Short weeks are very nice to have. Because tomorrow is Good Friday, we don’t have school and the official politically correct term for the day off is ‘spring break’. By the way, political correctness is nonsense. I guess Jason Pelowski though that my remarks on the way the school’s IT department handles itself as ‘funny’, this is according to a source of mine. Since I don’t want my blog to end up on a Websense block list I quickly wrote Cribsense last weekend, since then I’ve planed out how I want everything to work with it, and integration with other anti-spam tools. Cribsense provides the user with direct control to blacklist a particular IP address (Entire ranges are coming in the future.), and will provide automated self protection techniques to block spammers, and hopefully prevent DoS attacks. When it is ready (Once it reaches the beta stage, approximately a month or so away) I will offer it for distribution as a public beta, and of course it will be under a Creative Commons license.
I keep forgetting this, but I didn’t today. The following link is to Google videos to a clip that was done for the bi-weekly school television show, JumpStart, which happens to be taught by Mr. Pelowski. Since the full clip didn’t pass approval for the school audience it has been posted on Google videos how it was supposed to be shown. It’s about what people at Chaska think ‘grillz’ are.
Here is the link: Chaska Grillz
-John Havlik
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After finishing my school work, I went to work on improving CribSense. My current implementation of CribSense on my blog is an old ‘build’ something around the lines of build 0005, while the current alpha is build 0014. Currently I’ve replace just about all of the original PHP code in preparation for plug-in integration into WordPress. Once all of the work that I can do without a mySQL database and WordPress installation is finished I’ll begin testing WordPress integration. I will open the code to the world for testing in a public beta some time shortly afterwards. Currently I need to finish some xHtml work so that I have the form needed for password override, which will work on the lines of “iif you are logged-in, you aren’t evil and are exempt from the IP ban”. Later on I will add a ‘learning’ ability to CribSense which will allow it to quick ban (1 day or less duration) any IP that sends more than three comments that are considered spam by Spam Karma or Badbehavior or end up in moderation.
Right now I’m doing a test with build 0005 on this blog to see if the spammer that I mentioned in the previous post has given up on my blog yet or not. If so I can set-up some automatic removal of IPs so that legitimate users are protected better than just though the account method.
-John Havlik
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Since the stability issues a few days back, I’ve obtained a new ‘friend’, Mr. ‘Bonifacius’ from some non-existent website. This spammer uses the IP address 38.96.1.97 which is associated with Cogent networks, not to worry I’ve already sent a nice letter to their abuse department, and hopefully Monday I’ll know this person’s real name, address, phone number, e-mail and all the other goodies necessary to let the Feds have their way with the spammer.
Bonifacius is a mildly retarded spambot persona, he only says one phrase in his comments, and this phrase is: “Great article. I am just sad I dont know how to reply properly, though, since I want to show my appreciation like many other.” A quick Google search for this phrase turns up less than a few hundred results for this spammer, most of these are WordPress based blogs that must not be running any anti-spam plug-ins. From what I’ve seen in the past Bonifacius spams a blog differently than most do. The typical spambot will crawl a blog and then make post where ever possible. Bonifacius instead of crawling a site will only check to see if it is a WordPress blog. In a week or so Bonifacius will start pushing data to the wp-comments-post.php file and starts with the first post then it tries the next post up the next hour. This process continues until either: there are no more articles, wouldn’t that be pleasant, or until it is blocked, or trapped as it is on my blog. I haven’t tested to see if the spambot stops after it reaches the end of the posts or continues on to infinity, if it does that’s very bad as it waists bandwidth on both ends.
-John Havlik
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Introducing CribSense, an anti-spam blacklist suit for keeping those you don’t want visiting your site out. I’m just beginning to test it, but it’s a nice spoof of the Websense proxy block pages, you can check it out at the link provided below. I’m seeing if this will have a nice affect on the spammer that is attacking my blog at about once every hour right now.
Here is the link: CribSense
-John Havlik
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Ok so this is long over do, I know, but this past week has been hell for the WordPress servers for some reason at Weblogs.us so everyone’s blog has been up and down for the last week. Reliability has to be at about 70% right now. Every time I’ve meant to post something suddenly the blog is down. As I outlined in a quick blog which should have gone out at 1:00 AM today (It didn’t but I edited the time stamp and released it later today), Apache is crashing allot due to what we believe is an improperly coded WordPress plug-in which a Weblogs.us member is using. To help alive the situation I’ve disabled all of my plug-ins other than Bad Behavior to block spam. This means that my blog will be broken until the servers can handle the burden someone is placing on them.
We had a track meet last Wednesday, which was originally scheduled for yesterday but due to forecasted storms, which did take place, the meet was moved up a day. Wednesday was dry, for a spring day, and windy. The entire back straightaway of the track was at times directly into the wind, which made running more difficult than it usually is. Adding to the wind was the absence of uniform tops, since they didn’t arrive until today we had to run in t-shirts which was just great since we didn’t really look like a team with twenty or more different t-shirt designs. I accidentally left my nalgene bottle at my second block class, which left me waterless for the races, which really hampered my performance, but it was the first meet so all is good.
I promise once the new Weblogs.us front page/website design is finished and implemented then I will post a new issue to the critique of Myspace profiles, the new name for the series will be launched at that time. ETA for this event is the second Friday in May. It would be the first Friday, but I’ll be out of town that weekend.
-John Havlik
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WordCamp NYC
