Author Archives: Donncha

Busy weekend for the spammers

I was sick and out of the office on Friday, but this morning I was shocked to discover 40 spam emails in my inbox! After moving them into my ‘SA training folder” I checked my spam folder – 577 emails! wow! Almost half of them were from Thursday night and Friday.
Then I checked my CorkLUG mail queue. 289 emails. Lots of them were viruses, but the majority were spams.
How much personal mail did I get? (outside of mailing lists, automated bug reports, crontab output..) 5 emails.
Add on to that 841 viruses, or 125MB of email caught by my mail server..

More on Blog spam

Kasia’s having a rough time of it with comment spammers, but I like an idea expressed in the comments of this post. Print an image containing text that the user must input to submit their comment. That’ll stop bots spamming your blogs at least. There’s also lots more good info in the comments there.
Update! But it’s not good for accessibility reasons. 🙁
Thanks Alex for that link.

Easter Egg in Redhat 8 and 9

I’m clearing out old stuff from one of my drives (in a bid to consolidate all my photos in one place for burning. FSlint helped so much in finding dupes – thanks Padraig!)
In the process, I discovered an easter egg in Redhat 9, which also exists in Redhat 8!
The egg is supposed to be a scrolling list of credits with music playing in the background, but it looks like RH9 didn’t get the full egg as no credits appear and the only message is ‘There is no easter egg’ :(.
I ran the egg, /usr/libexec/redhat-credits but didn’t get any music, but you can still play /usr/share/redhat-credits.ogg using xmms instead.

MSN to block 3rd parties?

Ok, I logged onto MSN this morning to find the following message which I got a good chuckle out of.

messenger@microsoft.com: You are running a version of messenger that requires an immediate security update. Please visit http://messenger.msn.com/Help/Upgrades.aspx to complete the update.

I didn’t visit the upgrade page, as well, I’m running Gaim on Linux and what could Microsoft offer me?
I happened upon the Gaim website later and found this disturbing page. It seems that on October 15th, 3rd party software won’t be allowed to access MSN without a license. The protocol is changing and that’s why an upgrade is required.
Take a look at the above page for more details but it’s not certain if MSN will be supported by Gaim or others after this date. 🙁

Close

Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.