August 2005 Archives
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I suppose it was inevitable that 419 scams would eventually start using Ireland as a source for their scams:
Continue reading Irish 419 scam.
The recent freeze of the XXX TLD launch has sparked some lively debate in certain circles.
Continue reading Morals vs Censorship - XXX on ice.
I am always amazed at the number of "e-commerce" sites that forget the basics.
What are the basics?
Continue reading E-commerce - stating the obvious.
Brody Sweeney's Making Bread: The Real Way to Start Up and Stay Up in Business is a fantastic read for anybody either thinking of starting a business or who already runs one.
Running a business is not easy. Anybody who tells you otherwise is probably lying.
Sweeney knows this and is not afraid to share some of the problems he faced along the road to success. He offers insight into how you can cope with issues and overcome them and make your business stronger.
It's not a "how to" book or a textbook, but more a collection of ideas and reflections based on his own experiences with O'Briens and elsewhere.
There are a number of technologies currently being developed to help combat spam, phishing fraud and other email related abuse.
One which has received a considerable amount of attention in recent months is SPF. Another, which may not have attracted quite as much attention, is Yahoo's domain keys.
In both instances the technology is designed to help verify who is authorised to send mail from a particular server, hostname or IP address.
The problem, if you aren't a diehard geek, is actually identifying potential fraud in your email client.
Server-side (at the MTA level) implementation comes in a number of forms, but at the client level (desktop) the number of email clients that actually check for valid SPF records (or domain keys) is thin on the ground.
For Thunderbird you can install Joshua Tauberer's handy little extension which checks both SPF and Yahoo Domain Keys
I'd love to hear of other email clients that support these kind of checks.
Earlier this summer ICANN supposedly approved the .XXX TLD. I say "supposedly", as they are now back peddling quickly.
You may recall some press coverage recently about ICANN and the US government, or more specifically the US government's influence over the internet. Of course we all know that the 'net started out as a military network, but that was then. This is now.
It transpires that the US government, which is currently headed up by a right-wing conservative religious freak (Bush) is unhappy with the idea of a TLD for adult content. Considering the stranglehold the US government can potentially bring to bear on the internet, this is a disturbing development.
Earlier this summer the US government decided that they would not hand over governance to ICANN now it looks like they have put paid to the launch of the .xxx TLD.
But on what grounds?
Do they honestly think that by blocking the TLD that they will stop pornography? If they do then they are even more naive and stupid than I thought previously.
Whether you approve of pornography or not is irrelevant. It has been part of global culture for thousands of years. It is not going to simply vanish because a prudish US government (or president) would like it to.
Well ICANN is claiming that they need more time for consultation which is amusing. It's not as if the .XXX TLD emerged out of the blue. Like every other new TLD the process has been long and arduous.
I've always been fascinated by spammers. They send millions of emails out in the hope that enough people will be duped into clicking on the link and visiting whichever site they are promoting or buying into whichever service they are selling.
The phishing emails vary in their complexity, but you would have thought that the majority of people would have learnt to be more cautious by now.
Unfortunately that is not always the case.
I still see people offering to send me their credit card details via email.
We still see credit card fraud.
We sometimes see paypal fraud.
How much money the fraudsters are making and how many scams are committed is hard to say, especially as people are unlikely to notice or report small amounts (scam a few thousand people for a euro - it's a lot of money, but I doubt if the victims would notice it immediately)
In the last month I've seen the usual number of credit card scammers, with the hapless victims contacting us in some cases looking for more information. Apart from an IP address (belonging to a major ISP) there isn't that much information that you can provide.
Some time ago I wrote about setting up a local mirror for a DNS blacklist using RBLDNSD and Bind.
Although that works fine and definitely gives a speed up to servers on the network I'd really like to know what is happening ie. how many queries.
Continue reading Graphing RBLDNSD queries using MRTG.
Justin has posted an interesting study of a rule's effectiveness over time. His observations are interesting.
I've been trying to get the new look search.ie online for the last couple of months in my spare time.
However, due to a number of factors, this has been dragged out for an inordinate length of time.
I decided to launch it this afternoon (soft launch :) ) as quite a few people had been emailing me about link submissions.
There are probably bugs and issues, but I can deal with them as they arise
I've mentioned phishing fraud in the past.
Most of it is quite well done and almost looks genuine
I got one today that was really badly executed
The first sign of it being fraudelent was the "from" part. Instead of saying "paypal" or "PayPal" they used "PaYpal", which is incorrect capitalisation. A company the size of Paypal is unlikely to make that kind of mistake
The other signal was from MailScanner which had spotted that the link to paypal.com was actually to an IP address.
Some people's efforts at SEO are simply annoying.
Spamming people after grabbing email addresses using some badly written bit of software is not the way to win friends online.
Unfortunately some people obviously missed that message:
Hi, I took a look at your site a couple of hours ago... and I want to tell you that I'd really love to trade links with you. I think your site has some really good stuff related to my site's topic of car rental and would be a great resource for my visitors as it deals with some great aspects of car rental that I'd like to give my visitors more information about. In fact, I went ahead and added your site to my Car Rentals i Resource Directory at http://xxxxxx.com/carrentalsinireland Is that OK with you? Can I ask a favor? Will you give me a link back on your site? I'd really appreciate you returning the favor. Thanks and feel free to drop me an email if you'd like to chat more about this. Best wishes, XXXX xxxxx.com info@xxxxx.com P.S. When you do link back, there's some suggested code to use at http://xxxxxx.com/addurl //(Links removed to stop them gaining from this post) Would somebody please explain what the connection between car rentals and hosting is? I can't see it. Any suggestions would be welcome. I am tempted to reply along the lines of: "Dear Muppet If you'd actually visited our site I would have to question your sanity. Love Michele"
Paul pointed me in the direction of another firefox extension the other evening called Stumble Upon
The concept is very simple.
You choose your areas of interest and can then "stumble" from one site to another using the little button in you firefox toolbar.
As you view sites you can express your approval or disapproval.
It's a great idea if you like finding new and interesting (and boring) sites randomly.
According to a post over on problogger, Google are testing a new method of allowing site publishers to inform them about their content and demographics.
This could help bloggers who suffer from the "blog only adverts" syndrome.
Dan Brown is not a great writer.
He was lucky.
He is now rich.
Continue reading Premature Literary Peaking.
If you have the inclination to write your blog from your desktop as opposed to via the web interface then you can. There maybe reasons why you would want to do this, though personally I am so used to using the web interface I can't see too much point.
Continue reading Blogging from your desktop on linux (Ubuntu).
If you think about the possible irony of choosing wine as a subject for a review. .. Or maybe I'm reading too much into the possible meanings ...
In either case Damien spotted this rather interesting promotion of wine via the blogging community.
Even a couple of days ago the offer was only open to UK bloggers, but now they've expanded it to include Ireland :)
I've requested a bottle as well..
Google offers a wide range of specific data catalogues including web pages, maps, shops, news and images. As the Google empire expands their selection of special search services has expanded.
Continue reading Improved Google.
The issue of data retention in Europe has been raising its ugly head with increasing frequency over the last 12 months.
Continue reading Data retention.
Eurid's clarification on resellers came as a shock to many in the industry, but nobody seems overly concerned.
Continue reading Revisiting .EU.
Spamming really doesn't pay as Scott Richter, former "spam king" found out.
Microsoft has won a case against Richter and his company OptInRealBig.com Llc. and will receive $7 million as part of the settlement.
Full story
Well, actually, it seems like they won't be able to.
According to a snippet on breakingnews.ie the Irish government may have been thinking of enforcing the wearing of reflective clothing.
That plan seems to have come apart:
The introduction of mandatory reflective clothing for pedestrians would be impossible to enforce, it was claimed tonight.Full story
Colm MacCárthaigh posted details of the latest upgrade to the Heanet FTP server earlier today.
If you are interested in high-spec servers then this may interest you:
ftp.heanet.ie now comprises over 12 Terabytes of storage, 32 Gigabytes of RAM and a new 136 Gigabyte RAID-0 caching layer for popular content. We hope that this level of storage will unperin an effective service, meeting current and future requirements. ftp.heanet.ie's network connectivity has also been significantly upgraded and there are changes which may of interest; ftp.heanet.ie serves content over FTP, HTTP and RSYNC and is available over IPv4 and IPv6. Clients should correctly resolve the IP version supported; however, the ftp.ipv4.heanet.ie and ftp.ipv6.heanet.ie records facilitate manual specification of the IP version to be used. For some time now ftp.heanet.ie has tagged all outgoing traffic with a differential services code-point (DSCP) IP header value of 0x08 which is the conventional value assigned to "Less than Best Effort" (LBE). This means that even with a minimal IP Quality of Service (QoS) configuration on your network it is possible to de-prioritise traffic from ftp.heanet.ie. This also enables HEAnet and GÉANT to ensure that ftp.heanet.ie traffic does not contend with customer traffic. ftp.heanet.ie now supports Jumboframes of up to 9000 bytes in size Traditionally ethernet and general internal traffic is restricted to sending frames of 1500 bytes in size. A file 1 Megabyte in size took about 750 sent packets to download. With Jumboframes, this can now be achieved in fewer than 120 packets. This can represent a major speed increase, and we've been able to download entire DVD ISO's in 9 seconds in testing with jumboframes enabled. HEAnet currently extends jumboframe connectivity to the GEANT network. ftp.heanet.ie now sports 4 Gigabit/sec of load-balanced out-bound connectivity, and 2 Gigabit/sec of resilient in-bound connectivity. This connectivity is in place in order to cope with future peak demands and is not intended for immediate use, so rate-limits at 1.5 Gigabit/sec are currently in-place. Further to this, we are committed to ensuring no contention with other general internet or customer traffic through the use of QoS configurations. We have also taken the opportunity of the migration to revise and renew the content of the mirror. Over three years of usage, some files have become corrupted due to local and remote problems. We rely on user reports of such errors and always try to rectify them as quickly on possible, however now we are in a position to do more; We have re-synced from scratch many of our popular items. For example, we have re-synced the entire RedHat tree (some 256Gb of content) and manually verified its contents. We have also checked some 50,000 Debian packages and re-synced approximately 100 from our Debian archive. We now have the CPU and spare I/O capacity to start automated checksum verification for as much of our content as we are in a position to verify, and are putting this system in place.Via ILUG Further details on the heanet site
Statistics can be a funny thing. Depending on how you interpret them you can use or abuse them to either make a point or disprove an argument.
When the statistics contain information on spending trends then you can be sure that marketing types' ears will prick up:
"He said money?"
A new survey published by ComScore will probably get its fair share of attention from the media buyers in coming weeks.
50 Million Americans Visited Blogs During the First Quarter 2005 reads the headline. Wow! Isn't that amazing!!
It's not really, but it's a headline, so you can expect it to catch your attention or at least try, for that is a headline's raison d'etre
The actual study itself makes for interesing reading and gives some insight into the consumer profiles of blog visitors (who are probably also made up of a lot of bloggers)
They supposedly spend a lot of money, so you may see more media buyers attempting to get their products in front of blog readers in the future. Kind of funny when you think of some of the recent posts here and here and here
Via
In recent weeks there has been a lot of excitement among Adsense publishers who had discovered that placing images above their adsense ads was increasing clickthroughs.
From Google's point of view more clicks should equal more revenue, however it seems that Google is not entirely happy about this.
If the images are placed in such a way as to give the impression that they are being served by Google then publishers may be asked to modify the layout.
Full story. Found via
Have you seen the PSAs that Google push out when there are no relevant ads?
If Google cannot match ads to your site's content you end up displaying non-paying Public Service Ads.
Eric Giguere points out a new service that is designed specifically to fill those gaps:
AlternateURL.com which introduces its benefits as:
Most online ad programs, including Google, will sometimes show default ads, or public service announcements (PSAs) when they have no paying ads to show. This can happen for many reasons, especially when their ad code crawls your pages. AlternateURL lets you replace those ads with paying ads. You could be wasting a lot of adviews — and losing a lot of money — by not replacing AdSense PSA ads.You can see what their ads look like here From reading their terms and conditions and FAQ it seems that this is open to Irish users as well, so I'll probably signup later today. The only restriction that I can see is that they only payout via Paypal, but that wouldn't bother me in the least.
Irish Rail is the national railway for Ireland. Their website should reflect that.
Continue reading Irish Rail.
Tom:"Blog posts for sale II":http://www.tomrafteryit.net/blog-posts-for-sale-ii/ seems to have picked up on one word that I used in my earlier post and is ignoring the rest of what I was saying. I mentioned the word "bribe" and he seems to have misinterpreted me entirely:
So what Michele is saying is that bribery for a review is alright but bribery for a positive review is not. While Michele’s is definitely an interesting perspective it is certainly not one that I would subscribe to.If that was true then none of the reviews in any magazine or newspaper would be honest. Maybe I'm missing something? Bernie:"Bernie(writes for The Examiner and other newspapers)":http://www.tomrafteryit.net/blog-posts-for-sale-ii/#comment-1388 raises an interesting point, however, about being sent tech gadgets on a regular basis. I would still contend that being given a "toy" in return for a review is not a bad thing. If you only reviewed the things you bought you would either review a very limited number of items or bankrupt yourself. I get sent some IT products that vendors feel could "benefit" our business. In some cases I have to pay for them, whereas in others I don't. Should I feel guilty if someone is trying to win our business or favour? I don't think so. Book publishers, for example, regularly send literary editors hundreds of Euros worth of books in the hope that they will be mentioned. It would be impossible for any publication no matter its scope to review every single book that it is sent. Should they return the books to the publishers? Should they feel guilty if they give a book a bad review? If you are given press passes to a concert where the face value of the tickets is over 100 Euro are you obliged to give a good review? Of course the person you are asking to review the product should be qualified to review it. Tom, for example, is a Mac user. I am not. It would make sense to ask Tom to review a new Mac gadget. It would be rather illogical to ask me to do so.
One of the great things about blogs is that you can link to other people's sites and make reference to your sources.
Continue reading Annotating your posts.
Tom follows up on Damien and I on his blog
Continue reading Review Quality.
Not so long ago I mentioned my experiences with 3 and also mentioned Tom's suggestion of them setting up a blog
Continue reading 3 Ireland - more criticism.
Iraq's new government has been authorised to manage its TLD by ICANN
Continue reading Iraq gets its domains back.
Continue reading Usability?.
Damien has an interesting post about how you can get bloggers to mention your products or services.
Continue reading Providing Incentives to bloggers.
Running a website off a CMS (content management system) makes a lot of sense, especially if you want to maintain uniformity and allow publishing of new content with ease.
There are, however, a huge number of CMS solutions to choose from.
How can you make the right decision?
Continue reading Choosing a CMS.
I thought it was time that I gave this blog a facelift, so I've changed the them to a three column one I found here
I'm trying to get it to display some of the plugins that I have installed, so it's also proving to a be good exercise in housekeeping ie. I'm dumping a lot of the superfluos junk that I've installed over the last few months.
If anything is broken please let me know
Words dissemble Words be quick Words resemble walking sticks Plant them they will grow Watch them waver so I´ll always be a word man Better then a bird manJim Morrison, An American Prayer. Words and language are powerful. Your choice of words can have a very powerful effect, be that in your personal life or in business.
Continue reading What’s in a word?.
I posted a quick survey over on boards as I'd be interested to see what people are using.
Most of the blogs I read on a regular basis seem to be using Wordpress, Movable Type or Blogger, but there's probably a lot of people out there using other blogging software.
Why am I so interested?
Why not? :)
I'm naturally curious.
EDIT: Posting a link to the survey might help! So here it is
I constantly experiment with plugins and hacks for wordpress.
Sometimes they bring extra functionality. Other times they reduce this blog's usability.
Continue reading Wordpress experiments.
Remember the dot com boom?
All you had to do was get a domain and you were guaranteed to make a million... or so they had all believe
Continue reading Archiving dot bomb.
Comment spam can be a pain.
Email spam renders email unusable.
Being able to block both easily would be the "Holy Grail" for many bloggers.
Continue reading Stopping the spammers in their tracks.
Technoogle had an interesting post about MSN's foray into the blogosphere -
MSN filter
I had a poke around it and I was more than a bit confused. From the description on the front page you would have thought it was an aggregator of some kind:
MSN Filter is your one-stop shop for the inside scoop on what's happening across the Web, according to the people who know the most ... YOU!I suppose the next line should have given it away:
Whether it's music, sports, TV, style or technology, our team of bloggers will filter the best stories, photographs, links and other interesting tidbits that you've sent in, as well as items that they've dug up.So, rather than aggregate content from other blogs they're going to pay a team of bloggers to post what MSN users submit? Huh? I don't know what to make of it.
Ubuntu's "Music Player" is Rhythmbox and does not come with mp3 support by default. I noticed this when I tried to load all my mp3s into it :)
Rectifying this situation is very simple:
sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.8-plugins
Problem solved - thank you Google
Getting hit by /. is a dream for many geeks. Fame!
But how would your server cope if it was running off a DSL line on old hardware?
Brandon Harper got slashdotted a couple of months ago and lived to tell the tale!
(via)
Why would you want to fork out your hard earned cash to read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince?
NB: Don't read on if you haven't read the book yet. Spoilers to follow.
Continue reading Why bother reading it?.
Anybody who reads this blog knows that I'm ever so slightly opposed to spam, spammers and their ilk.
Talking to Irish SMEs on a regular basis you realise fairly quickly that email is more than just a business tool.
Continue reading Irish Spam - ignorance is bliss …..
Quantifying the size of the hosting business, be it on a national, European or international scale, is something that fascinates people in the business and its observers.
Continue reading Quantifying the hosting business.
RTE is to offer a high-quality video stream to broadband users in the 32 counties.
Continue reading RTE to offer high-quality streaming video.
Being able to track your web statistics is important for commercial sites. For personal sites it may not be as important, but it still nice to know where people are coming from and what they are looking for.
There are a number of open source log analysers that work with Apache, however my preferred choice is Awstats.
Continue reading Configuring Awstats with Apache 2 on Ubuntu.
Keeping track of your adsense performance can be a daunting task, even though Google have made some serious improvements to the UI of their publisher centre.
Even using the more advanced reports it is not possible to see which ads on which pages are generating income and which ones aren't.
A couple of months ago Adsenselogger was released.
Continue reading Keeping track of adsense.
I mentioned recently that the Netvisionaries had been launched officially.
It transpires that the Golden Spiders intend to run their "awards" on the same evening.
Although I would like to think that the Irish 'net industry is vibrant I would be either naive or foolish to think that you could run two award ceremonies on the same night.
Then again the Golden Spiders aren't exactly in the same league as the IIA awards.
Whereas the IIA awards are open, transparent and democratic you would have to be forgiven for thinking that the Golden Spiders were some kind of dinosaur that the great freeze forgot.
I already posted last year on the merits, or lack thereof, associated with some of these awards.
However, whether they hold any merit or not, how can they possibly gain from running their award ceremony on the same night as the Netvisionary ones?
Take it from a pure business perspective.
Both awards rely on their sponsors to make the event viable. Last year the Golden Spiders were unable to find sponsors for all award categories until shortly before the event.
The Net Visionaries, on the other hand, had already secured sponsors for most of the categories prior to the press launch.
In terms of quality, which is quite subjective in some areas, the entrants in the two awards last year were at two different extremes of the quality spectrum.
NetVisionaries awarded innovative entrepeneurs such as Aodhan Cullen who runs Statcounter, which is probably the most popular free stat service on the web at present. The fact that it is actually Irish owned and run is probably ignored by a lot of its users, but it is and should be lauded by the Irish 'net community.
So who stands to gain from this kind of move?
I'm currently going through one of my reading phases, which means that I get very upset if I don't have at least one novel to read after the one I'm currently reading.
You can usually find me reading two or three books concurrently. One or two would be "work related" ie. not novels, while the third one is usually a fairly light novel.
Continue reading Reading Mania.
According to a bulletin from Directi:
"Heavy rains and flooding in Mumbai, India has damaged the .IN Registry's Name Servers. This has hampered DNS propagation, with the result that your Customers' .IN domain names might not resolve to their websites for the time being."
