some of the big spammers here in the US.

Other reports on the story
All Things D
Download Squad
Deep Web

image by Flickr user r80o

It’s no secret that we love the Lifehacker blog (and lifehacking in general) here at Boxbe. We love all the efficiency it brings our lives and the general philosophy that things can always be better. Gmail tips, getting rid of junk snail mail, unix hacking, plugins to improve our experience on popular web sites, what’s not to love?

Who is Gina Trapani?

Well, the blog doesn’t just write and edit itself, folks. And we think that Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding Editor and efficiency wünderkind, is the bee’s knees. Being Editor of Lifehacker, one of the most popular blogs on the internet, Gina doesn’t just sit around waiting for her blogger minions to write up posts so she can nitpick vocabulary and spelling, Gina normally writes about 6 posts a day and two weekly features. Many of those posts are tips emailed in from readers.

Besides being a brave soul who actually has an email address on her personal blog, Lifehacker has a public email address on every single page to their tips hotline.

I can only imagine how much spam and unwanted email she must receive. Given all the help Gina has given us, we’d like the opportunity to return the favor.

How to use Boxbe

One way Gina could use Boxbe would be to make all of the people submitting their tips to Lifehacker prove that they are human with our simple captcha test. Better yet, to prevent marketers from over running her inbox with pitches, she could simply set her contact price to $.10. That way, she could quickly weed out everyone who wasn’t serious about getting her attention by collecting a dime from every submitter who was marketing to her. She’s not going to get rich off of this, but it does raise the bar to reach Gina.

Her posts show that Gina Trapani is a power user of Google’s Gmail. Arguably, she might know Gmail better than anyone. She’s even created a plugin to make it better. We’ve added our own improvements to Gmail by integrating Boxbe into the service. The process is free and easy and can dramatically improve the quality of email that you receive in Gmail.

Boxbe does this by reducing your inbox to only the email that you want to read and leaving the rest in our quarantine. In practice, we accomplish this by allowing emails from people who are pre-approved in your white list, that take a test to prove they are human or pay a fee.

But Gmail has a spam filter…

Despite Gmail’s wonderful spam filter, unwanted emails and spam do slip through. We’re firm believers that filter based solutions to stop spam simply won’t work in the long run. Ultimately, the war on spam is an arms race and the good guys are losing. Market based solutions like ours are really the only long term solution getting rid of unwanted email and spam.

While you might not be a famous blogger, I bet you do have a problem with spam. Just like Gina and the crew at Lifehacker, we’re here to help.

photo from Flickr user rcrowley