November 2004 Archives
Lycos is introducing a new way to fight spam. It's a screensaver which attacks the web sites of spammers, draining their bandwidth and making their site unresponsive. I'm not at all sure it's legal, but really how many people are going to have sympathy for the spammers?
Of course this could backfire. As we've already seen with SORBS, it's easy to accidentally target people who haven't done anything wrong. It's common, for instance, for a number of completely unrelated web sites to be hosted on the same server simply because the owners are signed up with the same web hosting company. An attack on one site on such a server would impact the other unrelated sites as well...
I downloaded AVG free edition version 7 last night, and was glad to find that it is actuall a lot better than version 6. The email scanner seems to work with Pegasus Mail (It may have done before and just not told me, since it seems to do so transparently) and the interface as a whole looks a lot better.
I'm hoping the new version doesn't crash my PC after doing a full scan, like 6 did... I have yet to do one though.
I administer a web ring on webring.com. At the moment I'm finding this difficult, as any time I attempt to load webring.com, it times out. If I load it via Google language tools it works fine. Webring.com Fanlisting works fine.
So evidently there's a problem somewhere between me and webring.com that's stopping me from loading the pages. I would contact webring for help in solving the problem, but all they have is a feedback form and no apparent helpdesk email address. They suggest on the support page to ask in the forums, which I would do if I was able to load the forums (directly) at all.
Thus we have a catch 22 - I am unable to load webring.com, and I am unable to obtain help because doing so requires loading webring.com.
I am going to attempt to guess a support email address in the hope someone there is monitoring that address and can help.
Today's Get Fuzzy. Egads, I say. That's a wee bit disturbing...
Edit: I didn't mean to end up ranking so high for Get Fuzzy on Google. My apologies to anyone who landed here expecting something deep and meaningful about the comic and found instead a (now) dead link and two pathetic sentences of comment.
The comic, which is no longer there because comics.com take them down after a couple of weeks, was during a period when Darby was suffering from an injured arm. ISTR it looked like Bucky was doing something obscene to Satchel.
I guess this is more proof Google is broken.
I got hold of the Farscape box set finally yesterday and, bam, I've watched five episode already. I've got to slow down and ration them, because after this there's nothing until either the mini-series (or whatever it was they made) plays on TV here, or comes out on DVD.
But Jeff keeps sending me Star Trek and Stingray DVDs to watch, plus both seasons of I'm Alan Partridge, and Kylie's lent me the first season of Dark Angel, not to mention a pile of videotapes which Meg sent me a while back, so it's not like I have nothing to space the episodes out with...
Farscape season 4 comes out on DVD here today. Seasons 2-4 of that series haven't screened here other than on pay TV, so I have been waiting (im)paitently for the release of the fourth season so that I could watch it finally. I was going to buy it at lunchtime, however (having gone to the trouble of printing out their $20 coupon) Whitcoulls didn't have it on the shelf.
It turned out that they were sent the wrong items by the distributor. Hopefully they'll get it in before the coupon expires on Sunday...
On a whim last night, I signed up for Blog Explosion, as site which lets you earn credits by looking at other people's weblogs, and then use the credits earned to direct other BE members to your weblog. You can also refer other people to the service in a sort of pyramid scheme dealy and earn credits from that.
After having surfing on blogs using their system for a while:
- On dialup, weblogs often take more than 30 seconds to load. :)
- The six credits I earned were gone before I finished surfing.
- It's also a useful way to find weblogs to vote into industries on BlogShares
I suspect I would have to surf quite a lot of weblogs before experiencing anything like an "explosion" in traffic, but as at the moment most of my hits appear to come from blog spammers, it's worth a go.
Good old SORBS (Spam and Open-Relay Blocking System) is still at it. Not only are they blocking whole ISPs, they're apparently also blocking email from servers hosted on dynamic IP addresses. Once again, SORBS is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The reason thay're blocking anything from dynamic IP addresses is because virus-ridden PCs can be used to send spam. Gosh, wait until they realise that 100% of spam emails are sent via the SMTP protocol! "OMG! By blocking any email sent with that protocol, we can block 100% of spam! We'll be saviours!"
As I mentioned a while back on my LJ, SORBS came to my attention because I tried to email a friend of mine, and it bounced. If there's one thing I hate more than spam, it's having a perfectly valid email bounce for no good reason. (I've been able to email George since, and it looks like Paradise was taken off SORBS' list.)
Blacklisting is bad, it stops legitimate emails and doesn't really affect spammers much, because they use fake email addresses and don't get the bounces. Of course, if everyone used the blacklist, that would stop the spammers... for about five minutes before they found a way around it. Spammers make quite a lot of money, you see, so they're determined to keep doing it. The only way to stop spam for good is to cut it off at the source. Blacklisting doesn't do that, it just makes the problem invisible, like taking painkillers for a brain tumour.
Of course, people will still use blacklists. However if you consider using SORBS, you might stop to consider what valid emails you might miss out on.
Incidentally, SORBS is currently in fourth position for a worthless project.
This makes me wish I had the software to make SWF files, so I could make a pet Dalek.
It's that time of year again, when I become mysteriously unable to get a decent dial-up connection. When I tell my modem to dial in, it re-negotiates twice and I end up with a sub-56K connection. At the moment I'm connected at 28800bps
I'm pretty sure it's not the modem, as I borrowed another modem from work last year and it had the same problem. Besides which, the modem connects at high-speed fine for most of the year - it's just between November and sometime early the next year that it starts becoming a problem.
Perhaps Telecom lowers the quality of their phone lines to "encourage" people over to its highly-expensive broadband "offerings". Perhaps it's just that the warm weather does something to the phone lines to lower the quality. Maybe it's Paradise's modems. Maybe it's solar flares. Whatever it is, it makes the internet surfing experience more painful than it should be.
