La Presse journalist Patrick Lagacé just found out his phone was tapped by Quebec police, one of 7 other Quebec reporters. His meta data and geolocated movement were legally obtained, through 24 court ordered warrants for police surveillance. This is shocking.
DS ()Diana Swain): We’ve focused on journalists, and that’s what we’ve heard about this week. But should Canadians at large be concerned about this? People who are not journalists?
Hate, we do, all comment spam. They post, we delete, but I actively ban. Still, they come back for more. It must be economically worthwhile for these people to continually do this, because there seems to be no end in sight as to when they will stop. Comment spam is here to stay. Innovations are bound to happen, so I’ve logged what I have learned.
You will need to utilize your raw access log to see these techniques in action.
Viking Auto Dryer by the T. Eaton Company, 1995, front control panel. Photo by Don Tai
Dead it was, our dryer, a Viking Auto Dryer, from the T. Eaton Company, circa 1995, model number EDX22RW1181, front load, Toronto, Canada, hopelessly turning and turning, all without heat. Of course our clothes were not dry after an hour. Wife was not impressed and put the dryer at the top of my “to do” list. A solution was required before the next weekend load. Nothing stops for laundry or cooking.
Hotlinking is simply not cool. Referrer spam is also not cool. I get both of these from 4 Blogspot sites, and have struggled to contain their mess. The problem is that they are hosted by Google, through their Blogger platform, GoogleUserContent.com. Though Blogger is free, they are very difficult to kill. Here’s what I did to combat the problem.
Lose, humans will, in a competition with a bot. Smarter people in the stock market know this and acknowledge that bots play a major role in their online trading system. This has yet to occur in the online ticket sales area. The CBC documented an ex-bot operator on how bots rig the system. I do agree, and something must be done about it. Tragically Hip concert tickets selling out to bots before humans means that fans will pay a huge premium for tickets, and none of this premium will go to the artists. This is simply not right.
Big Weed told me to not ban Pinterest. While I am not a huge Pinterest fan, she is/was so I listen to her. The problem is that Pinterest is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud host provider infamous for hosting bad bots. Here are the IP ranges to ban AWS but keep Pinterest coming back.
Damn, Magento is difficult, and more than a little fickle. This eCommerce open source package runs on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySql, php) and seems popular enough, but wow, there’s not much community support. Scary,when you need help but cannot turn to your people.
My client’s Magento site runs on Porto 1.2.0. The front page has a products slider that only displayed “;”. The products slider shows he most recently added products. Like, what? It used to work, I did not even know where the code was located, and now it broke? I tracked down the html with Firefly but even with the identified html could not find it in Magento or the Porto theme. I get a hint from the client that it is the homepage_15. Lo and behold, there is the code.
I have upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. There have been very few issues for what is essentially an engine swapout.
Wireless Lan not recognizing Old Connections
On my home wifi I hide the SSID. After the upgrade these connections do not seem to work. Or rather they worked for a while and then seemed to slowly stop working.
When I edit my hidden network connections, the old connections are there but the connect button is greyed out. I thought I had to go to my router, broadcast my SSID, get a connection, then re-hide my SSID. This did not work. It turns out there is a bug for hidden networks.
My friend was surprised when I told him that I banned all IP ranges of Amazon Web Services (AWS) from my site. It is particularly ironic considering that we both had recently attended an AWS Cloud Computing IoT presentation, which was well done and interesting to both of us.
AWS accounts for a huge chunk of the world’s cloud computing platform, and my decision to ban all IP ranges did not come lightly. I just simply could not keep up with all the comment spammers and scrapers coming out of AWS. It seems like I am not alone. This has been by experience as well. There are others.
Puzzling, it is at times, that my htaccess does not always behave as intended. As a computer scientist I expect that my programs and file input should output consistent, stable and reliable results immediately. This is not the case with my htaccess file, hosted on Site5, my internet service provider.
Delays in htaccess Implementation
When I do certain changes to my htaccess, there may be delays of a day or two. This is very odd to me, because supposedly the htaccess is checked for every server request. Maybe there are some caching that I do not know about. Nevertheless it seems like the htaccess has a unique personality. I know that I should not anthropomorphize a computer, much less a security file such as htaccess on an Apache server, but it is difficult to not.
