Archive for July, 2007
Splogs
July 14th, 2007 • web
I’m starting to get hits from splogs (spam blogs) that do nothing more than aggregate your feeds and steal your content (PROTIP: there are WP plugins to stop this) in order to jack up their PageRank and make money from AdSense. They’re just as bad as MFA (Made For AdSense) sites. They’re also in clear violation of my own copyright but I’ll have a fun time trying to win that case so I set for some answers. A certain site was stealing my content so I searched for something quick to fix it. I came across this post from someone having the same problem. It’s a great one-time fix, in fact, that’s just what it is. Once WordPress updates wp-trackback.php, you have to re-edit the code. Problem is, what if you forgot you made that change? The splogs soon make their return. I’m not saying this is a bad solution, not by far. However, lots of people are not very comfortable editing code of any kind, that’s why they use things like WordPress.
I’ve got two extremely simple solutions, one for server owners and one for web hosting users. First up, my easy and always-in-place fix:
route add 71.246.159.83 reject
route add 72.249.33.141 reject
These are two IPs of some rising splogs. Now, that’ll stop them from ever hitting my feed and my content forever as long as I stay on my server. Next up, web hosting solution:
order deny, allow
deny from 71.246.159.83
deny from 72.249.33.141
allow from all
And put that in your local .htaccess file. This is the most portable solution for when you have to move providers. The only problem with this is that if you have multiple sites under multiple accounts — on the same server or otherwise — you’ve got a lot of .htaccess files to update. Still, however, this remains 100% portable and will always work for your blog as long as your hosting provider uses Apache or another server that supports .htaccess files.
This week’s interesting tech news
July 13th, 2007 • 3 comments chatter, interesting posts, web
Still reeling from the iPhone explosion, I eagerly sought out more interesting tech news this week to satiate myself with.
Apple buys the CUPS printer framework. Since switching to a BSD core, CUPS has been at the heart of Apple’s “it just works” mantra although us Linux users (and BSD users as well) have enjoyed CUPS for ages. CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) has been around for a very long time and makes dubious use of the IPP (Internet Printing Protocol, basically printing over IP, like VoIP) standard that makes printing to decent printers dead simple. I made heavy use of this at my old job when I began to switch as many printers from their proprietary Canon/Toshiba protocols to IPP. This really made the 5 Mac users on campus extremely happy and made my job a helluva lot easier.
LaTeX squares off against Microsoft Office and easily trumps it in terms of proper typesetting. I haven’t used Office in well over a year because it’s a bloated piece of garbage but I always did hate the fact that certain fonts and typefaces just didn’t look “right” when typing certain works. Taraborelli shows how easily LaTeX can do everything Office does, and more, with very little effort. I’ve always stayed away from LaTeX and have used the likes of OpenOffice.org and Abiword for my word processing but I’m definitely tempted to give LaTeX a try now.
Shoperro and Viewpoints set to square off against Epinions and each other for user-generated reviews. It seems both are going to be rolling out for-pay revenue models but unless something has changed in the last 4-5 years, this may not last long since Epinion removed this feature long ago.
Google snatched up Postini after using their services for Gmail and other projects for a couple of years now. I’ve only got experience with Postini’s spam capabilities and it’s great and my company’s customers love it. From all the people that I know that have used Postini in the past have never had anything bad to say about it. This was the one acquisition lately that made me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside because it’s something extremely immediately relevant to today’s world and Google decided to give them a few truckloads of cash to keep doing what they’re doing.
Inviteshare.com allows you to easily share invites you have for invite-only or closed beta sites. Right now, there are 37 sites you can give out invites for (it was 15 or so when I joined earlier today) and the process it extremely simple. The site also looks great, even in this day of web 2.0. The design is an intelligent 3 column fixed-width layout that presents all the information you need, right now, in the proper places. IS has been getting literally pounded for days now, with 500 Internal Server Errors popping up every few seconds and this is clearly due in no part to being on the front page of TechCruch. Having been public since July 7th, I believe the site has now easily passed the 2 million pageviews mark and is probably climbing close to 40,000+ uniques. Not bad for a simple service launched this week.
Hurricane damaged hotel room?
July 12th, 2007 • chatter
A woman booked a stay in a local hotel last year and it was waterlogged from a recent hurricane but I’d love to know which one! Our area was only hit by one tropical storm during the last season and it was less devastating than rain we had last week. In fact, we were not hit by any hurricanes in the last 18 months.
I live, with a stop light included, approximately 45 seconds from Deerfield Beach and if they were hit by a hurricane, we would have been as well. I could probably nail my local CompUSA with a nicely powered potato canon. While it’s more than probable that the roof needed to be fixed from the last hurricane before this — which was the devastating Wilma in 2005 — this claim is from late 2006. I don’t disagree with the woman that this is appalling behaviour on behalf of Embassy Suites but it sounds like someone talked this up to make it sound more horrible than it was by simply saying “hurricane”
Freudian slip?
July 12th, 2007 • christianity, spam
I was just sitting here, investigating a Spamcop report and I go to look up the domain:
root@viper [~]# grep websofffaith /etc/userdomains
And it’s actually websoffaith.com, whoops? Even funnier, they’re spamming people to drum up business. I’d post their number publicly but I’d probably get into a bit of trouble for that.
West Palm Beach woman sets to ban books she’s never read
July 11th, 2007 • 1 comment christianity, education, intolerance
Sean Prophet writes about a local woman getting the WPB school board to ban books that she’s never read based on her own personal beliefs. That’s right, beliefs. She’s on public record as having never read any of the books cover-to-cover but I’m going to guess it’s more than that, she’s probably never read any of them at all. She pretty much proves this when she met with the school board’s superintendent about it and couldn’t recite blasphemous passages or page numbers even though she’s required to provide sufficient proof to back up the complaint.
She wants 80 books on topics such as homosexuality, atheism, abortions, and even a book about Richard the Lionheart pulled from the shelves. Yep, she wants a book based on the trials of a noble and respected king, who also happened to be deeply pious, to be banned because she’s not even read the thing. I can imagine that right now, this woman is the laughing stock of her subdivision because she’s clearly displayed her own ineptitude and lack of sense in a very public way. Funny how I bet she skipped over all the books on demonology or the shady past of the Vatican because they have some religious roots. Next week will she want newspapers running recent stories of pastors charged with sodomizing and molesting children pulled from local newsstands because it casts a negative light on her fellow Christians in their time of backsliding. Or what about pastors that fraud and steal from generous contributors?
Not one to aid in his mother’s misguided plight is her atheist son whom she conjectures that he think she’s “pretty stupid.” I’m guessing he isn’t the only one based on this aberrant display of public foolishness. I don’t go to libraries and complain that they have Bibles, Korans, or Torahs on the shelves and demand they be pulled because I’m not the arbiter and controller of knowledge and feel that people are free to read whatever they want. Maybe that’s something she’ll learn too. But somehow, you know, I really doubt that. She’ll probably try and take this to the local court.
Review of ‘Learning Python’ by Mark Lutz
July 10th, 2007 • 1 comment programming, python
My review of Lutz’s Learning Python has been published over at The Associated Content. Between this blog, BAND NAMES NOT BRAND NAMES (new review posted today!), Helium, and Associated Content, I always forget to write something for each one! I wonder how people can manage and write for so many sites at a time unless they have a decent amount of back material already prepared.
Our beloved Kendra
July 9th, 2007 • chatter
I’m right scared of spiders. All sizes too. Except for baby spiders and granddaddy long legs, those are okay. But in the last week, we had a little spider of our own that was inhabiting the space between our bushes and our patio door. We had no idea what to do with it and like I said, I’m scared of them. So our little spinybacked orb weaver (Gasteracantha cancriformis) had a rough little stay at our house for a week. I named her Kendra.
It was rough only due to the fact that in the later hours of the day, we leave the house frequently and Kendra was rather intent on building her web from one of the bushes to our door or straight across the pathway so it was constantly being rebuilt and I frankly felt horrible. And I was still pretty scared of her even though I named her and took most of the photos we have of her. When we weren’t tearing up Kendra’s web, the famous south Florida rains did. But she was a quick little worker and managed to rebuild her webby empire in a matter of minutes with most of her orbs still intact. I don’t know what was in them but I hope it was some of those pesky mosquitoes that have been bustling about since our recent rains.
After contacting a very nice scientist from the University of Florida about what to do with her, we were presented with two options: move her or squish her. Even though I was scared of the little thing — that coincidentally, could bite me over and over and I’d be OK — I couldn’t bring myself to kill her. She’s now resting in a nice, giant palm tree just tens of feet from our door.
I kind of miss that scary looking terror. With all the rain and our constant mucking up of her web, we were very worried that we were endangering her survival and any potential for breeding there might be but we know that everything is OK now that she’s moved. Even if I am still a bit scared.
Maybe PHBs and “security professionals” will start to take notice…
July 8th, 2007 • web
Much of my day-to-day work duties include fending off spam and keeping blacklists at bay. For a few years now, I’ve known that spam blacklists are a pretty pathetic answer to the spam problem and they’re just as bad as so called whitelists. Sure, whitelists are very handy but they suffer from the same problems as blacklists: false information and impersonation. Whitelists work by denying all mail from anyone or any domain not on your list however, spammers can circumvent this with ease by simply spamming you until something makes it through and then they just use that one address/domain to spoof all the mail and now you’re getting hundreds of penis enlarging patch emails. Oh no, what to do?! Since you’ve previously trusted this domain and it’s a well respected domain in your eyes, do you add it to your deny list or just quarantine the bad mail? This is the same problem with blacklists and they work in the same manner. Blacklists are lists of who you don’t want mail from but are easily subverted. If you have a Hotmail account, you know all about receiving spam in your supposedly secure inbox. (Hotmail “requires” an SPF record for proper mail delivery and has a signature-based secondary engine. However, I haven’t used my Hotmail address in years and I still get nothing but spam in it and these domains do not have the SPF records required and are obvious spam yet they end up in my inbox. I’m told “they’re working on it”)
So I’m scanning the BinRev forums today and I see an aggregated feed from root-secure.net about blacklisting blacklists so I’m naturally intrigued given my job. The article from the Sunnet Beskerming talks about how useless blacklists are becoming and how antiquated of technology they are. It talks about how different information vectors are playing an important role in making blacklists obsolete and inaccurate. The determined spammer/hacker/”security expert” will use these failing technologies to their advantage since it’s trivial these days to spoof your identity and mask your origin or intent. The main focus of the article is about the new phishing/forgery recognition modules built into popular browsers such as Opera, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Subjugating these banned website lists is as trivial as downloading pirated music today. Microsoft amazing acknowledges that it’s anti-phishing module (most likely based on or using the original code from Spoofstick IE) in IE7 is “not a security feature” but why don’t they disseminate that information past IT professionals? My mother wouldn’t know a Paypal phishing site from www.paypal.com itself and if the phishing site was subverting IE’s blocklist, she can kiss her information goodbye. These blacklists are now lacking in granularity and positive information.
Spam blacklists fall prey to the exact same problems except one: many people running RBLs have vendettas against other people, companies, and other RBLs. One such list is APEWS that’s recently sprung up out of nowhere. They seemingly block anything they want and never block singular IPs but almost always anything from a /15 to a /24. They’re even blocking other blacklists and spam prevention companies with their list because that’s how they operate. The /15 that your server resides on at your datacenter might be blocked by APEWS because of a single server spewing spam to their traps and now this is affecting thousands of customers and potentially, tens or hundreds of thousands of mail recipients. And how do you get off this blacklist? You don’t. The list is (almost) completely anonymous and the only way to “contact” the admins of the list is to post in newsgroups that only the most dedicated of reporters use. Now, I prefaced that with “almost” because there have been one or two posters to these groups that have slipped up and, in so many words, stated that they are behind APEWS. This is only one of such lists that unwitting “professionals” and “experts” use everyday to block your perfectly legit email.
How do RBLs and phishing block lists correlate? They’re falling prey to people working at a much faster pace than they are and are outwitting them everyday. Spammers subvert blacklists everyday with zombie botnets and vulnerable scripts that improperly handle input validation. Phishers are hopping right over phishing blacklists with ease by so closely mirroring legit sites and sometimes even using previously deemed “safe” companies to host their phishing scams. As defenders, our technology is always 2 steps behind than those of our attackers and the antiquated protocols that we use today are at the root of the problem. Things like full disclosure, partial disclosure, and full information dissemination via numerous media also help us stay behind trends instead of staying ahead of them. If so many people didn’t whine and complain about a not having full disclosure when a problem is found, many problems could be subverted from the beginning. Then again, lack of disclosure helps the attackers even more since they like to boast about their conquests only to have the vendor at the end of the attack develop a patchwork solution later on.
The last paragraph of the original article sums it up best in the fact that we, as systems and network admins and engineers, need to step up and recognize the huge failures of our current technology and do our damnedest to try and stay afloat.
It is also time that people became aware of the problems that these lists can cause when improperly developed and maintained (and even when they aren’t).
They’ve obviously watched too many movies
July 7th, 2007 • chatter
OK so I gleaned this gem from Digg. According to my Google Reader trends, it’s part of the 0% crap from the site I actually click on. I won’t even drop spoilers about this, it is very much self-explanatory…
Treachery…I mean tagging is afoot!
July 7th, 2007 • 5 comments chatter, meme
Seems I’m victim of this new meme and I’ve been tagged by toomanytribbles.
* we have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
* players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
* people who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
* at the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
* don’t forget to leave them each a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
1. In my massive DVD collection, it’s quite obvious I rarely buy mainstream movies. I suppose I have about 30 DVDs of random mainstream movies and then everything else. The biggest space hogs in my rack? Campy horror and anime.
2. I have a nice collection of rare vinyl records and I own no turntable to play them on.
3. I made my first website in 1995 (on Geocities!) and have been blogging for 7 years. Back when it was just called “writing”.
4. I have been using IRC since 1995. Since then, I’ve taken up residence in two channels on EFnet for almost 8 years now. Out of roughly 40 regulars, I’ve only met one of them in real life. On the Binrev IRC network where I’ve been for 3 years, out of the roughly 30 regulars, I’ve met about 10 of them and drink with one of them regularly.
5. I met my girlfriend on a college-oriented community web site a little over 6 years ago. The site, and its functions, were a precursor to social networking as we know it today.
6. I remember when Firefox was called Phoenix. Slightly related, I also remember when the Mozilla “suite” was just the Mozilla browser and did not need a preloader just for it to quickly.
7. The longest I’ve ever been awake, continuously, was 108 hours (or 109, I really forget which) during my 2nd semester in college.
8. I love listening to Paris Hilton’s CD because it is so horribly bad.
I don’t know 8 bloggers who haven’t been hit by this yet so I’ll list the ones I know have not:
phreaknurse
verbal
Shalini (OK so maybe she’s done this already but frankly, he blog is the only one in my feed reader that I read, post-for-post every time. If I don’t check my feed reader for 3 weeks, hers is the only thing I do not “mark all as read”)
rightcoast
Culled from the Atheist Blogroll:
