Geek Bits – Page 34 – The Wacky World of Chris Knight

I used to be a major fan of SpamCop. I think they have gotten sloppy these days. They have a method of finding spammers that involves seeding the net with honeypot addresses, and if your mail server sends that address email, of any sort, your server gets blocked. The problem is that some spammers are managing to figure out what these honeypot addresses are, and they use them in the From field on their spam. There starts the problem…

A while back my personal mail server became blocked by SpamCop. When I tracked down the reason, the only thing I could find was bounced spam. I had received spam through my secondary MX, so it bypassed my spam filters and user checks. When it hit my primary mail server, and was addressed to a non-existant user account, it was bounced. Because the From had been forged with a honeypot address, it bounced back to SpamCop. It would appear that SpamCop is not parsing the email sent to honeypot addresses to see whether they are real spam or bounce messages. This means that lots of legitimate mail servers will get blocked by SpamCop, and many administrators will have to disable SpamCop BlackHole services to receive legitimate mail. I’m sure this was the spammer’s intent, to poison the SpamCop well; and they are succeeding because SpamCop isn’t going the extra mile and parsing for bounces.

Today I realized that SpamCop was blocking email from Apple’s @mac.com mail servers. It looks like pretty much all of the @mac.com outgoing mail servers are blocked. Well, that doesn’t work for me. The well is poisoned, and I can’t risk so much as a sip. SpamCop is out of my RBL config.

2005/12/30

Pixels for dollars and your hits for free?

Cash pours in for student with $1 million Web idea

If you have an envious streak, you probably shouldn’t read this.

Because chances are, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, is cleverer than you. And he is proving it by earning a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet.

Selling porn? Dealing prescription drugs? Nope. All he sells are pixels, the tiny dots on the screen that appear when you call up his home page.

This is one of those ideas that will work just a couple of times before it becomes annoying. Even now, to look at this guy’s home page is to give yourself a headache. Thank the elder gods that this guy didn’t allow animated gifs!!!

Still… It is a little inspiring. I’ve had Tampa Bay Ads sitting on the back-burner for over a year, and this gave me the impetus to change the format of the site. Do I need $1 per pixel? Nah, I’ll settle for two bits a pixel. That should give me enough for a down payment on a 1 bedroom cottage in the San Francisco area…

-Chris

2005/12/24

The Wrong Elves

There are lots of elves that work through the winter holidays. After Santa went bust with his pets.com investment during the dot-com boom/bust many if his elves went to work for Amazon and UPS; after all, that’s where all the toys come from now.

A few though were bitter about their losses. With their pensions invested in a failed sock puppet, and Santa delving into horror since he can’t afford to run a toy factory anymore, some have turned to crime. These bitter elves have taken jobs at UPS; not so they can delivery toys, but rather so they can steal them.

Today I came home to find two boxes waiting for me on the porch. UPS had left them while I was at work, no signature required, so I was not able to inspect them prior to accepting them. The smaller of the two boxes looked odd, like it had not been properly folded closed at shipping. The merchant sticker was intact across the seam though, so I was blissfully ignorant until I got the box open.

Eagerly I did open it, as this was the RMA memory from Other World Computing (aka macsales.com) which would finaly put my G5 saga to a temporary rest. In an earlier post I mentioned that I had 4G of memory to install in my new box. Well, it turned out that one of the modules, if not the whole pair, was defective and caused random machine crashes. OWC was very responsive when I called for an RMA, and they cross-shipped my replacement memory. Except, well, the box was empty. OK, not entirely empty; the rat bastard evil elf who stole my memory left me the RMA paperwork. Fat lot of good that does me.

I called Other World computing, and spoke to Mike in customer service. He said that he would file a lost/stolen item claim with UPS, and that I would hear from them within the half hour. UPS never called. I’m guessing they have a lot of evil elves, and I’m probably down the list of call-backs by a fair number.

I figure the theft had to have happened at OWC or at UPS, and if it happened at OWC mine was a pretty small order to take such a risk. I can’t imagine why a thief on my doorstep would have taken the time to pry open the box and then put it mostly back together. It would have been easier to just pick up the paperback sized box and walk away. That leaves UPS. I wonder if the theft has anything to do with my package not being trackable in the UPS system for several days of its journey?

This holiday the wrong elves were working at UPS. The bastards!

Category: Geek Bits

SpamCop.net – Honeypots of doom!

Pixels for dollars and your hits for free?

The Wrong Elves