Category Archives: Technology

Spam

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I’m wondering if anyone has actually gotten a satisfactory response from a major ISP after sending a report to their abuse department?

I’ve submitted a large number of abuse reports to SBC, Comcast, RoadRunner, etc … but have yet to get any satisfactory response at all. One report I submitted to SBC, via DSLReports SBC Direct forum got me some grief because they wanted me to Opt out first. My opinion, of course, was that I should never have been Opted In involuntarily in the first place.

A week or so ago I got an email from GoDaddy, my domain registrar, about a abuse report that was mistakenly reported against midrange.com … and they demanded a response within 24 hours … which I gave them (it was a total misunderstanding … someone was reporting spam against someone else hosted by GoDaddy … but the email they forwarded was misconstrued to be coming from midrange.com). Even though I responded well within the 24 hours they specified (I responded within 24 minutes), they did not respond back to me for more than a week. I had to send 3 requests for a response to get them to reply.

I guess the two questions I would like to see answered are …

  1. Do ISP’s actually act on abuse reports?
  2. If ISP’s do act on the abuse reports, do they respond to the reporter with a resolution?

My own experience is no to both.

[tags]Spam, email, ISP[/tags]

Disable IPV6

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You can disable the ipv6 module by adding or changing /etc/modprobe.conf:

alias net-pf-10 off

After a reboot it should be gone.

Note: I only know that this works with Fedora Core 2 and higher.

[tags]Linux, IPV6, networking[/tags]

Linux Upgrade!

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Well, I did it … and, so far (knock wood), it’s working ok.

What I did was: Upgrade my Redhat Linux 8.0 system to Fedora Core 4.

Last time I tried this it went horribly wrong … there was some kind of problem with the system that caused all available memory to be eaten up like it was going out of style … and then it started chewing on the swap space … to the extent that there was no memory and no swap space available.

To add insult to the injury … my backup procedure wasn’t as solid as I had hoped.

The end result was that my system was down for about 2 days while I recovered manually.

This time, however, I had a absolutely fool proof backup plan.

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Dell Discount

I have some Dell discount codes that I’m not going to use.

One is $20 off electronics and accessories purchases of $200 or more.

The other is 20% off select desktop and notebook purchases of $999 or more.

If you would like one of the codes, leave feedback explaining why you deserve the code. I’ll give the code to the person with the best explaination.

They Expire 1/31/06.

Dell, Coupon, Discount

Note to self …

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… don’t rest foot ontop of the UPS when working on the linux servers.

This evening, while I was checking something on the console of my linux servers, I was resting my foot ontop of the UPS.

I had just started a reboot on one of the servers when, all of a sudden, the other two systems lost power.

Obviously I had a bit of a panic for a minute … then I realized that both systems were plugged into the same UPS… the UPS I had my foot resting on.

Obviously I had my foot near the UPS’s power switch … and bumped it.

See how exciting my life is? 🙂

What are they smoking?

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The federal government’s two-year-old anti-spam law is helping to cut back on unsolicited bulk e-mail, but more must be done to fight the problem. Those are the conclusions of a Federal Trade Commission report, released today, on how well the law is working.

– ABC News — Spam Slayer: FTC’s CAN-SPAM Report Card

Uh yeah … right.

I think the FTC needs to take a good long hard look at the internet again and rethink their statement.

CANSPAM did absolutely nothing … because the people sending spam are totally unconcerned about the laws of the U.S.

The spam my server receives has only INCREASED in the last year.

And, as long as the internet is unregulated, the spam will only continue to increase.

Please note: I am NOT advocating regulation of the internet.

If the government wants to put some legislation in place to help combat spam … put some penalties on running open relays, open proxies, and failure to implement anti-virus & anti-worm technologies on computers.

[tags]Spam, Government, FTC[/tags]

Microsoft tries to recruit Eric Raymond

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Seems that Microsoft is trying to recruit open source advocate Eric Raymond.

My favorite part of his reply to the MS recruiter is this:

I’d thank you for your offer of employment at Microsoft, except that it indicates that either you or your research team (or both) couldn’t get a clue if it were pounded into you with baseball bats. What were you going to do with the rest of your afternoon, offer jobs to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds? Or were you going to stick to something easier, like talking Pope Benedict into presiding at a Satanist orgy?

Oh well … there are stupider people in the world.

IPod Nano

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Ok, I know I told Ginny that I wasn’t going to get an IPod (after she got her IPod mini as an early birthday present) … but this IPod Nano looks pretty cool.

I had thought about getting an IPod Shuffle at one point … but I didn’t like the idea of not being able to control the song that is playing. This new entry in the IPod family looks like a good cross between the mini & the shuffle.

Of course $250 is a bit much to spend on a MP3 player … but who knows. Maybe the price will drop soon. 🙂

Boycott IE

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Boycott IE. It’s a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn’t secure and isn’t standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators.

– Paul Thurrott

I’m all for it.

I haven’t used IE for anything serious in months.

I think I worried my dad once, when he wanted to show me a remote access system he uses that’s browser based … but it wouldn’t work with Firefox. He wanted to launch IE but I wouldn’t let him. Especially when it would install an activex component. I was quite adamant.