Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic » Ewwww…I don’t like SPAM

Cut the fat and LOL it up!

Nicki — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:02:43 +0000

Oh my, WordPress, you’ve gotten fat!

I’ve been trying to clean up this blog: deleting old pages that aren’t contributing to the site, inactivating and deleting old plugins that are no longer needed (or that I can live without), … etc. I think the hardest part is trying to figure out why I needed some plugins. One is RunPHP. I know I *had* to have it at one point but honestly do not remember if it’s still in use … so I’m currently investigating that one. I may just end up deactivating and waiting a week or so to make sure nothing breaks before deleting it entirely from my Plugins directory.

So if you see something broken … please let me know. Chances are, it’s probably be something I shouldn’t have fiddled with!

In the meantime, I was commenting on Devilish Southern Belle’s blog and noticed a link to Lucia’s Linky Love. It’s a souped up ‘no follow’ plugin for WordPress that has other “do-gooder” functions, like kicking trackback spam to the curb. YAY! I’ll most likely dump Denis de Bernardy’s Dofollow for it. (Sorry, Denis!)

DSB also uses Feedjit. I had kept meaning to check it out, but couldn’t remember the URL once I sat down to research … so, now I got it again. Heh. :grin:

LOL it up!

And something totally un-related to this: ICHC LOLcats will now be appearing on Jones Soda bottles. I’ll have to buy some just to get the “LOL-bottles”!!! :mrgreen:

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

Cut the fat and LOL it up!

Telemarketers = phone spam

Nicki — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:54:00 +0000

I got my first sales/telemarketer call on my cell last night. It was a local number, but Google searches have turned up empty. I didn’t answer it because I didn’t recognize the number. The caller left a 6 minute message touting life insurance quotes for whatever company for whom he was calling — six freakin’ minutes!

Geez, buddy, if you can’t sum it up in 2 minutes or less, you’ve lost my interest.

Lucky for him I guess that I didn’t answer … I get pretty ugly if a caller is pushy or won’t take “No, thank you” for an answer.

I would like to know how they got that number though, as only a handful of people have it.

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

Telemarketers = phone spam

How smart can you be?

Nicki — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:31:27 +0000

I’ve often heard it said that those who are high up in book smarts have no common sense. I see this theory in practice almost every single day. For instance, a particular multi-PhD/MD user came to my department wanting to know how a spammer could use her email address without her permission. Now, I only overheard part of the conversation between this user and one of our techs, but apparently she had received a recent increase of spam (who hasn’t these days?) and one alarmed her because it had the name “Logo Pens” with her email address in the Reply-To field.

Honestly, wouldn’t *most* people who had enough common sense know NOT to open such blatant spams???

So anyways, this genius decided to open it and replied wanting to know who this person was and what they were doing with her email. :shock: (Yes, I know, I know … bad user! No cookie for you!) Imagine her astonishment when her reply instantly appeared in her Inbox. After that point, she came to us naturally wanting to know how to make spammers stop using her address when they send stuff out.

I had to leave the room to keep from laughing in front of her. :mrgreen:

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

How smart can you be?

Pardon my progress…

Nicki — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:10:00 +0000

I think the domain shuffle is pretty much through. I moved over the bulk of my domains last night and dropped 4 today. There may be the odd missing image or directory here or there, but I think I’ve covered about 98% of the site. You may also notice a change on the front page. I have removed my Firefox Extension Development page link from the navigation menu and added my Fanlistings. I doubt I will be continuing the development on the extensions I’ve done in the past, as I’m no longer involved in those projects. I may decide to start new ones in the 3.0 format later, but simply don’t have the time (or interest) to do it now.

Also, I have rearranged the sidebar a bit. Hopefully the recently blogged items are more visible now. (sorry ’bout that Jo! ) I’ve also added a couple new collapsing sections, the newest being Local Link Love which features metro-area sites and organizations of which I’m involved, or have discussed here previously. Feel free to take a peek and stretch out a bit.

There are several new interests I’ve been wanting to add in for a while, so hopefully I’ll have time to make those modifications soon. Also, I will be working on my portfolio more, taking off older works and adding some newer ones. It needs re-structuring horribly, and hopefully Zooomr will be done with their move next week (so most of my images will start working again, LOL!). In the meantime I’m making short notes of what needs updating — while surfing the web looking for an appreciation gift for Jessie’s teacher. (funny there’s a whole slew of teacher gifts sites, or with teacher gift ideas in general)

Right now I’m wishing I hadn’t cleaned out the spams caught by Akismet because I ran across this nifty suggestion for handling splogs (spam blogs). Considering I get a ton of trackbacks from the same 8 or 10 or so, it won’t be long until I add a bit o’ code to the ole HTACCESS file to take care of ‘em! :twisted:

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

Pardon my progress…

The bots like me, they really like me!

Nicki — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 21:15:29 +0000

It seems the search and spam bots are showing my site a lot of love lately. I’ve noticed several “obvious” search results in my Search Meter logs: viagra, phentermine, tramadol, “buy hydrocodone,” home furniture, etc. — and who could forget the exploit bots, LOL

p0hh0nsee%\') UNION ALL SELECT 1 2 aid pwd 5 6 7 8

Give it up, fellas. Wrong blog software, dummies. Don’t you read headers? :mrgreen:

Of course not all of my searches are by bots. I can usually tell by IPs if it’s someone I know and it’s interesting to see what people search for.

I’ve recently seen a few searches by (who I suspect) are my ex’s associates searching for any mention of him in my archives.

Like I’d be stupid enough to post his real name. Gimme a freakin’ break.

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

The bots like me, they really like me!

On Craigslist and job ads

Nicki — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 13:52:27 +0000

I try to run by Craigslist at least once a week, if anything but for a good laugh at some of the ads that I see posted there. Once in a while I’ll see a legitimate posting, but for the most part they’re spams, scams, or “questionable” at best. But then again, those are sometimes the ones that are really funny. For instance, I saw one that said:

Are you waiting for an oppurtunity for electronic check processing ads?

Grab the ripe occasion
Check this out: ((snipped link))

Compensation: Various

When will they ever learn to use the spellcheck function? And what is “grab the ripe occasion”?? LOL!!! There was a huge gaudy image with additional text, but it won’t load now so I’m guessing that the hosting server is down, or the account was killed for spamming. :roll:

Like I said, once in a while you’ll run across a legitimate posting — after all, that’s how I found my last job. *shrug* (Read into that what you will … )

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

On Craigslist and job ads

Tweets on Twitter

Nicki — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 18:59:48 +0000

Had an uber-busy weekend. For those who observed it, I hope everyone had a good Easter. Jim’s brother and his family are in town, so we spent most of the weekend with them.

I didn’t get to spend a whole lot of time on the pc, so I’m just now catching up. Posted a lot of things to BYKYC that I’ve missed over the weekend. I had originally resigned to sit and go through my Twitter updates, but let’s face it — I got WAY too may Friends listed, and I’m not keen on pouring through 25 pages of one-liners, LOL!

I did read today’s though! hehe

I have run across a nice site for keeping up-to-date on new Twitter gadgets and various Twitter-related news: Twitter Hacks. They featured a piece on there today on how easy it is to spoof someone on Twitter:

Twitter Vulnerable to Spoofing?

Can someone pose as you on Twitter? With a very simple trick, yes they can.

Both Twitter and Jott authenticate users by their phone number. Twitter does this by validating users based upon the source of SMS messages sent to the phone number 40404 (US), and Jott does this by trusting the incoming Caller ID when someone calls 877-568-848. From a security perspective this means the following:

* Anyone who knows your phone number can update your Twitter page by spoofing a SMS message, i.e. post a Twitter entry as you.
* Anyone who knows your phone number can spoof his or her caller ID to send a Jott message as you.

Read Twitter and Jott Vulnerable to SMS and Caller ID Spoofing by Nitesh Dhanjani for the full details. Needless to say I hope they are able to fix this. I don’t know much about the SMS world but hopefully they’ll be able to block these fake sender services. The problem is new ones will fill up all the time. Does this mean Twitter and similar services need another layer of authentication? I know a lot of people on Twitter publish their cell phone numbers on their web sites so this could get ugly kinda quick like.

I guess lucky for me I don’t have a cellphone, so the above wouldn’t apply to me; but anyone who does, it would be easy to spoof an account and send an unGodly amount of spam — say, messages advertising that Phentermine stuff? Anyone with a blog has seen those! That’d likely piss off people on your friends list, easily having your account terminated, and worse: labeling you as a spammer.

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

Tweets on Twitter

Holy spamarama, Batman!

Nicki — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 15:45:33 +0000

I’ve had Akismet installed for just under a year and it’s already caught nearly 13,000 spam!

I get quite a lot on my cooking site, but nowhere as much as I get here … considering my current traffic, I can only imagine the amount that much larger/more popular sites get! :shock:

I try to glance over them once in a while when I delete them, after all, some of them are quite funny! But for the most part I guess my spammers are pretty dull, mostly advertising generic porn or meds (wtf is generic Ultram anyways? I get a TON of those!). So where are the “creative” spammers? lol

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

Holy spamarama, Batman!

Email cleanup

Nicki — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 16:08:09 +0000

I also spent the better part of this morning cleaning out my Inbox for Nitallica.Org, GMail and all of my other email accounts. I’m happy to say that spam isn’t new as much of a problem it was a year or so ago. (but then again, turning off my catch-all’s helped out with that tremendously!) I’m pretty happy to say that really the only spam I get is on my GMail account, but it catches 99% of that, so I don’t have to fool with it much. It still catches a few legitimate emails, so I do have to check it once in a while … for instance, I had an email forwarded to me from a friend about a free diet product. Hey, those things aren’t really my deal, but I *did* promise her I would at least look at it. So stuff like that will get caught, but otherwise I gotta say that so far GMail has impressed me. :mrgreen:

Email cleanup

Phasing out email for this domain

Nicki — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 01:14:59 +0000

Due to the amount of spam my email accounts are receiving, and the fact that for whatever reason now The Bat! refuses to filter incoming emails, I’m thinking of turning off email for this domain (nitallica.org) and simply using my GMail account instead. I’m sure most of you are smart enough to figure out the address (nitallica plus gmail dot com equals … very good )

If in doubt, simply use the Contact form here on this site and you’ll reach me.

Phasing out email for this domain

I love akismet

Nicki — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 18:21:20 +0000

I don’t remember why I never installed it, but a few months ago I finally installed (or rather, activated) Akismet for WordPress. Actually, now that I think about it, I think it was because I didn’t have an API key … but anyways …

It’s been a God-send. Don’t get me wrong, Bad Behavior has been a good little soldier too. But it couldn’t catch everything, and was unfortunately blocking a lot of valid traffic. BUT, after installing Akismet, my spam comments and trackbacks went from a steady stream to nil. I did notice, however that I had received a bit of an “attack” … over the past 48 hours, there have been over 400 spam comment post attempts — I say ‘attempts’ because they had slipped through Bad Behavior, but Akismet caught ‘em.

Check it out, over the last 3 months, it’s blocked exactly 1000:

Sweet.

I love akismet

New plug

Nicki — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 17:04:00 +0000

I meant to type this up last night when I implemented it, but I fell asleep. I know, I’m such a goober, hehe.

Anyways, I was thumbing through the WordPress Wiki looking for a search mod and something caught my eye … “Bad Behavior” … the name alone hooked me.

It turns out that Michael Hampton’s Bad Behavior is a comment spam prevention tool. It monitors the traffic to your blog and helps keep evil spammers/spambots from accessing your blog, thereby preventing the deposition of steaming hot piles of crap (aka comment spam) when they visit.

Ooooooh me likie already!

I turned it on last night and left the logging option set to “verbose” just to see what all it would log … within 9 hours, I had a 12mb table full of logs! Man, it logs everything. (heh, which is probably why ‘verbose’ mode is not recommended, LOL)

Needless to say, this one’s a keeper. I fired off a feedback email to the author and added Bad Behavior’s plug link to my Toolbox.

Yay.

~~If I get a chance later today, I’ll post some log screenshots.~~ Scratch that, got something better: log snippets.

New plug