• The Never-Ending Bloga - Wonderful Spam, Beautiful Spam

    Only The First Of The Month, and Already…

    Whoa. Last month I cracked the lid open a little, and I'm still not sure why. My stats page logged 9,030 unique visitors. Probably 8,999 of those were spambots and trackback zombies, but still. Apparently the mere mention of H.R. 4437 drove a lot of visitors here. Huh? All I did was link to an article. Anyway, today being the first of the month, I checked to see what people are searching on today. And the result is pretty predictable: Search Keyphrases (Top 10) somali woman 2 7.6 % newton tomb 2 7.6 % capaccio bros 1 3.8 % having…

  • Connections - Hot Off The Presses - Make Poverty History - Music - Parish: Holy Moly (ECUSA) - SABRE2th Tigress: Book 'em, Dano. - Wonderful Spam, Beautiful Spam

    Ketchup

    So here's what's going on this week around here: Busy at work, but not as crazed as last week. Thinking about sick friends and considering how best to help Keeping only half an eye on the news Fooling around with iPod more (David got me a dock!) Putting off on uploading more photos to Flickr Getting ready to travel again Real Soon (just a weekender) Realizing that there's not a lot of time left Playing catch-up in nearly every area of my life Now that the Weekend of Crazed Running Around is over, I can finally say something about what…

  • SciFi/Fantasy - Wonderful Spam, Beautiful Spam

    Shields Holding, Iris Secure

    My husband David's been getting a lot of spam emails, and so have I. The trickiness is that we can't just mark the emails "spam" and forget it, because they're spoofed to appear to come from our domain. They're getting stopped, but we need to figure out some filters to refuse them completely. It's still amusing to continue to get emails from our "staff" telling us our computers are "zombies." In light of the preceding link, does this mean that we're bound to get all medieval on the zombies' decaying asses? For the first time Blogula had a lot of…

  • Wonderful Spam, Beautiful Spam

    Oh No! Zombies!

    Oh, this is truly funny. I got a lot of fake "your computer has been compromised and is being used to send spam" emails. Why do I know they are fake? Here's a typical "alert." Dear user of midrange.com, Your email account has been used to send a huge amount of junk e-mail during this week. Obviously, your computer was compromised and now runs a trojaned proxy server. Please follow instruction in order to keep your computer safe. Sincerely yours, The midrange.com support team. Obviously, someone thinks they're being devious, because not so obviously, my husband David IS the midrange…

  • Wonderful Spam, Beautiful Spam

    Stupid Greedy People

    One victim, Kevin McCrary, a 56-year-old Manhattan business consultant, would not dispute that. After falling prey to a fake postal money order scheme, he said, "I couldn't reach around far enough to kick myself." Single and lonely, Mr. McCrary joined an international online dating site, Elitemate.com. In late January, he was contacted by someone claiming to be a young woman from Nigeria. She – or perhaps he, or even they, Mr. McCrary now concedes – went by the name of Ogisi Douglas. Their e-mail exchanges were barely a week old before the supposed Ms. Douglas asked Mr. McCrary for his…

  • Hot Off The Presses - Wonderful Spam, Beautiful Spam

    Spam 95% Of All Email By Summer 2006?

    Spamhaus estimates that by the summer of 2006 spam will account for 95% of all e-mails sent and the problem will not be alleviated until the US acts to toughen its laws. British anti-spam laws are even more toothlessly useless than the US ones, apparently. 95%? Also according to Spamhaus, Australia has a strong anti-spam law. They report a reduction in overall spam, known spammers are keeping a lower profile, and at least one has left the country.

  • The Never-Ending Bloga - Wonderful Spam, Beautiful Spam

    Plug-in Linky Goodness

    Jay Allen, of MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse fame, generously recommends Brad Choate's Spam Lookup as a more comprehensive solution to webspam/commentspam/trackspam. The nightly build (which fixes a bug in beta 2) is here. So, in short, for spamkilling purposes on the new and improved MT3.16 version of the blog, I think I'd like to give "Spam Lookup" a whirl. I like MT-Blacklist, but it's kind of slow, and the cross-blog functionality alone makes it possible for me to open up the 'Quicklinks' sideblog comments. Plus… hey, I think I could eventually bring the Holy Moly blog under its wing, too. Hmm.…

  • The Never-Ending Bloga - Wonderful Spam, Beautiful Spam

    Getting Closer To Done

    David, the sneaky sneakster, upgraded the beta blog to MT3.16, and I'm at the "tweaking templates to look right with the new stylesheet" stage. Still some archive templates to be fixed so they display the new banner image and colors. I will be going through all the templates looking for inconsistencies that may be lurking there from my old installation, but I'm pleased that the latest version is a new commitment to quality (and bugfixes). Via About Six Apart – Mena's Corner UPDATE: as previously stated, I've got some template tweaks to do. And the cool crap is getting cut…

  • Only in Utah... - Wonderful Spam, Beautiful Spam

    Now If Only They’d Outlaw Spam

    Within the legal limits: At least one legislator promises to vote against any bills targeting poker houses. "What I know about those clubs is that you are not gambling," said Rep. Greg Hughes, R-Draper, who has played at Big SLC on three occasions, but is obviously uncomfortable talking about it. "I enjoy poker. . . . Recreationally, of course. . . . Within the legal limits," he said between long pauses. The clubs "deserve as little government intervention as any other law-abiding club or group." Former Republican legislator David Zolman plays once a week and ranks in the top 20…