Spam

Or Bearer

Like frightened ducklings we have taken to shredding all the junk mail we receive so that identity thieves can’t get their greasy lunch hooks on our name and address. The quantity has become large enough that we now need to sort through and only shred the pages that actually has our names on them and just trash the harmless prepaid return envelopes and fake credit card looking bits of plastic for fear of overloading the industrial strength shredder at work.

Today, during a quiet moment, I was sorting through a heap of snail spam, and came upon one of those sneaky checks that they hope you will cash and unknowingly sign up for something. This one was from our friendly credit card issuer and was for the princely sum of $20. By cashing this check you would agree to be enrolled in the Payment Protector Plan at a cost of 89¢ per $100 of the ending monthly balance. I’m not sure what the heck the Payment Protector Plan is because I had already discarded the rest of the mailing, but I’m betting I don’t really need it.

What caught my eye about this particular check were the words printed right above my wife’s name, “Pay to Donna Bogardus or Bearer.” So, if I had thrown this bit in the trash and it found it’s way into the hands of a nefarious individual, he would not only have a name and address to do his worse with, but he would be paid twenty dollars for his troubles. And on top of that, we would be paying an extra couple bucks to our credit card company.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 358

Are They Friendly Spam Bots?

Ever since August/September when I was pushing 10Gigs of traffic and 90% of that was referrer spam, I check my stats and raw logs every few days. Using a combination of pages equal hits and searching through the log I find the offending IP address and ban them. So far 152 IP addresses are no longer welcome. I have a couple of WordPress plugins running that are supposed to block some of this, but so far I’m not sure they are up to the task. Banning IPs is the only surefire way, but it means constant diligence is required.

Something new has popped up in the access logs, instead of requesting a GET which loads the page and consums bandwidth, there have been quite a few that are requesting a HEAD which doesn’t load the page and results in zero bandwidth usage. Are they being friendly?

Or are they just probe droids looking for pages to exploit?

I’m betting on the latter, so they are going on Santa’s Naughty list…

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 356

Ancient Drivel, a Short History Lesson & a Peek at the Future

Finally imported the last of the posts from Brian’s Early Blogging Days, AKA The Reader’s Digest Condensed 2002.

Started with one blog on Blogspot using Blogger in January of 2002 and one became two shortly thereafter. Moved to MT and piggybacked the 2 blogs on my Barndoor Fan Club web space. Two became three with the addition of a photoblog. Moved to my very own domain and then swapped to Pivot for blogging software. Combined all three blogs into one and moved back to MT. Jumped ship to WordPress in an attempt to eliminate referrer spam and here we are.

As threatened, I have created a gallery of the photos I am using on my 2006 Miata Calendar. Added one for this year’s images and added back some to replace the missing from regular Miata gallery. Take a look by clicking on the links on the right under Photos.

Started down, went up, back down, up again, down once more, up to dry off, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 354

Thanks Donavan

Donavan, who’s email address is Washburn@ypo.co.jp, was kind enough to send me a note this morning alerting me to a hot stock pick. It is currently trading at 15 cents a share with a 12 month projection of $1!

Founded in February 2000, m-Wise has rapidly established itself as a leading technology provider with the de facto Service Delivery Platform and related value-added data engines for Mobile Operators, Wireless ASPs, and large content and media providers.

Working closely with leading operators, ASPs and content providers, m-Wise is committed to take the lead and keep up to date with the latest industry headways in areas as diverse as content management and delivery, infotainment, mobile gaming and mobile community services.

I know I’m going to go empty my current 401K porfolio and put it in this company. In a year you will be able to say, “I knew him when.” Thanks again Donavan.

Hey, wait a minute, he sent it to the ASCO global list, everybody knows…

Birth of a Blog

In an effort to foil the referrer spammers who who eating my bandwidth like kudzu covering southern roadside, I pulled the plug on the Movable Type blog and fired up this WordPress site one directory over. Word Press has a couple of referrer spam countermeasures that I hope will help. For now all those who try and hit the old site will get a 404. Take that to your Google Ranking store sucka!

I saved all my old posts and everything, but I’m not sure when (or if) I’ll get around to reposting them. For now my plan is to turn the root entry of the site into a spot with links to my Miata related stuff, photos, mods, to transitions, etc. and this will be the usual drivel about my boring life. I just know that writing something down everyday has become too much of a part of my life to just stop doing it.

Hence this “new and improved” blog. It will be plain for a while until I figure out how to shape these templates to my liking.

Death of a Weblog?

I’m seriously thinking about giving this up. Why you ask? I’ve let the bastards get me down, that’s why?

This morning I was greeted with another “The domain mr-miata.net has reached 80% of its bandwidth limit. Please contact the system admin as soon as possible.” emails. Between yesterday and the first third of today over 5-1/2 Gigs of bandwidth was sucked up by referrer spam from porno sites trying to increase their page rankings by leaving their demon seed behind. That is more than half of my alloted 10 Gigs a month transfer limit.

So I spent an hour or so going through the raw access logs and adding about 20 IP addresses to the deny list. I did this a month ago and now they are back with doubled efforts. For now I seem to have quelled the tide again, but next month they’ll be back, probably with again double the IPs…

Maybe if I tried a different blogging software. I have used Greymatter and Pivot before, don’t remember about GM, but pivot suffered from referrer spam too. I could step backwards and return to blogger, nah, probably not that option. WordPress…maybe. Time to learn another templating system…I don’t know

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 299

Sneaky, Sneaky

Haven’t said much about spam recently. Levels at work have really sunk, for a while there I was down to the teens in junk received and one day I actually got into single digits! But the last two weeks it has climbed back up a bit and has leveled out around 35 a day. Today I actually had a couple of ’em slip through the net.

Here is what the email looks like:
spamsucks.gif

Here is how they did it:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1106" name=GENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Courier>
<DIV style="FLOAT: left;">Ul<BR>Xa<BR>Me<BR>Ce<BR>Le<BR><B>Ci
</B><BR><B>Vi</B><BR>Am<BR><B>Va</B><BR>Pr</DIV>
<DIV style="FLOAT: left;">tr<BR>na<BR>ri<BR>le<BR>vi<BR><B>al
</B><BR><B>ag</B><BR>bi<BR><B>li</B><BR>op</DIV>
<DIV style="FLOAT: left;">am<BR>x<BR>dia<BR>brex<BR>tra<BR><B>is
</B><BR><B>ra</B><BR>en<BR><B>um</B><BR>ecia</DIV>
<DIV style="FLOAT: left;"><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR> $1<BR> $3
<BR><BR> $3<BR></DIV>
<DIV style="FLOAT: left;"><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>.21<BR>.33<BR>
<BR>.75<BR></DIV>
<DIV style="CLEAR: both"> </DIV>
<DIV><A href="http://www.spamsucks.com">http://www.spamsucks.com
</A></DIV></FONT></DIV></B></B></BODY></HTML>

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 291