Reinke Faces Life

20060511 @ 1437 zulu

Just when I wanted to use it. Argh! Their website isn't responding either?

http://download.yahoo.com/dl/msgr75/us/ymsgr75us.exe

Yahhhoooo, Yahoo Help finally supplied an executable that will install. I installed and it's running.

It was wireless wednesday. And, as planned, I have the loveable LUGGABLE up on vwbbie (i.e., the Verizon Wireless not so Broad Band service). I was able to make one out call from it to home that was acoustically unusable. The called party could hear me but it was delayed badly. I abandoned it and went to a landline. Of interest was that it did charge me two cents for the failed call. That's a bad omen.

I want to have an incall to test. Maybe I'll try it from my cell to laptop. 

Arghhhh!

… based on my problems with the new version of Yahoo Messenger …

… … is that you are not in control of your computing environment. You have the illusion that you are but you're not!

 If I was, I could fall back to an old version of Yahoo Instant Messenger. I have the old version. At one time, I felt that I'd always wanted to keep what I was installing locally. Remember my winrot experience. But, now neither YIM version installs.

Reported earlier, LinkedIn changed their UI which disrupted my modus operendi.

It just seems that I keep losing control.

That loss of control wastes my time. Which is the most critical resource to me.

So officially declare me "not a fan of web based apps"!

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/security/0,70831-0.html

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"Blue Security is indeed hurting our business, but not by taking down our websites," the purported spammer wrote. "Instead, they create a daily nuisance to our server administrators."

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Awhhh, poor spam server administrators … have … daily nuisance. They better not make their identities known or they will have a hard time finding work in the industry.

Already, when they pop out of their rat hole, they get pounded.

A spammers website got "dug", (i.e., equivalent to slashdotted) and their link collapsed under the traffic (i.e., ping times a grazillion people tends to abosorb your bandwidth). Akin to Dlink's NTP fiasco. Only this time it was deliberate.

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There is a great discussion going on about BlueSecurity and the jerks at specialham.com. (Search for Spammers in Digg). 544 comments when I checked a few minutes ago. There's a lot of good tech info on how the bad guys jump around the globe hourly to avoid detection.

The Digg effect and the Digg Army did a great job of bringing specialham.com to its knees. Even though Alexa is not the most reliable source of information, you can see there was a huge increase in activity on Sunday at the specialham.com site. Here is a link to the most recent Alexa chart. The daily reach went from 25 million to 450 million in one day. That is a big RED FLAG for their advertisers and sponsors. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbenson2/143175992/ 

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And one digg commentator summed it up nicely:

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A MESSAGE FOR THE BLUE SECURITY SPAMMER…

Since I've seen plenty of evidence that you're trolling anywhere on the web that people are discussing Blue Security and your deeds, I'm absolutely certain that you will read this.

Some things I need you to consider:

1) It's ridiculous for you to say "If you want to be removed from our mailing list, please opt out first." We tried that. You didn't listen. Blue Frog seems to make a concerted effort to *make you listen*. Seems to have worked. You're reading this right now, aren't you?

2) It's even more ridiculous for you to say "The point of it is to get Blue Frog software to stop turning its subscribers' computers into zombies that attack our servers". Why? Because you use botnets / zombies to do a bulk of your spamming. And you used them again to give Blue Security fits for a few days. The difference between Blue Security and you is that their software is on our computers by *our choice*. I don't think you can say the same of your vast botnet that sends spam.

3) The threats and lies you spread are so outrageous, I wonder how you think anyone is going to believe them — or for that matter — your whole facade of "I'm the the good guy" and "what these Blue Security people are doing is illegal." What you fail to understand, Mr. Spammer, is that this is a very sophisticated community of people you are dealing with; the early adopters of Blue Frog. We've put up with your Spam for years and years, we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore.

4) It really doesn't matter if you have my email addresses. If my email addresses were so unbelievably private and well-guarded then I wouldn't have a Spam problem, now would I? So how do you think you can threaten me? Do you really think that I'm going to notice an increase in Spam as a result of your efforts when I routinely filter 500 a day? Think again.

5) The more attacks you pull on Blue Security and especially ** read this ** on regular guys like me, the more you draw attention to yourself and increase the possibility that the real big guns of the Net will get involved and squash you. And at the same time, you make Blue Security even more powerful and well known. Everyone I know is installing Blue Frog now.

I guess your threats had the reverse effect than you intended.

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DITTO!

Come on inet, let's get mad!

http://www.google.com/reader/things/intro

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Welcome to Google Reader

Spend your time reading what you care about most.

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Nifty! 

Plug in https://reinkefj.wordpress.com/feed/ to read my feed in it.

You need a signon so if you need a gmail invite, drop me a note. I have lots of them. As does most GMail users. It is important to play with all these gems. Just to know what is in Web2.0. Or whatever the hyped name for the future of the web is being used today.

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Reference number: LTK6904419311X Please use this ticket number in any correspondence with us.
Subject: from email
Dear reinkefj,

Thank you for joining Blue Security community.

Unfortunately, because of a major DDos attacks, we are currently focusing on maintaining our facilities, therefore your Blue Frog will not post opt out requests in the next few days and the spam reporting may fail. Please report us your spam messages only after the service will start function properly again. Thank you for your patience.
Thank you again for your support.

Should you require further assistance or information, please do not reply to this message, but simply use this Support form.

Best regards,

Idan Liron
Support Team
www.bluesecurity.com  

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Go get 'em guys. This is one of the first offensive strikes back at spammers. I think they deserve our support. It doesn't surprise me that at least one spammer doesn't want to lose his revenue stream.

I would think that those interested in cyber-defense of the USA would be watching this epic struggle as a prototype of what could happen to our national infrastructure.

To compensate for a cheap mp3 player which doesn't remember where in an mp3 it left off (i.e., it always starts at the beginning of a "song" arghh) and its lame fast forward function (i.e., hold down a button forever), I engineered my own solution.

I like to listen to the fellows over at http://www.freetalklive.com, who while sometimes a tad "juvenile" about what they are interested in and talk about, do have a show that talks about liberty. It does challenge one's assumptions. And, even for a cranky old Libertarian like me, it has developed my thinking. It's a good use of my commute time. And, they put their show out as a podcast, which means I can time shift. They rapidly wormed their way into my commute and become my favorite podcast. And, the podcasts are free unlike almost every other talk show like Rush, Bob Brinker, or such. Many talk shows don't even have a podcast for you to time shift with. From time to time, I listen to IT Conversations, but it's too much like work where I'm going to or coming from.

Any way back to compensating for the cheap mp3 player. The freetalkwebsite has the last six days of podcasts available as an http download. More than a year's worth are available by BitTorrent. So every Sunday, I get the last week's for my next week's drive time.

FreeDownloadManager http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/ is a download accelerator and manager. Free! Using this software you can easily download files from any web site. With FDM, I do my usual "save as" and FDM takes over from there. So I do six right clicks on the web site, select the right destination directory, first time takes a few more clicks, and FDM does the dirty work. It gets each one in turn; two at a time.

Then, I fire up mp3split-ght http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net/ and get ready to surgically split the nominally 3 hour mp3 from FTL into 12 ten minute segments. I experimented with 24 fives and that was OK; ten seems to be "better". SO I set my output destination the first time; it remembers after that. Select 600 minute blocks. And, select my input file. Usually by this time, FDM has all the files. So I run mp3split-ght and it creates my 12 ten minute mp3s.

Here's the tricky part, if I just went ahead an split the next file, it gives them the same name. (I haven't figured out that different name stuff in the program. Must have a feature. Just too lazy!) So I run a trivial batch file to rename the parts to Monday1 to Monday12. Yes, I have six batch files, one for each day.

I proceed to iterate. Split and rename five more times.

Then I use MusicMatchJukebox http://www.musicmatch.com/home.htm to nuke everything on the mp3player from last week and stuff this week's stuff on it.

The whole process takes less than 20 minutes. And which doesn't require my full attention all the time.

FWIW YMMV just in case you were interested in a cheap and lazy way to do it.

Maybe it's me?

Azureus, a really sweet BitTorrent client (free of course), appears to havehad its own personal brain freeze. What is noteworthy was that it was unrelated to network issues.

My internet connection is rock solid now that I had my ISP come out to investigate. It turned out that the darn squirrels hand chewed the wire from house to pole down to bare wire. I assume that every time the wind blew the wire would ground out. Amazing that there was an signal at all. Any way back to Azureues.

I use Azerueus to help the fellows over at Free Talk Live http://freetalklive.com, my favoite podcast, deliver their content. They uniquely have a more than a year of their show online for free. As anyone who knows me, I'm big on "free".

(Free software, free podcasts, free beer, free love. Never did get all that free beer or free love that they were talking about in the Sixties. I'll now break out into my rendition of "Born Too Late". Oh no audio on your end. Too bad. Your loss.)

I have all their content here and when I'm home I put fire up Azureus to help them deliver their content. Azureus does come in handy for downloading Linux distributions, my strategic direction, from time to time.

This moring I awake to find Azureus "stuck" with red ballons on most of the files. A red balloon mains something is wrong. It was bizarre. Some files couldn't be found. Some couldn't scrape. So I shut it down. And brought it back up. Green (good) and blue (sadly trying) baloons came popping up all over.

Hmmm.

Maybe it just got lonely. But everything was back to normal. I don't know why. Wish all my software problems were resolved so easily. Have to keeo my eye on thsi troublemaker.

http://truthintech.net/2006/05/05/evoting-problems/

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The Washington Post has a decent article up about problems with eVoting systems. 

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As an IT guy, I KNOW that eVoting will be fraudulent. It can't be other than that.

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That said check out the article and its comparison to Vegas Slot Machines!  

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/03/16/GR2006031600213.html

I love it.

Best mechanized voting proposal I ever saw was the one that kept the system pretty much similar but, with Open Source software, the machine printed a "receipt" for your vote. You then "cast" that vote in the ballot box. Everyone got a quick tally from the machine and the ballot box was there for verification.

It wasn't internet, phone, or absentee balloting but it was fraud proof.