perkonis

Alright, enough is enough. I expect spam. I expect odd spam. I even expect lots of odd spam. But enough with the tramadol for dogs links.

Seriously. Tramadol for dogs. Hundreds of them each day. Day after day.

I don’t think I get a lot of dogs reading this. Maybe I do. After all, on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog and Google Reader is pretty easy to use. Even if I do have a large canine readership, I somehow doubt that a high percentage of them are canine junkies and/or have a credit card to order more smack. Even if they did, how much of that stuff could the average junkie dog go through?

In December 2003, German citizen Khaled el-Masri boarded a bus in Germany for a holiday in Skopje, Macedonia. Instead of a restful vacation, the Muslim man of Lebanese heritage says he ended up in a Central Intelligence Agency isolation cell in Afghanistan as a suspected terrorist.

read more | digg story

Spam is spam is spam. I try to stay on top of it, but some days it’s difficult.

To help me keep the crap comments out of here (and I don’t mean mine, thank you very much) I have been using the Akismet and Simple Trackback Validator plugins and blocking the worst offenders in my .htaccess file.

It works well, but that’s a lot of work. Unbeknownst to me, I could have just gotten some “protection” against the spammers…

/cue Godfather theme

Anikrichard | anlikivanna.80@mail.ru | wwwwww.com | IP: 72.9.235.218
hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

Not Spam — Sep 5, 11:31 AM — [ View Post ]

Hopefully I won’t receive a horses head in my inbox for declining this gracious offer.

As a consolation prize, I would like to present the award for Dumbest Comment of the Year. This will also be in the running for Dumbest Comment Ever.

Lucky me. I got to do a clean install of XP sp2 today. All told, including Windows updates, it took me just shy of 4 hours. Yeah, 4 hours just to install an OS.

The initial install appeared to go OK, but on first boot I found that Windows hadn’t recognized my sound card, video card, wifi, modem, and network card. 0 for 3 on the networking front. Fortunately I had another computer sitting here that would connect to the internet and a thumb drive. Woohoo! Sneakernet! That’s progress for you.

Then I got to start on the updates. All 107 of them. SP3 would be nice to have some day. And I haven’t even gotten to installing software yet.

All told, that’s 4 pieces of hardware not recognized, 1 Windows Genuine Disadvantage installed, 107 updates, and 11 reboots.

Yet people seem to think installing Linux is difficult.

I’ve had to sit through hours of conference calls before. I have yet to encounter one that actually gave me any knowledge. In fact, I’m pretty sure they actually render whole sections of my brain useless for hours afterward.

I’ve also had to sit through web conferences. Theses usually cause me to consider the Amish lifestyle. Plowing fields or web conference. Tough call there.

And then there’s Powerpoint. The ultimate force of evil to have been released upon the Earth. Sitting through a Powerpoint presentation usually causes me to wish for death. I don’t generally care if it’s me or the presenter, I just want the pain to stop.

Today I had an experience that I’m reasonably certain violates some aspect of the Geneva Convention.

Somehow, someone got the bright idea to combine a conference call with a web conference all for the sole purpose of watching a Powerpoint presentation. Not just any Powerpoint either. It was one I had already seen twice.

Now there was a productive way to spend 2 hours of my life.

Yesterday I had the strangest thing happen. I was happily reading Slashdot while trying to look busy at work. No, that’s not the strange part. I do that all the time. I had just read a comment that pointed out that the backhoe was the natural enemy of an ISP. Just as I read this, I heard yelling from the office next to me that his email wasn’t working. That’s still not the strange part, that’s pretty much how someone initiates a “trouble ticket.”
(more…)

Just when I thought I was winning the security battle, along come the users. Even worse, upper management type users.
I finally convinced the powers that be that 123456789 was most definitely not a secure admin password for the server. And first_name/last_name were not good credentials for user logons. You laugh because you think I’m kidding. I’m not.
I figured the best way to win this battle was to take a preemptive strike. I waited until everyone was out of the office leaving me with no adult supervision. Then I struck. I changed passwords on everything that looked like it needed a new password. Which was everything but the coffee pot (I still can’t get the darned thing to run Linux). And I made them as long and as complex as I could make them. Upper case, lower case, alpha, numeric, special characters, 12-20 characters, the works. I’m not pretending that strong passwords are a cure all for security, but it’s the most obvious (and easiest) place to start. And previously our practices were ridiculous.
I figured a good way to keep track of them was to type up a spreadsheet and store it in a hidden TrueCrypt volume on my hard drive. I encrypted that and protected it with a 20 character alpha numeric special character password. I was pretty pleased with the result figuring it was pretty safe there.
Then the big bosses came back.
So I gave them a printed copy of all the passwords with instructions to keep them locked in a safe place. I explained that they would not need that info unless I were hit by a bus. Two of them took that to heart. Out of three. After all my efforts, I found one of them writing all the usernames, passwords, and URLs in his frikin day planner!!! WTF? Maybe I should open our WAP and broadcast the admin password as the SSID. Or just tape my key to the front door.