Puzzled, I am, when Microsoft spams me, and they are pretty regular visitors. After all, Microsoft owns the Bing search engine, and I let Bing freely crawl my site. So why would they want to spam me, and do it so often, using multiple ways? inquiring minds want to know.
Usually I see Microsoft come in using a missing user agent, pretty stealthily, and as I want all visitors to be identifiable, I ban them. They change IPs and do this regularly. Then there are the tor exit servers owned by Microsoft. I suppose that having Tor exit servers is Ok, as they are used by everyone.
Got it by a small referrer spam campaign today, for some website called “hetmanship”. I’ll not mention the extent, as if you look them up you might download some malware. That would be bad.
As is typical, multiple IPs from around the world: Indonesia, China (8), Russia/UA (5), Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Germany, US. They are indeed difficult to track.
Referrer: http://hetmanship.(will not publish)
UA: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Strong, WordPress is, otherwise it would have been breached long ago. These three attackers did a brute force login attack on me today. This is not the first and will certainly not be the last. While I can track down the IP and ISP, and ban them, their origins I will never know. This is the murky world of the internet, and it is worldwide.
41.76.123.243: 41.76.123.0 – 41.76.123.255 WIFLY GA GABON has tried security hacks on my site before, 6 attempts
Brute force attacked, I was, for the xmlrpc.php API in WordPress. Thankfully WordPress was strong enough to ward off this attack. I’ve had random attacks on xmlrpc.php before, but nothing this organized. I thought I’d document a case of 57 xmlrpc.php POST attempts here for all to see. Maybe someone can identify the culprit, as I could not.
I had 57 POSTs to xmlrpc.php on WordPress. They are randomly spaced apart throughout the day, use different IP addresses and hosts, but use the same POST (POST /wp/xmlrpc.php HTTP/1.0), referrer (http://dontai.com/wp/xmlrpc.php) and user agent (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0) like Gecko)
These five lot came on my site with a innocent but fake User Agent name of “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”, scraped some documents, and then proceeded to try to break into my site’s security. Cheeky bastards.
Seven attempts at document scraping, followed by 9 attempted logins. The interesting thing is that when you use a computer to do these campaigns, if you are not clever they really do look like a computer generated attempt and are thus easy to identify. Which user would have this behaviour? Of course they have all been banned.
Well known, is that smartphone use, specifically texting while driving and walking is dangerous to both the person and to all others either on the road or sidewalk. There is no question that smartphone use has an addictive nature and seems to be able to tap into something primal in the human spirit.
Recent news articles have come out to try to explain what is happening and why the addiction happens. Here is one on Texting and Addiction.
1. Sending a Text creates a “TR”, a novel brainwave in the prefrontal cortex on both sides of the brain, but only acting when sending a text, not receiving one, or talking on the phone.
I have Bell Fibe 15/10 on twisted pair into my house, Toronto, Ontario, but the upload speed is .67mbps of the advertised 10mbps. This summer Bell trenched my street to install fiber optic cable. They left the fiber optic cable zip tied to the side of my house. After 2 months wait I am trying to find out when Bell will install fiber optic into my house so I can get 10mbps upload, but they cannot give me an answer. photo by Don Tai
Get, I do, a lot of referrer spam on my site. I’m pretty sure that every site gets referrer spam, they are ubiquitous. Usually I have already banned them and they are usually from Russia, such as xrus, dealing with lovely, nubile, young Russian women. These I treat like background noise: I glance at the error 403 and move on. Then occasionally, about once a month, I get a bona fide referrer spam marketing campaign, where someone really wants to make a negative impression on both my Google Analytics and myself. I then find and ban them.
Highlight modes are dependent on the file types you are editing. They are useful because they highlight different types of text into different colours. For example it is useful to put all comments into a specific colour. Important language specific keywords can be highlighted in a different colour. Usability wise your brain will then be able to ignore unimportant text and concentrate on important text, simply by colour.
I work a lot with .htaccess files in Ubuntu 16.04, so wanted a highlight mode for .htaccess. Someone has created one and was available for download, called apache.lang. Unfortunately I could not find out how to put this download into the right directory. Here are my instructions.
Globe and Mail newspaper is testing changes to their comments section. The existing font and style, left, is much more readable than the new and hip but less readable version, on the right.
Leave it alone, sometimes, is the better option. Or the more vernacular “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. The Globe and mail newspaper is testing changes to their comments system. They have decided to brighten up the icons, but instead of using black for text they have gone for grey. The grey, for me, is much more difficult to read. Maybe the use of grey will prompt for less comments.
