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musings of mark since 2001

When Barbara from Wiltshire House Publishing moved her forum on to my server, she got some idiots tagging along that have a whole lot of time on their hands apparently. While idly surfing around the internet, a stop would be made at her forum and spam would be deposited.

I tracked down who the person was for her, (easy peasy, took three weeks before they figured out how to change their IP address, too late by then!), but she’s too nice and wouldn’t prosecute at the time. Rather, she opted for simply deleting the spam for a while, but when that got old she went to visitors not being able to register for the forum.

Not to be mistaken for someone with at least half a brain, the dummy decided to fill in people’s email address in the “Forgot Your Password” form on the web site. Just about 100% of the forum users understood why they were getting password emails, but one or two were not sure, following is the reply to their query about the spammer whilst sending me the headers of the emails:

Although to you it looks like spam, and ultimately it is, the server logs for the web site matched to the timing of the emails are what the authorities would be interested in, so don’t bother forwarding them, a quick email to Barbara as the forum owner when it’s happening wouldn’t hurt though.

So… please just treat this as spam and delete it.

Your password is still the same as it always was, just as the email states. This joker has learned what “copy and paste” means, and is simply putting in email addresses repeatedly in the “Forgot Your Password?” log in and clicking Submit.

I mean, how lame is that??? – treat it as such, i.e.: some lame, nameless joker that blew his/her chance to participate in the online forum for Bowen Island because of their spam, and they are still not understanding that copy/paste = spam.

This will die out as the loser realizes it’s a hopeless cause that wastes a lot more of their time than ours. It takes about 2 seconds to delete a bunch of posts or comment spam; think this joker actually believes they are more than a minor pest, well it gives me something to blog about once in a blue moon eh

When photographers get bored, they play with Photoshop:
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/stu/bored/

In the unbelievably stupid category, people running Windows are now expected to buy anti-virus software to clean out a machine that allowed itself to be infected via an email or web page or other download. Is the public so gullible that they think the same company that wasn’t able to make it’s software susceptible to this junk now has the ability to remove it properly? Methinks staying with Ad-aware and Spybot Search & Destroy would be a more prudent course of action.

As Bob Cringely points out in his article this week, this new initiative from M$ is probably more about revenue streams than making Windows any more secure or better. It’s been the holy grail for the company since it’s inception, to sell software based on a subscription model for a recurring revenue stream based on something that once built, costs nothing.

Of course the anti-virus software at first will be for free and have the ability to be separated or removed from the OS itself. That won’t last long though, just long enough to make people dependent enough that they can bundle it in. And then your copy of Windows won’t work until you’ve paid your fee over and over again, year after year, just like Symantec and any other company that has made a ton ‘o money from the faults native to Windows and Internet Explorer and Outlook.

For myself, I still don’t run anti-virus software at all and don’t need to trust to luck or knock on wood that I haven’t been infected. For years, reading email in plain text, not using Internet Exploder and ActiveX controls for the internet and plain common sense has kept me clean, I simply don’t use the programs in their default state, or at all if possible and all is good.

There was a party for the opening of the bids from the RFP for the Municipal web site, but almost no one came. Attending were the representatives from Muni, Isabel and Chris, and among the curious myself and Ivar, a Python and Java programmer that lives on the island.

Only three bids were tendered, Ivar passed for about the same reasons I did on the development aspect and was just there out of curiousity. We both felt there were too many “gotchas” in the Request for Proposal, he mentioned that when his first page of notes was full of nothing but exceptions and things to cover your butt on, it was a sign to pass this one up. I came to the same conclusion from a different angle; being familiar with a number of CMS systems now and understanding how complicated they are to the average computer user, knew the training time for them would pretty much eat up all their suggested budget for the project with nothing left over for development and hosting.

Also, there was no single CMS that would do everything and very few of them generate menu content and sub-sections dynamically as well as Textpattern. So to use my fave CMS, it would mean adding a lot of extra functionality, much beyond what I’ve already done for the Chamber of Commerce web site. Nothing too complicated, just lots of it along with the attendant training time for the web site admin.

So… I think my proposal for the hosting portion will be well received. The MG Web Services plans are already fairly priced and I didn’t deviate from them a bit, while suggesting that based on other busy island web sites that I host, the “Standard Plan” would be fine for them to start out with.

We will know in a month how everything turns out, there may be some development work for the Muni in the long run yet. Their list of “web site tools” requirements are already all available to install with a few clicks on my existing hosting plans so maybe it will be, (for me, the ideal case), a case of someone else getting the initial design and content together and then having me bolt on all the extra parts and doing some training.

Robert Hensing has an interesting post on renaming malicious files in Windows. What caught my eye was that instead of using Unix Epoch Time as a starting point, you can’t search the system using the GUI earlier than Jan. 1, 1980 or set the clock back earlier to than that either, odd. But, you can set the date of a file to before that later date, a feature built into Win95 to stash files away from users without really hiding them at all I ‘spose.