Category Archives: Web

Hellloooo to my new StumbleUpon friends!

After asking people to add me to their StumbleUpon network last November I finally logged in again and added about 20 new friends including Ellybabes as you can see from the graphic below.

Add Ellybabes as a friend

StumbleUpon makes it really easy to add friends and I’m glad to see there are a few more Irish people in my network. I’m looking forward to stumbling on more Irish content and I hope you all enjoyed the sites I discovered in my trawling of the web. Thanks everyone for adding me, and sorry for taking so long to do the same!

How to use ssh as a proxy server

Using ssh as a proxy or encrypted tunnel to browse the web can sometimes be necessary:

  1. When you’re at a conference but need to login securely to your blog.
  2. When local access restrictions make life really difficult.
  3. If you have a server in another country and want to see what Google Adsense adverts people see in that country.

I use ssh for the third reason. I want to see what adverts people in the USA see when they look at my blog so I can filter out the low paying and MFA ads (see notspam.org for more). Unfortunately I have a head like a sieve so unless it’s in the bash history I need to go look this up every few months:

ssh -D 8080 -Nf example.com

Replace example.com with your own hostname. That short command will create a socks5 proxy at 127.0.0.1:8080. Just configure your browser to talk to that and you’re surfing again!

Here’s a few external links you might find useful.

(I bet that when I most need to look up this post I’ll be behind a tight firewall that won’t let me at my blog ..)

Anatomy of an AIB Phishing Email

I’m well used to getting phishing emails for American or internationally known banks but this morning an email supposedly from AIB made it past Gmail’s spam filters.

AIB phishing email

AIB posted an alert a few days ago to watch out for fraudulent emails, but this one appears to be different. I’m forwarding it on to alert@aib.ie

The content of the email is a Jpeg image, and it links to a php file on http://internetbanking.aib.ie.2.3h8ax3.com/

As the rest of this post has a number of large screenshots click the link below to read the rest. You can probably ignore this if you’re not living in Ireland. 🙂

Continue reading “Anatomy of an AIB Phishing Email”

It's so hard to sell a laptop on eBay

Sometimes blog posts take on a life of their own. Occasionally they attract the wrong sort of attention. I made a brief post called, Laptop for sale back in 2003 and ever since that post has been collecting comments from Nigerian scammers. It’s bizarre.

Last month one of them got smart. They subscribed. Here’s the email Tobi sent me when he got the confirmation email from Feedburner.

laptop email

Being curious, I checked the email headers. Luckily, Yahoo records the IP of the user who sent the email:

Received: from [83.229.91.53] by web58309.mail.re3.yahoo.com via HTTP; Fri, 14 Dec 2007 19:23:22 PST

Armed with that bit of information, I checked out 83.229.91.53 only to discover he wasn’t in the grand old US of A at all! I was shocked!

inetnum: 83.229.89.0 – 83.229.91.255
org: ORG-SA410-RIPE
netname: Supernet
descr: Supernet
country: NG
admin-c: TS3788-RIPE
…….
[clipped for brevity]
…….
address: 8th Fl 21 Mobolaji Bank Anthony way
address: Ikeja Lagos
address: Nigeria

I toyed with the idea of stringing him along but it was the run up to Christmas and I never got around to it. I had to dig up the email this evening because this was too good not to share.

Anyone remember the 419 Monty Python sketch from a while back?

Facebook advertising on a shoestring

You’ve got an interesting project to advertise but your advertising budget is, nil, nada, nothing. An empty box of air is worth more than you can spend on getting the word out.

That’s sort of what Frank said when he asked me (and I presume a number of his friends, the Facebook email is generic) to help get the word out about the new play in the Granary Theatre, They Never Froze Walt Disney.

I was wondering if you would help me out with an experiment… you may have noticed I am trying to get the word out about ‘They Never Froze Walt Disney’ – and I would love your help!

Would you mind changing your status on Facebook to read:

<your name> is letting people know about They Never Froze Walt Disney. See theatremakers. net for more details!

Always eager to help friends if I can, I updated my Facebook status. Will it help? Does anyone look at my profile? I doubt it, but it can’t hurt.

The latest teaser trailer is really, err, strange. Can’t we see a bit more please? TBH, it looks depressing!

Here’s what Frank said before the original production last year in the summer:

Funny and poignant, dark and yet light hearted, the writing is really tight and the story unfolds beautifully. Also the two performers (Jody O’Neill and John McCarthy) are excellent actors, and though I personally haven’t seen Jack Healy direct before he is extremely well known in the Cork theatre scene, and I have a lot of respect for him from acting with him and attending his workshops.

Check out my photos from one of Frank’s previous shows, The Importance of Being Earnest. We really enjoyed that show, but getting out to the theatre is a little harder to do these days with a small baby around!

They Never Froze Walt Disney
The Granary Theatre, Cork
8th-12th January at 8pm (preview January 7th)
Bookings & Info: 021 490 4275

We dated on Facebook

The Facebook “Friend Confirmation” page always unsettles me. I have never met some of the people who send me a friend request. Sometimes I don’t recall those I have met or bumped into at a conference. I knew a small minority before the whole “Internet” thing took off. Of the rest, I read their blogs and meet a couple of times during the year.

And Facebook keeps asking if we dated?

We dated on Facebook

How many of your Facebook friends have you gone out drinking with or socialized with or sent baby photos to or talked with about “ordinary things” besides Web 2.0?

Says me who’s getting really bad at keeping in touch with friends ..

Net in China domain spam

Early this morning I received the following email from Chinese domain registrar, “Net in China” regarding the camera club I’m a member of, Mallow Camera Club. It looks suspicious, but harmless. The worst they could do is tempt me to buy those domains through them, or could they have squatted on the domains and extracted a higher price?

Curious, I went searching, and found this post from a few days ago. It seems I’m not the only one receiving these emails. Either they’re trying to scam people, or business is going very well for Net in China!

I don’t have any interest in those domains, but I did finally register mallowcameraclub.org through Namecheap so some good came of this domain scam email!

Dear CEO,

We are the domain name registration organization in Asia, which mainly deal with international company’s in china. We have something important need to confirm with your company.

On the Dec 10, 2007, we received an application formally. One company named “Xingye Company” wanted to register following
Domain names:
mallowcameraclub.biz
mallowcameraclub.info
mallowcameraclub.cn
mallowcameraclub.com.cn
mallowcameraclub.net.cn
mallowcameraclub.org.cn
mallowcameraclub.tw
mallowcameraclub.com.tw
mallowcameraclub.hk
mallowcameraclub.mobi

Internet brand keyword:
Mallowcameraclub

Through our body.

After our initial examination, we found that the keywords and domain names applied for registration are as same as your company’s name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it. If you do not know this company, we doubt that they have other aims to buy these domain names. Now we have not finished the registration of Xingye Company yet, in order to deal with this issue better, Please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,

Zoey Wu
——————————————————-

Sponsoring Registrar: China Net Technology Limited
Tel:00852-30593099
Fax:00852-31771520
Website: www.netinchina.com.hk
Website: www.china-net.hk

Why I think StumbleUpon is better than Digg

Compare the following two graphs taken from Google Analytics.

stumbleUpon traffic
Hits from StumbleUpon
digg traffic spike
Hits from Digg

At first glance, an appearance on Digg.com looks great! All those lovely hits. 5 times more in a few hours than StumbleUpon sent over a few days. What you don’t see there is the bounce rate. That is the rate at which people visit your site and never come back.
According to Google Analytics, the StumbleUpon bounce rate is 29.94% while a whopping 77.58% of Digg users visit once and leave. I’d rather have the visitor who comes to my site, browses around and then hopefully subscribes.

It’s also easier to gain attention on StumbleUpon and it is likely to continue to send traffic to your site long after your Digg submission disappears into the nether regions of that site never to see the light of day again. That bump on the StumbleUpon graph a few days later was yesterday as people came back into work after the weekend.

In this example, there’s a large difference between the number of visitors Digg and StumbleUpon sent, but StumbleUpon can send you a torrent of traffic too. After I stumbled Grandad’s How to survive your first Guinness post, his site received an extra 16,000 hits plus his subscriber count jumped by a few as people enjoyed what they read.

So, sign up on StumbleUpon and add me as a friend and I’ll pop by for a visit.

Update! Grandad sent me a graph of his traffic over the last month. That big spike is the “StumbleUpon Effect”, but the extra traffic afterwards is more interesting. That’s from his new-found regular readers. Glad I could help!

grandad-stumble.png

Tweaking nipples causes pain

Damien has a knack for really pissing off people. Of course, the people in question, Ace Internet Marketing (nofollow condom applied) stole his content for their own site and then got all stroppy when Damien called them up on it.

Hahaha. This has happened to me more times than I can remember, but I’ve never had the threat of legal action taken against me. Phew. I even made money out of it when the News of the World printed one of my photos. When I bothered to complain at all I’m either ignored (very occasionally), or the content is removed with haste.

One thing I haven’t heard anyone suggest, is that this could be a dastardly evil plan by Ace Internet Marketing to get a few backlinks. What’s scary is that a Google Blog Search or Google Search for that site’s url return very little of the bad press Damien and other Irish bloggers have been giving them. A search for Ace Internet Marketing is rather more successful as Damien has found out.

They should have quietly taken down the post, apologised, whipped themselves a few times in contrition and scurried off to their own dark corner again. Cat’s loose now, let them try and catch it.

How many visitors come from Google?

I use Google Analytics to track visitor numbers to my site as well as a custom written referrers package some of the early users of WordPress.com may remember. That only records 7 days of data because of the data size so when I wanted to know how many visitors come from Google to my blog I went looking at Analytics.

Google visitors in October

To do the same on your site, open Google Analytics and select your site. Click on “Traffic Sources”, then look at the list of top sources. Chances are Google will be near the top of that list. Click on that link and you’ll see a graph like the one above. Done!

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.