Scott Yang's Playground

Deep Jive Interests: TailRank Exposes Massive Number Of Blogs Hacked — turns out all the latest spam sites are legitimate but hacked WordPress sites. I have also experienced a surge of trackback spams over the last couple of days, from hacked WordPress sites with their wp-content populated with static spammy content. WordPress 2.3.3 wasn’t even [...]

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch shared his list of Web 2.0 Companies he could not live without, and on the point of WordPress. Their Akismet spam comment blocking service is a godsend – without it we would quite simply be overrun with spam. It catches 15,000 or more spam comments per day and auto-deletes them. I [...]

HostingFu: Greylisting spams with Postfix + Gld. I have previously used only Amavisd + SpamAssassin + ClamAV, but the amount of incoming spams really work my poor server hard. After running greylisting for a month, spams virtually disappeared from my inbox. Highly recommended if you are running your own mail server.

Electrician came in the morning and fixed the power switch, which was actually burnt pretty badly when we looked at it last night. As you can see the Netural line has been burnt. They came and replaced the fitting, and the power is good again. Everything is up and running. I have also been experimenting [...]

Matt Mullenweg announced a new spam combating service — Akismet. If you are a personal blogger, or pro-blogger-wannabe who cannot make more than $500 a month, Akismet is free for you to use. If it is a commercial site, or you are making big bucks from your blogsites — then a commercial license needs to [...]

I hate referrer spams.

9:30pm at night and got an ICQ message from Wilson, asking whether I have noticed that Yahoo is now labeling my server as bulk mail sender. So immediately I tested sending different messasges (all legitimate with non-spammy content), originated from different domains to one of my Yahoo account, and everyone of them landed in the [...]

Comment spams DDoS’ed servers hosting MovableType. Not surprising, especially in slow servers where even spawning a new process of perl is considered “expensive”. Maybe for FOCUSer.net to move to WordPress would be one resolution for 2005.

Religion and faith related spam emails are on the rise, and they are exempted from the spam law as they are not commercial, according to ReligiousNewsBlog. I’ve received plenty Nigerian spams that played Christian theme, but so far I have not received one that requested me to repent and be saved. Oh wait! I receive [...]

FOCUSer.net has been bambarded with lots of comment spams lately. As many members do not check their emails regularly for comment notifications, many spam messages were left there for a day or two. I have been tuning the Apache server configuration to block out spam bots, but many of them still manage to slip through [...]

Just a discovery this week. Putting the following setting inside the Apache configuration (virtual host or .htaccess) seems to have positive effect on combating Movable Type comment spams. SetEnvIf User-Agent libwww-perl NOPOST <Limit POST> Order Allow,Deny Allow from all Deny from env=NOPOST </Limit> It seems that many spam bots are written in Perl, so here [...]

Matthew Mullenweg talked about WordPress and why it does not get many comment spams. I don’t get many comment spams either when I was with MovableType. That has nothing to do with the underlying software, but lack of popularity that spammers don’t even bother to flood me :)

Reports are saying 71% of spam emails coming from servers in China. Doesn’t that make me proud? Not!

I received a spam email this afternoon that boasts the following product: Become a legally ordained minister within 48 hours As a minister, you will be authorized to perform the rites and ceremonies of the church! Perform Weddings, Funerals, Perform Baptisms, Forgiveness of Sins, Visit Correctional Facilities Want to start your own church? Then there [...]

I have just got Postfix on my Mandrake Linux box to talk to Clam AntiVirus via amavisd-new, which also does spam filtering as well. It uses Postfix’s content filtering interface to pipe the incoming emails through another SMTP server to quarantine potential viruses. Because AMaViS also integrates with Spam Assassin, I have thus dropped my [...]