Archive | December, 2004
December 23, 2004

Bah humbug

Christmas is almost upon us, so we are closing the offices today until January 4th.
Over the last few days we’ve been inundated with Christmas cards, both real and electronic. Some of the electronic ones are very clever. We got a very nice one this morning from XMI which uses a very nice bit of Flash.
You can see it here
They are now taking bets on whether we’ll have a “white Christmas” or not. I don’t know why people get so excited about that.. I’ve had a few, but I’ve never found Irish snow to be particularly enjoyable. It’s never deep enough!

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Written by in General Comments Off Comments Off
December 21, 2004

Quote of the day – Devil’s Advocate

“Let me give you a little inside information about God. God likes to watch. He’s a prankster. Think about it. He gives man instincts. He gives you this extraordinary gift, and then what does He do, I swear for His own amusement, his own private, cosmic gag reel, He sets the rules in opposition. It’s the goof of all time. Look but don’t touch. Touch, but don’t taste. Taste, don’t swallow. Ahaha. And while you’re jumpin’ from one foot to the next, what is he doing? He’s laughin’ His sick, fuckin’ ass off. He’s a tight-ass. He’s a sadist. He’s an absentee landlord. Worship that? Never”
Al Pacino (John Milton) in Devil’s Advocate [1998]

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Written by in Cinema, Thoughts :: Pensieri :: Comments Off Comments Off
December 15, 2004

more Blog spam solutions ….

Blog spam is a real pain in the neck. Tom and I have been swapping notes about this over the last month or so.
I had some initial “success” with the builtin filters, which I then augmented with the SURBL plugin, but that still meant having to manually delete all the junk that was being put in the “moderate” queue.
At Tom’s recommendation I’ve now installed “auth image” which acts a bit like the authentication code you need for submitting a link to Altavista or the one I used to use on search.ie.
The install was quite straight forward, but of course I got lovely errors :)
A bit of googling and a couple of minor changes later it seems to be working fine!

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Written by in Techie :: Techno :: 3 Comments
December 10, 2004

Moving mailboxes

Moving mailboxes

Moving mailboxes from one server to another can be a painful experience. Formail is a handy command that makes this a lot easier:
cd /var/spool/mail/;formail -Y -s sendmail -oi $user@domain < $mailbox

replace $user@domain with the real alias you want to send to eg. michele@blacknight.ie
replace $mailbox with the local mailbox name eg. michele1
The only thing to watch out for is that your sendmail doesn't try to deliver the mail locally!
Sendmail Cookbook

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Written by in Techie :: Techno :: Comments Off Comments Off
December 8, 2004

Irony?

Barracuda Networks sell devices that are supposed to protect networks from spam, however the owner, Michael Perone, has been fingered by some as a former spammer

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Written by in Spam Filtering 1 Comment
December 4, 2004

Bored with system utilities?

Niall came across this the other week, but I am yet to see it in action. It’s a little application that displays a “Hot babe”
As your system load increases the “babe” strips. Kind of silly

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Written by in Debian, Techie :: Techno :: Comments Off Comments Off
December 4, 2004

Accurate Statistics

Accurate Statistics

If you are using MailScanner to filter mail you probably want to know how much mail you are filtering and how effective it is, or isn’t :mrgreen:
There are a number of applications that allow you to get an idea of what is going on:
MailWatch – A comprehensive tool that monitors many aspects of your incoming and outgoing mail, as well as offering access to your quarantine
MailScanner MRTG – A set of MRTG scripts specifically to work with MailScanner. Very handy :)
Example:
Number of copies of MailScanner running
Vispan – another statistics program. Unlike MRTG this also includes geo data.

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Written by in MailScanner, Spam Filtering Comments Off Comments Off
December 1, 2004

The Empire Strikes Back .. Or does it?

In what has to be the most controversial move in recent months Lycos have launched a DDOS campaign against spammers. If you have problems getting to grips with that concept I’ll try it again. Lycos have launched a DDOS campaign against spammers.
The site, makelovenotspam.com, is meant to offer users software to attack spammers. I say “meant to” as I can’t actually view the site.
Debate of their move has been heated on EUROCAUCE, slashdot etc., Needless to say the more intelligent reaction has been to condemn their actions..

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Written by in Spam Filtering Comments Off Comments Off
December 1, 2004

Blog Spam

Blog Spam

WordPress has much better spam filters than Movable Type, but you can still get hit hard. Considering that we filter email spam effectively I was thinking about applying the same kind of logic as SURBL but to blogs. Someone beat me to it !! :mrgreen:
John Sinteur’s plugin seems to do exactly what I had in mind…
Blog on: Building Online Communities with Web Logs

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Written by in Spam Filtering, Techie :: Techno :: 4 Comments