I have is_human() coupled with Akismet and together they knock out all the comment spam I was getting. The other interesting little factoid, is that nearly all the spam I was getting was coming from only three IP addresses… hurray for blacklisting. I’ll share the nefarious addresses so you can firewall them out if you like:
200.63.42.141
200.63.42.136
85.29.204.193
The first two don’t resolve in DNS. The third is a floating IP at ipv4.vnet.ee; I am not sure what that domain is for, but a lot of folks blacklist the entire domain for sending email spam.
Huge thank you to Nick Berlette the author of is_human() and the Akismet team. Have a great weekend!
I am very annoyed that for some weeks now, every time I sign into Yahoo’s instant messenger service I get two spam messages from random Yahoo accounts that change every time. I only get the unsolicited offers for illegal goods or services when I first sign into the service for a session (never in the middle of a session), and I always get exactly two such offers. The consistency makes me wonder what is going on… since I don’t get them randomly throughout a login session it is only mildly annoying, but I know others who’ve had Yahoo messenger accounts much longer than I have who do not get this junk.
Anyone know how to stop the nonsense?
Update: Turns out there is no good way to stop it, but you can elect to only accept new messages from people already in your contact list. That means people who would like to contact you will first need to contact you out of band (perhaps via email first) and have you add them to your Yahoo IM client. Sigh. Once again the evil creeps ruin a good thing for everyone else.
Gah, I find myself once again dipping a toe into the murky waters that make up the Windows(tm) experience.
I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate that I have not had to touch any MicroSoft crap for many years now… but I inherited an old Compaq desktop and my boss suggested we put XP on it so I could do the occasional web-form written by idiots that require MSIE as the only browser. It makes sense. I can also test websites I make for MSIE compatibility (since IE can’t handle CSS properly).
So I find myself setting up the whole uber-paranoid security software suite because Windows is so vulnerable… and I discover that my information is dated… I last dabbled in the Win 98/SE era. Yikes.
Update: I have a much newer page of XP information available here. The rest of this post is for posterity only…
Here is what I have so far:
Firefox 2.0.0.1 (secure and CSS aware browsing)
Ad-Aware SE Personal 1.06 (generic spy-ware/mal-ware remover)
Spybot Search & Destroy (alternative spy-ware/mal-ware remover)
McAfee VirusScan (corporate license, thanks to the company I work for)
cygwin DLL (because I still type like a UNIX/Linux geek)
putty (because Windows Telnet/Terminal sucks enormously)
gvim70 (because vim is better than notepad)
Opera 9.1 (alternative fast browser for low memory Windows boxes)
VideoLAN 0.8.6 (best media player with no spyware in it at all)
Synergy 2 (lets me treat side by side desktops like a two headed machine, cut & paste and same mouse/keyboard shared over both monitors/machines)
It appears that ZoneAlarm is no longer essential because the built-in XP firewall is pretty good, but is that really true? I really liked ZoneAlarm’s program manager, which prevented bad Windows software from getting out to the network… not sure yet if XP firewall can do that.
XP has a built-in graphic file viewer, so IrFanView is not needed anymore.
XP has a built-in xntp network time protocol client, so Dimension 4 is not needed anymore.
SecureCRT and NetTerm are competitors with Putty - looks like they all work equally well.
What other suggestions do people have?
What makes your Windows XP box useful?
If you live in Virginia, it’s primary election day, remember to go vote!
Results are on the state board of elections website, and will be updated live. I am following very closely to see if we will be hosting a Webb fundraiser or a Miller fundraiser later in the summer.
We just found out that Mr. Webb has a scheduling conflict and we may not be hosting his fundraiser this Sunday after all, more as soon as I know. There are other candidates, you can find out more, on a non-partisan site I have here, or on Politics1.com or the Virginia State Board of Elections website.
I am disgusted that six years into the 21st century, my precinct still has no verified voting system. We still have black box voting machines that are easy to program to skew the election. So much for trust but verify, there will be no verifications here. We must be the most backwards state in the union.
I don’t trust my bank to issue or collect $20 without a receipt and a paper trail, how can our stupid state government assume I trust their system to collect my far-more-valuable vote without a paper trail?
So this morning, all my attempts to use google are returning the strangest error, as if I were a spammer or hacker program trying to harvest their site for information.
The message reads:
“We’re sorry…
… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.
We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.
We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google. “
Perhaps this is because I visit their search engine site with cookies and java turned off?
I tried to switch to Teoma, but they suck now they they have been merged by ask.com. Update: Ask.com and Teoma did merge, but Teoma’s brilliant search engine is now in use, and this is wonderful.
Update: Turns out AOL’s employee networks were blacklisted by google, joy.
Update2: Two whole days and Google is still blacklisting AOL’s employee networks - I am switching to Teoma’s Ask.com, which turns out to be Teoma’s excellent search engine behind Ask.com after all. Sweet.
So I had trouble figuring out how to activate the Akismet filters on my WordPress blog, because I could not find my own API Key - turns out you must register a WordPress.com blog to get that key.
This became more important recently because the amount of spam commentary showing up on my blog was increasing dramatically the last few days. We’ll see how well Akismet filters now.
John Gruber has an excellent and very sarcastic article poking a little fun at the recent hype about the possibility that someday there may in fact be a virus for Mac OSX. The fact is well known and common sense, but why is there repeated story after repeated story about new Mac viruses (there are no actual viruses yet), and such hysteria?
We are all watching the security nightmare Windows users experience every day. Thousands of viruses a year, hundreds of malware programs that illegally rob cycles and memory from unsuspecting user’s computers, and that there is a possibility of one on the Mac is news!? Yes it is possible. Someday it will happen. Trust me, we are watching and learning from the Windows security nightmare. Very smart people are ready to stop the first Mac virus when it appears… some day. Sigh. Guess it must be a quiet news week…
On a lighter side, Apple has a really spiffy and poignant ad campaign about this very issue and about why years ago I switched from Amiga and Irix to OSX and not to Windows XP. Check them out for yourself, they are very funny, even if you prefer those Windows machines: http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/
Oh yeah, and to engage in “post mortem equine floggery” - once again (and for many years now) Apple’s own website requires no cookies, no Java, no JavaScript, and no ActiveX to work - meaning you do not have to lower the security of your browser to visit their website and conduct meaningful business. Hurrah… I sure wish other merchants would figure that out, perhaps they’d get my business then.
A few months ago I volunteered 2 hours of my time as a computer geek to a charity auction, and lovely L.G. won the auction. So Saturday morning found me helping her with her IBM Thinkpad A20m (P3 @700MHz, 256MB, 40GB, XGA, Win2000 Pro). I found myself impressed with the hardware, that this laptop made in 2000 was still running strong and quite useable after 5 years of use and abuse. That is remarkable for a Wintel box. While I am still using my 9 year old SGI O2, and 7 year old Macs, typically a Wintel clone is useless after 3 years. So this old A20m is remarkable, for it’s hardware.
Windows 2000 Professional is another story. As usual with Windows(tm), there is no security at all, so L.G.’s browser (MS Internet Explorer) had been completely hijacked by some weather toolbar that kept over-writing her registry. McAfee, Ad-Aware, and Spybot S&D were all finding this annoying application and deleting it, but it kept re-appearing through IE every time we rebooted. I suspect we’ll have to back up her data, re-install Windows, then restore only certain files. It is incomprehensible that people are not taking legal action against the companies that make this software that effectively steals their computer.
We had to settle for installing Firefox and Opera, and showing L.G. how to use them instead of MSIE, then installing ZoneAlarm, Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, and updating her commercial copy of McAfee VirusScan (thanks AOL - best thing you’ve ever done for your members); and showing her how to boot safe mode and use McAfee, Ad-Aware, and Spybot from safe-mode. We also installed VideoLan because WMP and RealPlayer are both spyware of a sort too. I’ll be investigating how to cheaply upgrade to more memory and an external backup drive for her. I am so glad I no longer waste my time with Microsoft’s miserable excuse for an operating system, how frustrating. Updated (12/20) research is that she can get up to 512MB (two sticks of 256MB PC100 SODIMM 144pin) for about $96 and an external backup drive (40GB EZ Backit Pro) for $89.
I know I am engaging in post-mortem equine floggery, but Rob Pegoraro over at the Washington Post agrees with what techies have been telling the computer shopping public for several years now: choose a Mac over a PC as your home computer. The nice thing about Mr Pegoraro’s article, is that he’s a much better writer than most of us techies, and he sums it all up very succinctly when he says it is no longer a case of “why should I buy a Mac over a Windows PC?” but that it is now a case of “why should I buy Windows at all since it is so insecure, so unstable, and after years of patches it remains insecure?” - Bravo.
Mr. Pegararo also gets points for mentioning the Sony decision to include what is essentially a trojan horse rootkit on some of their new audio/music CDs, a format previously thought safe from viruses and malware - and true ISO 9660 Audio CDs are, but Sony/BMG/Epic/Columbia music CDs are no longer standards compliant.
More fallout from the Sony/Columbia/Epic/BMG XCP rootkit exlpoit is detailed on Wired (first time I’ve read Wired in a while). Yikes, the after-effects of such a stupid corporate blunder, compounded by so many people running their MS Windows systems effectively wide open (no security to speak of), are turning out to be huge. Hopefully there is a very real cost from all this that is billed to First4Internet, Sony, and Microsoft. BoingBoing has a nice map of the spread of the infection here.
If you want to find out the impact to yourself, the EFF has a great quick page describing which CDs are infected. Basically only CDs made after March of 2005 have any chance, and apparently only a few of them.
