Taupe Hat Systems

Lacking time or energy to do anything more productive, and yet unable to stand the sight of my website looking like it was, I went ahead and upgraded to the latest version of b2evolution and left well enough alone. I'm told that the spam filtering has improved. Let's hope so. For fans of the operator, here she is again:

11/24/05: Happy Thanksgiving. Post updated and bumped. It's certainly been an interesting year.

First off, if you've previously installed my idiocy level extension for Mozilla Firefox, please upgrade to the current version here.

I've changed the web service query to point at the Department of Homeland Insecurity website rather than Boyzoid's blog - he was very gracious under the circumstances but did mention something about getting 25 million hits to his web service, so please help out by upgrading the extension asap - I've also changed some of the text and made the graphics purtier, and also made the extension compatable with the upcoming Firefox Version 1.5.

Now I've got a few things to say about all the interesting comments appended to my extension at the moz page.

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So, for those of you who see nothing here but a really ugly white page with text, I'd like to officially welcome you to Microsoft-Free Friday. Supposedly, there should be an informative message that tells you what's up, but somehow PHP is getting through the mod and pushing text out. Oh well.

So why am I doing this? Lots of reasons. First off, I don't have this page up to make money, so I'm not losing any by doing it. Mainly, though, I'm running this mod out of antipathy for Microsoft in general, and Internet Explorer in particular... believe me, there are plenty of better, faster, more secure, and more standards-compliant web browsers out there. By now you'd have really had to crawl out from under a rock to not know that. Oh, and to those who say, "What about websites that are IE only?" my reply is simple: when I encounter such a site, I go elsewhere, right after sending a pointed email to webmaster@ that domain telling them that I've just clicked ads/spent money at a competitor's site. Money talks, you know the rest.

This is the danger of summertime blues. I'm bored, and so I wrote code. Was it useful code? Well, I'll let you be the judge of that. It's a new cowfile, used for cowsay which, if you don't have it, is probably essential to the making of coffee at 11PM when you really ought to be getting some sleep, or otherwise annoying people on IRC. To use this Work Of Fine Art, simply download this file, and copy it to /usr/share/cowsay/cows/ or wherever your cows are kept. OH YEAH!

So I've been taking a course at the local uni entitled "History and Philosphy of Science." It's a 300-level course that has no prerequisites, and fulfills a graduation requirement. I enjoy the lecture, and the discussions are lively enough. The reading is, however, a different story.

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Had a site outage while moving the site to a new host - pretty cool outfit called Linode that basically gives you a disk image of any one of several distros using UML (User Mode Linux), thus giving me the cost advantage of shared hosting while having actual, real root on my server. (Tried a different host using BSD, but the way it was chrooted broke ports and several other things). So you know, there is a world of difference between chroot and UML, a difference worth investigation.

More later.

These have been few and far between, but to be certain a lot has been going on in the background. For one thing, I needed to work on my understanding of b2evolution, which as it turns out is very well-documented and easy-to-maintain code. I've also been checking and killing referral spam on a pretty much daily basis. I'm tempted to take the referral block out of the sidebar entirely, but I kind of enjoy banning the creeps, and it also forces me to maintain my website.

So here's an update, and there are a couple of obvious changes that should be apparent... that's all I've got to say for the time being, but will be posting more in the near future. Thanks for reading.

Open question to the community: is there an effective, ethical, and legal way to prevent these people from doing what they do? If they aren't filling up my mail with C14L15 and V*I*A*G*R*A ads (more amusing was the one that promised that I could "Increase by one full cup size in two weeks - guaranteed!" to which my reply was "To hell with that - lots of pizza and beer would work fine on me and be a lot more fun than some stupid pill."), the spammers are screwing up my referrer stats, hijacking domain names - for example, one of the referrer spams I had was a soccer website registered in the dot-org namespace - or otherwise finding ways to piss off 99.8% of the population in the search of a fast buck.

I'm kind of wondering if there isn't a clear psychological profile developing of these people - "sociopath" comes to mind but I'm no shrink. Any shrinks out there are more than welcome to add their ideas, as well as lambasting me for using the term "shrink."

Anyhow, I guess the best solution to spammers is to wrap them in barbed wire and fire them into the Sun. Unfortunately, that's neither ethical nor legal, and hardly practical, so let's put our heads together to find a better solution, neh?

Added an Iraq Body Count banner near the bottom of the page. I'm thinking this will be my next Firefox extension.

Also, just went through the referrer spam and cleaned it up a lot. What a bunch of jackasses. Really.

So thanks to the good people at Project Honeypot, we now have a new tool to deal with S*P*A*M harvesters at a legal as well as technical level. Basically, the way it works is that I've set up an account there, they gave me a custom script, which I've installed at here: http://www.taupehat.com/pwnt/austereinboard.php which I am placing all over this thread and my site (also hidden throughout the source code) to attract the stupid bots. The bots swipe the email address (which is unique to every page hit), which is often hidden in the sourcecode of the page, do what those hosers do so much, and thus break the EULA implied in the page itself.

Looks like a lot of good clean fun, harming only a bunch of criminal nitwits who deserve nothing better than to be wrapped in barbed wire and fired into the sun. Personally, I'm sick of the barrage of "C1AL15" and "Cheap meds - our doc's are waiting on your to call!" (SIC) junk that floods my inbox, and would be happy to get some of their money for wasting my time. If you have a website, you should check it out, too =]