This is a type of information attack where the attacker is attempting to bury an unfavourable article in search results through posting a large number of other articles that contain the keywords that they wish to obfuscate.
Category Archives: Internet
Microsoft, Firefox and Bad (X)HTML
So Microsoft stuffed up their redirect of real web browsers at one point from their preview page (you’ll need to set your browser to lie and say it’s IE 6 on XP to avoid the now-working redirect to the standard MS home page).
I think it’s a device to try and hide the fact that it’s the usual MS generated broken markup, the W3C validator spat out 113 errors and 13 info messages and their CSS doesn’t fare much better!
They’ve got their work cut out for them if they want to avoid making it a significant regression on the results for the current home page which has only 2 HTML errors (though still with a considerable number of CSS bugs).
419 Spam Giggle
Had a 419 spam this morning that slipped through the filters (now fed to SpamAssassin) that started with the following – do they know something that I don’t ? 🙂
Dear Fiend,
Sadly it’s probably just an attempt to evade the “Dear Friend” test..
0.8 DEAR_FRIEND BODY: Dear Friend? That’s not very dear!
Hell hath no fury like someone bitten by an incompetent service engineer
Useful Looking Media Stream Recording Script for Mplayer
Trying to catch up on LWN, I found this useful looking script to timeshift media streams (off course this is illegal in Australia, because timeshifting anything other than a TV show that is being broadcast live from a studio or on location is illegal here. Don’t even think of format shifting.).
Anti Virus Company Recommends You Don't Use Windows
It used to be the joke was “Friends don’t let friends do Windows” – well now it’s a case of many a true word spoken in jest.
The UK anti-virus company Sophos is reportedly recommending that you don’t use Windows any more due to its increasing vulnerability to attack.
Security threats to PCs with Microsoft Windows have increased so much that computer users should consider using a Mac, says a leading security firm.
As someone who is constantly having to fight spam because of Windows PC’s that have become infected by viruses, trojans and other malware I second the call – please think twice before buying a Windows PC!
Microsoft ‘Genuine Advantage’ – Kill Your PC ?
Boy am I glad I don’t use Windows! I don’t have to worry about another company deciding that I don’t have the right to use my computer..
There is a ZDNet blog article relating a conversation someone had with a Microsoft support person which was posted to the interesting people list in which the MS support person said:
“in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn’t installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now.”
I don’t think this is actually likely to be true as the only way they could be sure to disable Windows it if WGA wasn’t installed is to have planned this from the first release of Windows XP, otherwise they’d have no guarantee that the code they need to do this would be installed.
However, the ZDNet person questioned Microsoft and only got this in response:
As we have mentioned previously, as the WGA Notifications program expands in the future, customers may be required to participate. Microsoft is gathering feedback in select markets to learn how it can best meet its customers’ needs and will keep customers informed of any changes to the program.
Now given that MSFT is already being sued over WGA for violating the Washington Consumer Protection Act, Washington Anti-Spyware Laws, California Consumer Legal Remedies Act, California Anti-Spyware Laws, California Business and Professions Code and California’s Unfair Competition Law you would think that they would take this opportunity for a good PR exercise about it..
New Blog Anti-Spam Tools
Recently I’ve added a three new tools to my anti-spam arsenal. A few weeks back Rich gave me a heads up that he’d gotten the time to modify the WP 2.0 Akismet plugin to allow you to simply ban spamming IP addresses to your blog based on what Akismet classifies as spam.
Basically you get a top-10 of comments ordered by IP address and URL allowing you to quickly dispatch (and ban in the case of IP addresses) those evil posts. It works rather nicely, I must say.
This evening I’ve just added the Did You Pass Maths plugin from Aussie Steven Herod which is kind of a numeric captcha plugin for comments.
But this won’t stop trackback spam which seems to come in bursts, so I’ve also added the Trackback Validator Plugin from the Computer Security Lab at Rice University which visits the referrers of trackbacks received to ensure that there is really a link to you from that site in that page.
It’s not infallible as spammers can still configure a fake blog with links to your site, but they believe that when that happens it is no longer completely a spam trackback as it does originate from a real posting somewhere – just that you may disagree with the content and agenda behind it.
So, we’ll see what happens!
The Sysadmin Song
From those silly people at DeadTroll.com – The Sysadmin Song!
UK IT Consultancy Employs People with Aspergers Syndrome
This just came through as our 115th listing on Auties.Org – the “AS-IT” IT consultancy that employs people with Aspergers Syndrome.
You can also read their listing on Auties.org.