August 29, 2005
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Archive | August, 2005
August 29, 2005
Irish 419 scam
August 23, 2005
Morals vs Censorship – XXX on ice
August 22, 2005
E-commerce – stating the obvious
I am always amazed at the number of “e-commerce” sites that forget the basics.
What are the basics?
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August 21, 2005
Making Bread
Brody Sweeney’s Making Bread: The Real Way to Start Up and Stay Up in Business is a fantastic read for anybody either thinking of starting a business or who already runs one.
Running a business is not easy. Anybody who tells you otherwise is probably lying.
Sweeney knows this and is not afraid to share some of the problems he faced along the road to success. He offers insight into how you can cope with issues and overcome them and make your business stronger.
It’s not a “how to” book or a textbook, but more a collection of ideas and reflections based on his own experiences with O’Briens and elsewhere.
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August 18, 2005
Stopping Phishers via SPF
There are a number of technologies currently being developed to help combat spam, phishing fraud and other email related abuse.
One which has received a considerable amount of attention in recent months is SPF. Another, which may not have attracted quite as much attention, is Yahoo’s domain keys.
In both instances the technology is designed to help verify who is authorised to send mail from a particular server, hostname or IP address.
The problem, if you aren’t a diehard geek, is actually identifying potential fraud in your email client.
Server-side (at the MTA level) implementation comes in a number of forms, but at the client level (desktop) the number of email clients that actually check for valid SPF records (or domain keys) is thin on the ground.
For Thunderbird you can install Joshua Tauberer’s handy little extension which checks both SPF and Yahoo Domain Keys
I’d love to hear of other email clients that support these kind of checks.
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August 18, 2005
Backpeddling and fumbling – ICANN halts Adult TLD
Earlier this summer ICANN supposedly approved the .XXX TLD. I say “supposedly”, as they are now back peddling quickly.
You may recall some press coverage recently about ICANN and the US government, or more specifically the US government’s influence over the internet. Of course we all know that the ‘net started out as a military network, but that was then. This is now.
It transpires that the US government, which is currently headed up by a right-wing conservative religious freak (Bush) is unhappy with the idea of a TLD for adult content. Considering the stranglehold the US government can potentially bring to bear on the internet, this is a disturbing development.
Earlier this summer the US government decided that they would not hand over governance to ICANN now it looks like they have put paid to the launch of the .xxx TLD.
But on what grounds?
Do they honestly think that by blocking the TLD that they will stop pornography? If they do then they are even more naive and stupid than I thought previously.
Whether you approve of pornography or not is irrelevant. It has been part of global culture for thousands of years. It is not going to simply vanish because a prudish US government (or president) would like it to.
Well ICANN is claiming that they need more time for consultation which is amusing. It’s not as if the .XXX TLD emerged out of the blue. Like every other new TLD the process has been long and arduous.
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August 17, 2005
Fraud works
I’ve always been fascinated by spammers. They send millions of emails out in the hope that enough people will be duped into clicking on the link and visiting whichever site they are promoting or buying into whichever service they are selling.
The phishing emails vary in their complexity, but you would have thought that the majority of people would have learnt to be more cautious by now.
Unfortunately that is not always the case.
I still see people offering to send me their credit card details via email.
We still see credit card fraud.
We sometimes see paypal fraud.
How much money the fraudsters are making and how many scams are committed is hard to say, especially as people are unlikely to notice or report small amounts (scam a few thousand people for a euro – it’s a lot of money, but I doubt if the victims would notice it immediately)
In the last month I’ve seen the usual number of credit card scammers, with the hapless victims contacting us in some cases looking for more information. Apart from an IP address (belonging to a major ISP) there isn’t that much information that you can provide.
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August 16, 2005
Graphing RBLDNSD queries using MRTG
Some time ago I wrote about setting up a local mirror for a DNS blacklist using RBLDNSD and Bind.
Although that works fine and definitely gives a speed up to servers on the network I’d really like to know what is happening ie. how many queries.
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August 15, 2005
Spam Assassin Rule effectiveness
Justin has posted an interesting study of a rule’s effectiveness over time. His observations are interesting.
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