Dave's Free Press

New Bryar release

As I've been promising to do for ages (it's over a year since Simon said I could take over maintenance of it, and several months since I promised Bob that he could have all the shiny new features I had planned) I've finally got round to releasing a new version of Bryar, the software what provides the brains behind this 'ere august journal.

The most important change is that I released the stuff for filtering out comment spam.

An Idiot

[originally posted on 2007-01-12]

I got an email today from a recruiter. Not to see if I was available for work, but trying to push someone on to me. The email read:

Please find attached the CV of an extremely talented web developer who specialises in PHP and front end web development technologies including HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

This candidate is actively seeking work in your area at the moment. He does have several other interviews arranged therefore if you are interested in seeing him for a role you are currently recruiting for please give me a call today.

If you are not recruiting, please keep my details on record for future reference.

and was sent to my personal address, not to work. Neither I nor my lovely employer have told this girl that we are looking for anyone technical and if we had we'd not have asked for someone who knew PHP. So yes, I most certainly will "keep her details on record for future reference". Being a gentleman, I informed her of this fact and that I was keeping them because I would otherwise not remember that she is clearly far too stupid for me to do business with.

Update 2007-01-19: she dunnit again. This time I phoned her, and she admitted sending unsolicited, untargetted mailshots - that is, spam. She, of course, thinks it was targetted, but I'm afraid that's just not true as is obvious from what I wrote above. And, of course, there's the issue that the address she sent her spam to is one that I created only because one person (one!) continually mis-spelt my real one. I've never sent email from the address in question, nor have I ever given that address to anyone apart from that one person. Consequently, the idiot spammer Claire O'Keeffe of Huxley Associates obviously either guessed it or acquired it by some other nefarious means.

Paypal's anti-phishing advice

Oh dear. I just got email from Paypal (and yes, it really is from Paypal - I, unlike most people, know how to check it out properly) advising me about how to protect myself from being ripped off by fraudsters sending spam emails which merely claim to be from Paypal but which actually direct you off elsewhere so they can steal your Paypal username and password. This practice is commonly known as "phishing".

Trouble is, to an unsophisticated eye, phishers' emails look just like Paypal's real emails. What Paypal should do is simply never email their customers except in direct response to the customer doing something on their site, such as sending someone some money. That way, less technologically-literate customers can simply ignore all unexpected mails "from Paypal" and be safe.

That behaviour is good enough for my bank, so I wonder why Paypal don't do it.

And before anyone mutters about what would happen if someone sends me money (which I obviously want to know about) - the person sending it should tell me. And I'll probably make an exception for when I'm selling something through ebay too.

Stupid spammers

In the last month, there have been well over 400 attempts at spamming this journal. All have failed. And yet the spammers still try. And I get email notifying me each time, because there's always a possibility that a legitimate comment might get classified as spam and need to be manually approved.

Ah well, I have the IP for each of those 400-odd spams, and using routeviews.org I can easily turn them into a considerably shorter list of netblocks. And then auto-create a shitload of Deny from rules. 104 of them, to be precise. It will be interesting to see if the spammers notice their lack of access and keep trying.

When ads go wrong

I've been keeping an eye on things, and most of the time, Google puts pretty good well-targeted ads on these pages. The only real exception was on my page about spam, which kept getting ads for dodgy anti-spam products, which was clearly silly, so I've removed 'em from that page.

However, on occasion it goes amusingly wrong. Not Google's fault, but some idiot has obviously bought an ad for thousands of keywords without thinking about it, and so this 'ere journal is currently advertising ...

So how exactly does one order a burning cross online?