Steve @ Service: Bugs

Password bug fixed

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 21:54:49 GMT

Thanks Legion for the bug report. This was a new feature created for the school weblogs and shouldn't have had any effect on other sites.
It did.
It doesn't now.

Somebody somewhere

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 10:31:40 GMT

From Friday last week, I'd lost my personal computer. My hall.dll, boot.ini and file structure went knackered. Thus, I've lost some email.

Somebody somewhere asked if I had some logs for a referer they'd received. I do. But I don't know who you are, can you re-ask? And tell me as precisely as you can when the referer happened, to the day, give or take one. I'll then send you the raw logs—which is the best I can do.

Not just my paranoia

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 18:28:20 GMT

Wired: Spam + Blogs = Trouble: "Splogs are the latest thing in online scams and they could smother the Internet."

The splogosphere, explained.

Via Spamhuntress.

Outage for the weekend

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 21:24:07 GMT

I went away Friday 4.00pm. Around 8pm the mail server stopped and needed an OK click. This brought the webserver down, an hour or so later.

Home from Wales 9.00pm Sunday, and got it all working again.

I've got a once every 60 days email security do-dah, I should have brought foward the OK a few hours. Sigh.

I should have checked that my post about the overflow I sent Friday from my mobile was posted. But switched off receiving emails to my phone for the weekend. I had, then, a weekend off, and wasn't concerned enough. Bad of me.

Good of me to read the newspapers. To play ugeo cards (?) with Brad, have food with my folks, go see the horses in the County Park--twice. Watch telly. Figure and install a CCTV system for my dad. Time goes so quick. (Later: Brad's got a rare one Dark Neos, worth $38!!! eBay's cheaper though.)

If this happens again can someone txt me 07886 301 767. "Oy! Sever's down." Wake me from a slumber.

Something to try at home

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 09:18:31 GMT

BBC Spammers manipulate stock markets: "The team found that a spammer who bought shares the day before starting an e-mail campaign and then sold them the day after could make a return on his or her investment of 4.9%."

The slippery slope

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 07:52:11 GMT

WebProWorld AdSense Bad For Your Business: "To make a site work good with AdSense or Overture the first step is in building a site that is totally useless or close to it."

I'm not making much money with the Adsense here. There's a lot of truth in this discussion. Certainly, I've been caught landing on a crap site and clicking an ad to get out of there. And I've never, ever bought anything from an ad click through. I can't see web ads continuing. The bubble will burst.

Be careful out there

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 07:46:19 GMT

Spamhuntress : Inventive spams: "Comment spammers are getting more and more inventive. The "quality" of the spams have gone up recently.

Any time you receive a comment that seems on topic, or seems personal, you need to check the link included. If it's spammy or commercial in nature, chances are, it's spam. Don't approve it."

Most likely I'llcatch it an delete it. But if I don't within a day or two, delete it yourself. Go to your discussion group view, look for the comment and chipper chopper... Open the discussion group view of the item you wish to delete, at the foot of the page there's an admin box, there, delete this item?

And watch out for Russian girls—they're geezers after your money>

Damned Poles

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 16:19:57 GMT

Yes, we had 'connectivity issues' yesterday and today. Yesterday, late afternnoon, we were hit hard by a referral spammer. Now, these things come form different IPs, different countries, but carry all the same referers. In actuality, it's one person, sending out instructions to drone or zombie machines they've taken over. Anyway, we were hit hard. I came home wanted to do something on my site, saw I couldn't, so in the famous server dude words of, "fuck it!" Crash restarted.

This lead to a bit of corruption in one of my roots, the config.manila.stats.refer.steveswar to be precise. Come the early hours of the morning, when I do root compaction to clear crap, the damn thing hung.

When I awoke Sunday, saw the problem, tracked it down, jettisoned the erroneous table and restarted, we'd been down for some six hours. From 4.00am till 10.00am approx.

Apparently it's a pair of Polish brothers who are responsible to most referral spam. (I was going to link to back up that claim, but 'Spam Huntress' is suffering a Denial of Service attack, probably from the very same Poles. So I can't link deep into her site—see the screen shot. Stick your head too far up beyond the parapet, and they'll come after you.)

Bad bots, crawlers and spiders

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 15:08:40 GMT

I've been spending more time on my spam defences. There's a ton of info here, including IPs, names, addresses and a new idea for me: headers. I hadn't realised that spammers sometimes send unique headers in their requests.

To add to my list of referal, comment, member, and trackback spammers, I need to add spam bots!

List of bad bots: "A short list of bad spiders and nasty bots." Except that it isn't short! And it isn't available as a file to download, so I'm going to have to spider it myself. Kill them Chinese bots :-)

List of user agents of bad bots: "Some of these robots are designed to copy entire web sites, some to harvest email addresses." Again a nice long list, but no download. Still dead handy, thanks dude. We're safe from email harvesters here.

Traps for bad bots, crawlers and spiders: Some nice explanations of traps. No, not saucers full of beer, or yogurt pots with honey in.

Killing comment spam

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 14:11:42 GMT

I've tried stopping it getting into our sites. And in that arms race we won for a while. Now, they're getting through, again. The only answer is to find them after the fact and mass delete them, once an hour, every hour. So, that's what we're going to do. If you see any spam, please send it to me, so I can figure out any pattern, add that pattern to my filters and mass delete the bastards.

Everybody thinks Steve's a real hero

Steve gets his trusty sword and fancy dress gear on