Category: Geekery

Spammers are the scum of the earth!

In the last 24 hours, there were 2541 attempts to deliver mail to xcski.com.

Of those, 1871 (73%) were rejected by the mail server because they came from known spam sites, or because they gave an invalid “HELO”, or various other spam symptoms.

56 messages were to non-existant addresses, either old addresses that were retired (I use temporary addresses when I’m dealing with merchants and retire them when I don’t need to talk to the merchant any more) or spammers with bad address lists (people have been spamming 5bptomblin for over a decade now).

4 messages were to deliberate bait addresses (addresses which I put on comment on the main page of my web site), which are redirected to a spam reporting system called Vipul’s Razor.

311 messages (12%) were caught by SpamAssassin or bogofilter.

Of the remaining 299 messages (12%), at least some of that was uncaught spam, but I don’t know how much because I’m not the only person who gets email at xcski.com. I tune and train my spam filters, so yesterday only one piece of uncaught spam got through to me. But the others here do not train their spam filters the way I do, so they probably get more uncaught than that. But that means that at maximum, 12% of the email xcski.com gets is real, legitimate mail from people who have a reason, possibly a bad one, to send us email. I know for a fact that at least some of that email is from mailing lists that my step-daughters never bothered to unsubscribe from, but which they never read. So the real percentage of wanted email is lower, possibly much lower.

What spammers have done to the wonderful medium of email is criminal.

The Ottawa News Administrator’s Group mailing list got the following query. The bit with the quote markers is the start of the ott.events charter.

> ott.events is an unmoderated newsgroup for announcements of seminars and
> the like in and around Ottawa-Hull, Canada. This newsgroup is intended for
> events with no admission charge (unless the charge is sufficient only to
> cover expenses or is donated to charity).
>
> The following topics are NOT permitted:
> auctions/garage sales — use ott.forsale.other
> retail store sales — use ott.business.ads
> open houses — use ott.housing

Well if there are no advertizing for garage sales…which newsgroup would be
allowed ???

I responded “Which part of ‘auctions/garage sales — use ott.forsale.other’ didn’t you understand?” and underlined the part of the quoted text. After all, about the only compensation I get for being a news administrator is to be snarky to idiots. He replied a few hours later:

You should be careful who you’re speaking with. I have a good mind to rip your fucking head off and shit in your hole.

Don’t you ever talk to me again like that.

Colour me convinced. This person is a moron, and deserved all the snarkiness of my first reply. And more. He didn’t want me to “talk to me again like that”, so in my next response, I was much less polite.

If you don’t want your stupidity pointed out to you, you shouldn’t ask
stupid questions. Especially not when the answer to the question is in
your quoted text.

Fuck off, moron.

I’ve mentioned earlier the problems I’ve had buying this WRT54G Linksys router. I bought it for three reasons – because my existing router was sometimes flakey, giving in-coming http connections the router’s administration web page login instead of passing through to my Linux server like it’s supposed to, because the performance on Team Fortress Classic would start out ok and then after about 5 minutes drop you down to a “ping” of over a thousand (which gets you banned from every server in the world because that low a ping ruins the game for everybody, not just you), and because this new one runs Linux and is hackable. But twice in the last hour or so it’s flaked out on my – Vicki and I would both still be showing decent wireless strength, but neither of us could ping or reach anything. The wired connections (the Linux server and the G4) were working just fine, and the Linksys administration page was still reachable from those computers.

Oh, as a bit of an aside, I should mention that the Linksys administration page sucks donkey dicks. I could not find a way to list all the wireless clients on it, neither could I find a way to soft-reset the router. Does anybody know if the Swensoft (or whatever it is) firmware has better administration pages?

I power cycled the router and things came back up. I’m not sure what we’re doing this evening that’s so different from normal. I’m writing in my blog, which doesn’t even use the network, keeping three ssh sessions open (like always), bit-torrenting the new Doctor Who episode and playing some songs on a disk NFS mounted from the Linux server. Both of those last two are fairly network intensive, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never done both at the same time together. Anyway, I’m going to refrain from playing iTunes until I’ve got this Torrent done. Which will probably be tomorrow morning. I also made sure the router is clear of the switching hub and the cable modem so it doesn’t overheat.