Perhaps it's the time of year, but as I sit here, eating Santa's cookies and drinking Santa's milk while my daughter dreams of dancing sugar plums or whatever it is children actually dream of on Christmas Eve these days, I wonder how we're going to commemorate the tragedy that continues to unfold in a country called Iraq.
Wouldn't you know. I was happy to remove all the firewall rules blacklisting certain ISPs because of the spamming behavior of their customers. I was able to do this because the spam prevention methods I use on taupehat.com now are much more effective, and mostly what I get anymore are 419 scams sent by way of one-off Yahoo! accounts (not sure why they're using Yahoo so much for this, but it's really consistent that they come from there).
Well, this good thing has come to an end, and I'm putting /8 and /16 blacklists up again. This time, it isn't because of spam, oh no. This is much worse, in my opinion. What I've been seeing over the past couple of weeks are some VERY persistent SSH brute-force attempts coming from servers in China. I use fail2ban to temporarily block IP addresses that fail to login a set number of times in a row, but I'm getting some of these addresses coming back again and again in the banlogs. This looks to me like better scripting on the part of the attacker, and when I look up the address and find it part of a large dynamic netblock, my only recourse is to ban the entire netblock.
As most anyone in the business can tell you, sending email to abuse@ in China is futile. My own attempts have resulted in bounce messages, autoresponses in Chinese (fair turnabout, that - I sent an email in English to China), and most often, nothing at all. In no case was I ever given the impression that anyone on the other end cared or was going to do anything about the problem, and frankly, I've given up.
My previous attempts at blacklisting were clumsy, and friends of mine in Australia complained that they could no longer reach this site. So my question to you is: does anyone have a comprehensive list of IP blocks assigned to China? I'm done. Until Chinese network operators can show that they're willing to be professional and responsible with regard to criminal activity originating from their networks, I'm banning the whole damn country. I don't get this kind of crap from other hotbeds... the Russians aren't showing up on my radar like this, nor are the Central and South Americans, and even those countries have NOC admins that actually handle stuff when it's pointed out to them.
OK, here we are in 2006, and things still haven't improved a bit. The rest of the rant still holds. Seriously, if you send me an app and it needs Win98-style filesystem permissions (IE: none), I'm sending it back with a "don't buy" recommendation to management. Enough is enough.
With the recent trend toward educational standards initiatives such as NCLB (The Federal No Child Left Behind Act), and similar legislation in many states and local jurisdictions, public school districts are faced with an increasing demand for data collection, storage, and management. At the same time, the potential benefit of a technology-based curriculum is becoming both more apparent and with the explosion of personal computing in the last decade, much more accessible. The opportunity is here, the need is here, and a carefully balanced approach to using technology in the classroom is what schoolchildren deserve.
In my various travails as an ed-tech person, one of the things that has been a recurring theme (aside from poorly-written software ) or perhaps related to same, is the preponderance of educationally-oriented webapps being written for IIS and .NET. There are a number of problems I have with this.
Poor salespeople. I dislike the profession in general, and tend to not have much mercy when dealing with them.
Subject: Product Inquiry / Cable TV
Hi,
I'm comparing Charter Cable against the competition, which in this area is pretty much the satellite services. Given what I see thus far, I'll probably go with Charter so long as the following two requirements can be met. If they can't, I'll just go with the competition.
Requirements:
1) All billing and support websites must be fully usable using operating systems and browsers other than Idiot Exploiter on Windows (err, that's Microsoft® Internet Explorer in case you lack a sense of humor). Specifically, I will be handling billing using Firefox on Linux and Mac OS X, and occasionally Safari on the Mac. IE is no longer supported on Mac OS, and this is a Good Thing as it was long in the tooth when MS finally dumped it. It is not currently and will not be installed on my Mac. IE on Linux would be amusing, but doesn't seem likely.2) I require a package that does not involve any money at all going from me to Fox News Channel, even tangentially. Those filthy swine don't get my money. Ever.
I look forward to an affirmative response to both requirements soon so that we can begin doing business.
Cheers,
Mike
Reply follows. Note that they're full of shit - the competition does indeed offer FNC-free television programming.
Thank you so much for contacting Charter Communications. I would be glad to assist you in the best manner possible. It appears that the website is Netscape compatible and therefore Firefox able. Unfortunately the second requirement is one you will not be able to get around with any provider as Fox and its affiliates are part of pretty much all services.
It all started with a fluffy bunny.
A friend of mine linked me to a story at MSNBC about a fluffy bunny. There was a video linked to that story, and I wanted to watch it. OK, I can certainly view that, right? After all, my browser works fine at Google Video and YouTube, right? Surely this will work fine. So I clicked on the video link. (For those of you who don't know, I do my web surfing using Firefox on Linux, which some consider strange for some reason)
Instead of the fluffy bunny, I was instead confronted with a page that told me this: "To use this product, you need to install free software." Huh? Did Microsoft suddenly gain wisdom and decide that Free Software is the way of the future? Can I now look forward to standardized network protocols, well-documented APIs, and the opportunity to clean up the horrible, bloody, insecure mess that is the Windows OS?
Did Satan just get hit in the face with a snowball?
[UPDATE 10.30.06] Due to improvements in technology, I don't really have a need to do this any longer. On the other hand, I'll leave this post up for posterity - a look back at just how bad things were getting. I still get a ton of background noise from these bums, but it's really just that anymore. No more email spam, no more referral spam (nor a referral block), and most importantly, no more database thrashing trying to keep up with the deluge. Good riddance!
It's hard to be happy about doing this, but at this point, I've reached a limit. I've heard the debate rage about which networks generate the most spam, and perhaps it's different for large organizations. I don't know. What I do know is that about 80% of the email and blog spam I've been getting is coming from APNIC address space. I also get a fair amount from the Carribean.
Contact the admin.
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