Separating ham and spam

NE powerful technique to avoiding spam are E-mail addresses (accounts) which are not public. They can reside rather happily alongside more public address(es), but the level of ‘noise’ in each then varies. Reading habits benefit from the separation.

An odd suspicion should rise when a private (undisclosed) mail account is beginning to receive spam. Then, one can only spect that EITHER:

• A trusted person gave the E-mail address to a spammer or posted it publicly for ratbots to harvest

OR

• Somebody’s computer has been hijacked and address book data pulled from it, leading to misuse

This unfortunate scenario has recently hit me. At the end, it turned out that SpamAssassin was disabled, so I reported the fault to my host. My private account remains clean and has been clean for over a year. I warmheartedly recommend this tactic, which will be explained at greater depth if you follow the link above.

ROPOSALS have become Europe’s on-paper solution to America’s economic strength. Another proposal has been unveiled, which aims to help Europe complete with prestigious American institutions such as The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This is reminiscent of their plan to kick off a European initiative to create a powerful search engine.

The European Commission has unveiled plans for a world-class institute of technology intended to boost the EU’s economic competitiveness.

Perfect 10, which is an erotic magazine, has successfully sued Google for infringing some rights with its image search facility. This is not the first time a story as such emerged.

A federal judge has ruled that portions of Google’s popular image search feature, which displays small thumbnail versions of images found on other Web sites, likely violate U.S. copyright law.

I abide by my belief that Google make fair use of the material, yet erotica might be the exception. Image search in Google draws over 10,000 visitors to my Web sites every month, so I dare not complain!

EVERAL times in the past I whined about the state of the Internet. It is too susceptible to various faces of evil — something which is finally recognised at a higher level and is attributed to the way the Internet was initially conceived, engineered and set up. Blame it on Al Gore if you wish, for he is the one who “invented the Internet”.

My main domain continues to suffer from zombie attacks and brute-force hacking attempts, all of which are unsuccessful. Such attacks may seem like benign inconveniences when properly filtered, yet all such attempts contribute to ‘noise’. They also require a lot of work to circumvent and defeat.

If a Web page, let us say /foo/bar/ includes the word “guestbook” (especially in the page title), one may find errors in the site logs which resemble a particular pattern. These would be common sensitive addresses such as /foo/bar/addentry.php or /foo/bar//addentry.php, which indicate an attempt to spam em masse. The culprits are lazy spammers who scan a page (often a search results page) and run some scripts. The aim is to exploit widely-known vulnerabilities, which have been already patched in most cases. There are rarely open sores in Open Source, but large-scale spam continues to pose a risk and devours precious bandwidth.

As an example of spamming attempts, I find many requests that are similar to:

[Tue Jan 31 07:33:56 2006] [error] [client 69.31.80.114] File does not exist: /home/schestow/public_html/Weblog/archives/2005/07/addentry.php

These are, of course, automated attempts which are directed at pages containing the word “guestbook”. The attacks are thrown at many sites simultaneously, regardless of what software is actually used.

In other circumstances, hacking attempts involve hijacking of a content management systems or an entire Web site, which is worse than spam. These are attempts to deface, being the equivalent of a UseNet defamation or complete name mocking, crossposted for public humiliation (an example).

I used to very much worry about people’s ability to write self-derogatory blog comments, newsgroups posts, and mailing list messages ‘on behalf’ of somebody else. I saw it happening many times before. The least one can do is embrace PGP for signatures. No less. Not everyone can spot IP addresses and track them. People can nymshift without any restrictions.

If manners are the glue of on-line communities, what are the motives of such vandals? When has cracking (as opposed to “hacking”) become popular? The motives must be a boost to ego and clan vanity (or “klan” rather). Sometimes, Web sites are captured and then re-direct to steal ranks which are accredited by search engines.

What have I done on the matter? Not much so far, but I found a neat solution to the Windows zombies. Many common attempts to hack are being redirectd to this page rel="nofollow", to which I referred in this previous blog item. Errors and attempts to hack can be suppressed using re-directions on common URL‘s, which characterise vulnerable components or exploitation of script for mass-mailing or spam. All in all, after much work, Web malice has been lowered to a manageable level.

O those interested in joining the ‘experiment’, SUSE Linux 10.1 Beta4 is finally available to “adventurous experts”.

Novell’s SuSE appears to be a strong leader among Linux distributions nowadays. As merely a personal opinion, other formidable players remain: (Cannonical) Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Mandriva. Those excluded are either scarcely-found ‘in the wild’ or are difficult to install, which makes them more suitable to experts, special-purpose systems such as those dedicated to media, or those running on legacy hardware.

Photo from around 1984

Warning: shameless rave lies below, but it is no lie.

sometimes wonder how my life would have turned out if I had chosen a different career path. I believe I could stick to a particular sport and make a living out of it. Yesterday, the guy at the cashout (a friendly lad) asked me if I was a bodybuilder, making me shy and flattered at the same time. He then began asking for some general guidance and workout tips, while packing the groceries very slowly with the intention of earning time.

More often than before I find myself giving others advice on fitness, diet and exercise (apart from computers). Yet, on many other occasions I sought help from personal trainers with whom I am in good terms and, as a matter of fact, it was my father who got me started with regular exercise over 10 years ago. So, I merely pass on the experience I have absorbed from others.

This year’s fitness competition is coming up and I am already obliged to sign up and participate. I was the winner in all previous contents among this series, which got me in an ecstatic mood.

F your business awaits in the crossroad, having to make a choice between Linux and Windows, look no further. There has been a great deal of fuss over biased figures, which falsely showed Linux servers to be weaker than Windows counterparts. Help yourself to the true facts and do not be misled by heavily-funded propaganda.

Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and member company Levanta have announced the free availability of an Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) study titled “Get the Truth on Linux Management.”The study re-examines previously reported, anti-Linux management claims — deriving updated analysis from in-depth research with more than 200 end users. The “Get the Truth on Linux Management” report is available in its entirety, for free download, at the Levanta website.

Related item: Microsoft-funded Benchmarks