Ok so you Internet Exploder users out there should upgrade to the beta 2 to see my blog correctly, since I believe it displays 32bit PNG images correctly now. After mass ‘piracy’ of previous alpha builds, Microsoft has finally released a public beta, and therefore I will no longer care about users who use anything under IE 7, or Mozilla/5.0 compatible (Khtml based (Safari, Konqueror) and Gecko (Camino, FireFox, Mozilla, seamonkey)). You will need XP with Service Pack 2 installed to install it, I’ve tried on my SP1 machine and I had no luck.
Here is the link: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 Beta 2
-John Havlik
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According to the maintainer of Spam Karma in his latest blog entry, a new breed of spam bot has emerged and has been released in the last few days. This new spam bot uses somewhat more intelligent behavior and can get past Spam Karma 2 sometimes. Bad Behavior, the spam protection that I use, isn’t very effective against these bots, which I can attest to since I had swarms of spasm lining up for moderation beginning last Friday.
It seems that there is an update coming to Bad Behavior which may end up stopping these new bots, but it won’t come until Bad Behavior 2 come out sometime this year. Michael Hampton, Bad Behavior’s coder has released an alpha but it will be some time before a final release will arrive If you wish to speed the release of Bad Behavior 2 please donate to his paypal account, his laptop died on the third of January and he doesn’t have the cash to repair/replace it.
As for my spam buddy, Mr. 195.225.177.80, from Europe managed to either get past my .htaccess block, or Stat Traq tracks all http requests, even 403s. Hopefully it’s the latter rather then the former. Otherwise my site has been hacked and I’ll have to do another password rotation, which is a pain.
Here is the link: Michael Hampton’s Blog
Here is the link: Dr Dave: The State of Spam [Karma]
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
Watching a spamming attempt unfold before my very eyes, I have become furious to the point of almost writing a Word Press plug-in. In stead I’m going to share an idea. So a certain Internet Exploder (Explorer) user from Europe, whom is using the IP address 195.225.177.80 and is ‘pimping’ a fraudulent online pharmacy, decided to crawl my site a few months ago. Plotting its attack, it waited, and waited. Avoiding Bad Behavior was necessary, but the simple Word Press moderation blocks kept his spam from getting through. He should have seen a 412: Precondition Failed, but somehow didn’t. The first attack lasted only 8 posts but they never caught on. The next day 12 spam posts came, and then that night 48 posts came through. This really pissed me off. I uploaded a nicely modified .htaccess file that blocked his IP address, now he sees a nice 403: Forbidden.
Instead of taking such a harsh approach on spammers I’ve though of something: how about using a black list, such as Bad Behavior’s central one, and when a spammer tries to post a comment with under 10 words and has a hyperlink, or supplies one to the “website” field, log the message as spam, the IP address, and the site url in a sql database entry and then forward the robot to the site that they tried to “promote”. That way legitimate the users of the IP address can get make quality responses, while the spammer bots will waste bandwidth of the site that they are “promoting”.
-John Havlik
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In keeping with the pessimistic view of the media theme of this week, I decided to release a poem that I wrote for Creative Writing.
The media’s captives consume
another war story,
economic issues, news of an urban shooting,
incorrectly used slang, drug use and abuse,
hate, rape, sex, incest, ignorance, and infatuation.Today’s music consumer enjoys well-rounded plethora music.
-John Havlik
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So a day after news started spreading of a horrible virus running-a-muck and I said that there could be a link to media organizations. This link may not exist, but something better has come up. Kirby Dick submitted his film This Film Is Not Yet Rated to the MPAA with an e-mail ordering them to not make copies of his documentary. While rating the film the MPAA has admitted to making copies for its employees to watch.
Nothing seems wrong with this right? No, even if I believe that copying is should be fine, the fact that the MPAA doesn’t share my views on the subject and is actively attempting to force me to conform to their views, which isn’t fine. We already know that the media is a bunch of hypocrites and this only goes to further prove this fact. But what we have now is an excuse, “MPAA officials did this with Kirby Dick’s film, so why can’t I for archiving purposes?” is now perfectly legit due to their own example. Now if they used something on the lines of DVD Decrypter or DeCSS they would be in trouble with their own DMCA law. Not that this really matters because the media (RIAA/MPAA) will continue to rape us until we lash back by rioting and demonstrating against Hollywood. DVD/CD burning anyone?
Here is the link: MPAA finds itself accused of piracy
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]
WordCamp NYC
