Category Archives: Internet

The bandwidth hogs at allresearch.com

It seems like some others my sites are being bombarded with hits from a mob called AllResearch. Apparently one of the things they do is hit RSS feeds and suck down every page referenced, for some kind of indexing. Judging from the amount of traffic they’re burning up, they suck big-time, in fact. I mean, indexers usually put in a lot of hits on web sites, but these guys are hitting more than 10 times as much as the next one down the list, MSN.

These are the top hitters over at toxiccustard.com:

  • 45541 sp1.allresearch.com
  • 3448 msnbot.msn.com
  • 3110 index.atomz.com
  • 1328 crawl25-public.alexa.com

Time for a little .htaccess magic:

order allow,deny
deny from 38.144.36.
allow from all

Ad blocking begins to have an economic effect

So I was checking out copper (as you do), and followed the wikipedia copper entry link to EnvironmentalChemistry.com’s copper data, and I discovered that ad blockers are beginning to change the economics of the web. The web site whinged that they had detected ad blocking, and if I wanted to get the content I’d have to turn it off (and provided directions – which I followed, but it just turned out to be a bunch of atomic numbers and covalent bonds and useless crap like that).

The economics of a lot of the web are not dissimilar to those of free-to-air television; there’s a covenant between the producers (broadcasters/webauthors) and the consumers – we will let this stuff out to anyone, and you will consume our advertising. Advertisers give the producers cash to cover the costs of publishing. There’s a profit in it, and everyone’s happy.

Except that consumers have decided they don’t like the deal anymore. People are taping TV shows, and skipping the ads. People are using ad blockers in their browsers. The economics of the model are breaking down. I personally am behaving this way because I find the advertising increasingly intrusive and irrelevant, and thus annoying. The ads suck, for products that suck, and they’re shoved down my throat. So I avoid them. This is how a character in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact became the richest man on earth – by selling TV ad blockers.

The three outcomes I can forecast from this are:

  1. increased relevance of advertising (unlikely, the reason advertising is necessary is because of an inherent suckiness of the products, otherwise they’d be compelling)
  2. decreased expenditure on content provision (on TV, cheaper nastier shows – if that’s possible; on the web, uneconomic sites being pulled or at least not updated)
  3. product placement, which is a bit like 1, ‘cept different because it’s more about appropriate products in appropriate places

I for one have no idea how this will play out, but I’m sure advertising will get more subtle. It’s done that over the last century, and will continue to in response to increasing consumer sophistication. Perhaps advertisers will find a way to back off, and only offer their products to customers who want them; they certainly want to act that way, because it’s a waste of money advertising women’s sanitary napkins to the gay male viewers of Friends — unless they’re planning to fix their car’s leaky roof with one.

BTW, how did they figure out I was blocking their ads?

Skype: good or bad?

Skype now has a momentum that makes it hard to ignore — almost anybody on broadband who is interested in dodging long distance call fees is now happily chatting away. And though it doesn’t always “just work”, it’s certainly good enough and easy enough that it has mainstream appeal, unlike most previous VOIP applications, at least the freebie ones.

But its proprietary nature has got some commenters hot under the collar. In this month’s Australian Personal Computer, Dan Warne takes a swipe at Skype (heh), and suggests we shouldn’t use it (not online alas). Ted Wallingford has a similar beef.

Personally, I’m just following the pack. I don’t have the time to look around for a good open source, standards-based alternative, and even so, would it have the critical mass of users that Skype has? A number of overseas friends are now on Skype, so I’m happy to have the client running, alongside Trillian — which is for my many ICQ contacts. Yes, ICQ. I also haven’t been convinced to switch to Jabber, the open source IM client… why would I? Only one person I know uses it.

It’d be great if Skype had embraced existing standards. They say SIP and other protocols weren’t good enough for them, and they had to go down their own road. But if likewise it would be a gesture of goodwill to open up the protocol, and get it ratified as a standard. Maybe when they’ve made their first billion.

The other night I had a surprise Skype call from a friend in Poland I haven’t talked to for about five years. It may have its problems sometimes, but by and large it does just work. And for me as a consumer, I’m afraid that’s more convincing than some open source, standards ideal.

SMS spam from sms.ac

I got an invitation to join sms.ac. A quick Google seemed to indicate it’s not a great idea unless you want to give your mobile number to people who will SMS-spam you.

Further, if they convince you to reveal your Hotmail password (on the pretext of letting you read it from your mobile) they’ll also spam the people in your address book, inviting them to join. Delightful. And the person who “invited” me? She wasn’t even aware it had happened.

So remember kids: sms.ac is bad. Now email this warning to all your friends.

VoIP ain’t gonna happen this month

I’ve just moved houses and thought it would be a grand idea to replace our fixed phone line with a VoIP phone like that supplied by Engin. Save the $30/month fixed line rental, skip the $60 connection fee and also upgrade our net connection to broadband, come out ahead with features and finances. Everything would be great.

What a stupid idea.

The VoIP service offered by Engin is $20/mo, so you are saving $10/mo on connectivity. Our ISP costs $10/mo, so the most we can afford to pay for an ISP and come out equal is $20/mo. But if we pay only that then we are effectively getting broadband for free. The VoIP is $150, but we’ll just ignore that cost. It’s only $90 more than hooking up a fixed line.

Obviously, to use a VoIP phone you need IP connectivity – an ISP. Okay, so we’ll just sign up to one of those $20 / 200meg plans ADSL and that’ll be great; I did some figuring and we’d use nothing like that kind of traffic, even with voice calls consuming 1K/sec (all figuring based on Engin’s figures, supplied in the user forum, which has been pulled – methinks because the users were slagging them off). No problem signing up for a couple of years, no worries, I’ll be in the new place for at least that long.

You can’t have ADSL without a fixed line phone.

You Freaking WHAT?!

Fine. Cable, I’ll have cable. Call one of the two cable providers, the house has been cabled up by both. Except they’ve merged, to increase competition. No worries, I’ll call the only monopolistic cable provider, hook up (ought to be cheap, the house is already cabled up) and away we go. $279 to connect to your cable service?!?! $40/month to stay connected?!?! You Freaking WHAT?!

Fine. I happen to know that although cable and ADSL are widely regarded as your two options for broadband, there’s a third option here in Melbourne – radio. Alphalink provide superfast wireless access for only $33/mo; but connection is $286. But guess what? $33 is greater than $20. So we come out Losers.

So I resigned myself and we got a fixed line. And that’s why VoIP isn’t gonna happen this month, and I suspect won’t be happening for a long time yet.

The power of spam

When I registered my first domain name, toxiccustard.com, in November 1996, I didn’t keep my email address secret. It wasn’t obvious (at least to me) that spammers were picking up any valid email addresses they could find, left right and centre. The address: dbowen@toxiccustard.com. I can quote it now because it hasn’t been valid for many years.

But they keep distributing it, and keep spamming it. I know this because my web ISP told me last week that toxiccustard.com is now getting about five thousand e-mail messages PER DAY. Aye carumba.

In fact so much mail is coming in that before they realised the nature of it, they were saying they’d have to decline to provide me with shared web hosting for that domain in the future, because of the impact on other customers. As it is they’ve said okay they’ll live with it, since they’ll be upgrading their systems shortly so bouncing mail doesn’t impact them as much.

I’ve disabled mail completely on that domain in Plesk, and I’m looking into fiddling with the MX records, which hopefully should stop dead any mail way before it reaches anybody and starts costing them money. This may involve moving the domain to a new registrar, since the current mob doesn’t appear to provide this level of customisation.

The lesson: keep your email address secret. Once the spammers have it, expect a snowball effect. It may take 9 years, but eventually it’ll be unusable.

Briefs

The weird bounces I was getting a while back are apparently due to a bug in QMail. They’re also causing some mails to be sent multiple times from webmail. Triffic. But I’ve switched webmails from SquirrelMail to IMP, and that seems to help. I don’t like IMP’s “This mail was sent by IMP” footer, but I do like its features, especially the timezone setting, which was never satisfactory in SquirrelMail.

A big batch of Microsoft patches are out. Through as someone at work pointed out, they shouldn’t be due to buffer overflows, ‘cos MS claimed years ago that they’d eliminated them in Windows XP. (Thanks Ian)

Mr 99Zeroes has apparently been sacked from Google. As Scoble remarks, the rule for blogging about work really needs to be: Don’t piss off your boss. The alternative is simply not to blog about work.

C/Net’s new online news/RSS reader/aggregator: NewsBurst. (via Steve Rubel who features on the latest G’day World podcast)

An Englishman was arrested after he used the text-only browser Lynx to donate money to a tsunami fundraiser. Apparently British Telecom technicians looking through the web site logs thought it was a hacking attempt.

Spam Karma

Well after deleting what seems like hundreds of bloody comment and trackback spams over the past week, I’ve installed Spam Karma (billed as a “fearless Spam Killing Machine”) on this blog. If it’s successful, I’ll be installing it on my other WordPress blogs.

It includes blacklists, captcha or email verification for suspicious comments, a myriad of settings, all that good stuff. For now I’ve set it to “lenient” mode until I get a feel for how strict it is. Feel free to leave junk comments here to see how it goes. (But beware of deliberately leaving spammy comments — for all I know it may decide to blacklist your IP address!

PS. Tuesday 21:25. The manual install as in the ReadMe worked for fine me, except that you can’t get to the config page through the menus, you have to activate it from the plugins page, then go to the URL it quotes. (This is apparently a known thing with WP1.2, but I guess it applies to WP1.2.2 as well, which we’re running here. Presumably it doesn’t apply to the current nightly builds or to the future 1.5.)

Also be sure to try the test captcha page (linked off the config page) to make sure that bit works (eg the correct PHP libraries are there somewhere. If they’re not, I guess you need to hassle your ISP. Works fine for me.)

PS. Wednesday 21:15. There is a hitch: the e-mail it sends out summarising what it’s done is encoded with something. I think this is an incompatibility with the PHP setup on my ISP… the same thing happened with WordPress 1.2’s password reminder messages. I’ll have to dig around for a fix.

It should also be noted that Tony has tried to plonk it onto a blog he runs, and is having some issues. So it’s not all beer and skittles.

On the bright side, it tells me it caught 20 spam comments in the last 24 hours. I certainly haven’t seen any get let through.

PS. Thursday 20:05. Some are getting through, but evidently nowhere near the total number being caught. Hmmm.

Interview with a spammer

The Register’s Interview with a link spammer.

When Sam begins a spam run, he has one target, though he’ll accept any of six. Principal one: come top of the search engines for his chosen site’s phrase. “But you’ll accept coming in at 1,2 or 3, or if you come at 8,9 or 10. Actually, 8, 9 and 10 have better conversion rates. I don’t know why. Maybe the eyes fix on it when you scroll down the page.” And the cost of doing it? Once the code is written, pretty much zero. “Bandwidth is cheap,” he says. “You set it going in the evening and come back in the morning to see how it’s gone.”

So what beats them? Sounds like captchas (those distorted images requiring a human to type a letter)

So what does put a link spammer off? It’s those trusty friends, captchas – test humans are meant to be able to do but computers can’t, like reading distorted images of letters.

There’s several WP plug-ins that will do them; I haven’t tried it yet. But I will soon.