Category: Activities

Paypal idiocy

As somebody who gets more than his fair share of spam (see this post for the gory details), I see several attempts a day to phish my Paypal account details. So a few days ago I was a little disconcerted to see something that met every criteria for being legitimate, telling me that somebody had requested a password change on my Paypal account. There were no fake and hidden URLs, the email came from an IP that belonged to Paypal, it used my full name, etc.

And it said that if this request didn’t come from me, I should go to the Paypal page to get the phone number for their fraud contact people. So I did, using my own login bookmark rather than the URL they gave me, in spite of me not being able to see anything wrong with the URL. In a fit of extra paranoia, I even looked at the security certificate on the site.

After making me step through a bunch of voice mail options relating to phishing rather that password change, I finally got to talk to somebody, who said that a glitch in their system sent out a bunch of these and I have nothing to worry about. Ok, fine, why didn’t you save us all some time and effort and put information about that system glitch on your web site?

Today, I got an email asking me to fill out a survey based on my call to Paypal customer support. The only problem is it came from a domain other than Paypal. I’m sure there are quite legitimate reasons why Paypal/eBay would decide not to run their own survey, but in this day and age there is no way in hell I’m going to give *any* sort of information about my interactions with Paypal to a third party. (Ok, this blog post is giving information about my interactions with Paypal to lots of third parties, but that’s different – this is “push”, not “pull”.) Paypal, if you want to survey me about your customer support, you’re going to have to do it from your own email servers and your own web servers.

Mailing lists moved.

I’m home helping Vicki recover from her surgery. It appears to have gone well, and she’s not needing me to do much to help her – I expected her to be lying in bed all weekend weakly quavering out “bring me a cup of water, please”, but instead she’s sitting in her usual chair tapping away on her iBook.

While I’m home, though, I took the opportunity to move all my Mailman mailing lists from my home server to my linode. It was incredibly simple, if a bit time consuming. For each list, I copied over the /var/lib/mailman/lists/listname directory and the /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox file. Then I fixed the permissions with
chown -R list.list lists/listname archives/private/listname.mbox
and fixed the internal pointers and stuff using
withlist -l -r fix_url listname
Then I trimmed down the archives (I don’t have enough room on the linode for the whole thing) using
mbox-purge --before 2004-01-01 archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox
and rebuilt the archives using
su list -c "/var/lib/mailman/bin/arch listname /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/listname.mbox/listname.mbox"
and regenerated the aliases with genaliases. Then I went back to my home machine and removed the mailing lists there and put all the mailing list addresses in /etc/postfix/relocated.

Easy as pie. And now I don’t have to worry that the mailing lists will be down while we’re moving.

Spring Update

Ah, Spring.

Last night Vicki and I went kayaking. It was great. Vicki used Baycreek’s new Hurricane Aquasports Tracer which looks like a really nice West Greenland style kayak, very similar lines to my Skerray or the Avocet she was using last year, but made of “Trylon” plastic using a new vacuum forming method. Surprisingly sharp bow for being plastic. So is my Skerray RMX, but Valley are famous for how good their rotomoulded kayaks are. We saw lots of geese, some guarding tiny fluffy goslings. Also saw swans, most of them in aggressive postures, swallows, red winged blackbirds, a flicker (which was a surprise) and a kingfisher (which was also a surprise). The river was fast, but not so high as to make the weir too challenging. The reeds are starting to come in, but they’re still low enough that we could see what was down the other branch when the creek diverged. We went pretty far, and my elbows aren’t that sore today.

As another highlight of spring, today was the first real mountain stage of the Giro D’Italia. It’s been great how the sprint stages have managed to avoid being “the Alessandro Petacchi show” that they were last year, but it’s good to be up to the part that matters, where the GC riders make or break. Basso did great today, and I was surprised to see Cunego lost ground to Simoni. I’m still mad that OLN TV isn’t covering it daily like they did last year. And the “live streaming” software only works on Windows and probably wouldn’t work through the company proxy server anyway, plus what’s the point without Phil Ligget and Paul Sherwin? It’s hard to get a real feel for what’s going on when all you’ve got is the web updates, but CyclingNews.com is doing a pretty good job.

And the third highlight is the Kodak Perigrine Falcons. I haven’t been following them as obsessively as I used to when I could compare notes with Maddy, but it’s good to see that they’ve hatched another 5 this year. Pigeons beware!