So, since many of my friends overseas or far away are there, I’m forced to use Facebook. I find Facebook objectionable for many reasons, most of which, most people don’t care about. Facebook has a lot of powerful functions and it’s mostly easy for the nontechnical to use. After that, once a significant mass of [...]
Now that my site is back up, spambots are bludgeoning it with comment spam, which was also true in my Movable Type days. Luckily I have things set here to require my approval before allowing them to appear on my pages. This stops most spambots dead in their tracks. Nor is it a major inconvenience [...]
Now that I have a mobile phone, I’ve decided to rant about this and e-mail. I’ve ranted about e-mail before. I think it was poorly implemented to start with, lacking friendly, easy to use crypto for example, and got worse when HTML and scripts were added a few years later. The two decades of spam [...]
Okay, those of us who’ve been paying attention to search engine results lately have noticed something new: splogs. A splog is blog generated by a robot that searches other stable and long lasting blogs and sites searching for content that mentions specific keywords. It then copies that content to its own entries and stuffs them [...]
About a week or so ago Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy condemned the publication of the genome of the virus responsible for the flu epidemic of 1918. Kurzweil in particular called for the genome to be censored.
Over the past few months I’ve collected several articles about privacy and security: Automated Lockdown for XP: Still useful for Service Pack 2. VOA Releases Secure Tunneling Tool for Chinese Internet Users How to Run with Least Privilege in XP: It’s a damn shame Microsoft didn’t tell the masses how to do this after the [...]
If you must use Internet Explorer, please, please, please, turn off all scripting, Java and ActiveX support. Learning how to restrict security in Internet Explorer is easy. Once you turn off all JavaScript, VBScript, ActiveX and Java support, 99% of all worms, trojans, phishing schemes and other parasites that rely on Internet Explorer (Or any [...]
On Saturday, around 2 in the morning, I received a blind carbon at one of my work addresses that had a frighteningly clever phishing scheme posing as a Red Hat security update. I thought it was real and the only reason I didn’t apply this rootkit to the Linux box I have is because it’s [...]
The amount of spam I get through my business account, which is exposed to spambots, is fairly small, about 37 spam a day. The amount of spam I get through my personal account, which is hidden yet visible in a clever way, is far less, at most 6 each day. This totals to about 35 [...]
I resolve to write one entry in this journal every day, even if it’s total crap. At least I have persisted in keeping it going for three years now; that’s a start. Chastisements are finished. Now, on to business: Reading Mark Pilgrim’s site lead me to an explanation and a demo on how to use [...]