Category: Geekery

Spam Karma 7, Spammers 0

It’s two months to the day since I switched from MovableType to WordPress, and the spammers finally found me. And SpamKarma deleted all 7 spams without a whimper. It even decided that one IP was a repeat spammer and banned them from my blog entirely. I checked and that IP has a http redirector on port 80, probably installed without the computer owner’s knowledge.

I hate spammers with the firey passion of a thousand suns. I’ve been waiting with bated breath for them to start spamming my blog again, and I’m quite relieved to see that SpamKarma handled the first onslaught with nary a whimper.

In other geek news, I’ve got good news: I’ve got Tiger on my laptop. It’s been running the CPU and disk for hours now indexing it for Spotlight. But Dashboard is pretty cool. I kind of wish it would have an option to display the widgets all the time like Konfabulator, but it’s a good replacement for it. I hope somebody fixes GnuControl soon.

And in other geek news, I’ve got bad news: My Linksys router did that thing where the wireless side loses its mind again. The new firmware didn’t fix it. I’ve heard there are hardware problems with the V2.2 hardware. I guess that’s why it was so cheap. I’m also guessing there is no way in hell I’ll get Linksys to take it back.

It’s still September

In my blog entry Rants and Revelations » 4166 September, 1993, I expressed some hope that with AOL dropping Usenet access, it might mean that Usenet would go back to being the place where only the clueful hung out.

As usual when I express optimism like that, I spoke too soon. There is a new scourge on Usenet these days. It’s people accessing it through Google Groups (or other web interface) who think that Usenet is an invention of Google, and that Google is in charge of monitoring everybody’s behaviour. Representative quotes from this new breed of wankers:

  • “I saw a couple of spams in this group. Where are the moderators?”
  • “I’ll report you to Google if you don’t stop insulting me.”
  • “Speak english, this is an American system!”

Here’s hoping!

A few weeks back, I bought a Linksys WRT54G. I only had minor problems with my existing wireless router, but I’ve been hearing some great things about how customizable this one is because it’s open source and runs Linux. Hey, $60 for a Linux box is pretty impressive.

However, if I loaded it moderately heavily, like if I attempted to bittorrent the latest Doctor Who episode while listening to mp3s NFS mounted from my server, the wireless connection would start acting weird, and eventually stop transferring data at all, while showing full signal strength in MacStumbler. But the wired connections to the Linux server and the G4 downstairs kept working. But the only way to get wireless working again was to go downstairs and power cycle it. Which is a pain in the knees.

So it was recommended that I try one of the third party firmwares out there. I’m not sure if I want all the bells and whistles of the full Sveasoft distro, and so rather than paying the $20 for it I thought I’d try on of the free ones. I just installed dd.wrt.v22.prefinal3.1.bin. It adds a few nifty features, most of which I don’t care about. But it does have busybox on it, so I can ssh into the box. That’s just weird. But what I really want to see if it can go a few days without needing a power cycle.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

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.