Monthly Archives: December 2004

Christmas Pasta

Christmas Pasta from Cost PlusFor Christmas Eve dinner, I like a dish which combines simple rustic flavors with little prep and cleanup. The big meal after all will be Christmas dinner. For the last couple of years, we’ve got some Christmas Pasta from Cost Plus, and whipped up some of Rachel Ray’s Christmas Pasta sauce. Takes one pan and about twenty minutes of prep, makes a big pile of sauce. Combine that with some fresh homemade bread (or good bakery style Italian loafs if you aren’t so inclined) and you’ll have a meal that will warm your heart and fill your belly.

Brainwagon Radio: Christmas Prep, My Wife, Referer Spam and BitTorrent

Where your host complains about his perfect storm of auto repair, switches back to his laptop for improved sound quality, is interrupted by the missus, and talks briefly about referer spam and BitTorrent. I think this very well might be my most boring podcast ever, but what can I say: I’m preoccupied by the holiday.

I’m experiencing very slow access to my hosting service, not sure what the trouble is, but hopefully this will clear up shortly.

Addendum: it seems better now.

Tor: An anonymous Internet communication system

This EFF-funded project sounds very interesting. It attempts to provide anonymity by making traffic analysis difficult by using something called an onion router. I’ll have to read more about it.

Tor: An anonymous Internet communication system

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and more. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

Sandbag shelter wins architecture prize

I must admit to a certain fascination with low-tech housing solutions, so it was interesting to read this article on Boing Boing and the associated links. Architects Nader Khalili and Iliona Outram won the Aga Khan award for their method of using sandbags and barbwire to construct buildings based upon circular courses which are corbelled together to make domes.

Interesting stuff.

How bad is referer spam?

While exploring the depth of my ridiculous referer spam issue, I ran the following simple
query:

mysql> select count(*) as cnt , baseDomain from referer_visitlog where to_days(now()) - 
to_days(visitTime) = 0 group by baseDomain order by cnt desc limit 10 ;
+-----+--------------------------+
| cnt | baseDomain               |
+-----+--------------------------+
| 682 | chikaliresortmalawi.com  |
| 682 | champvilleclub.com       |
| 682 | ceyloncurry.com          |
| 682 | cbmwyo.org               |
| 289 | brittandersondesigns.com |
| 243 | clevelandfyi.com         |
|  50 | google.com               |
|  16 | google.co.uk             |
|   8 | xopy.com                 |
|   6 | search.yahoo.com         |
+-----+--------------------------+
10 rows in set (1.16 sec)

It’s kind of depressing to find just how many people work that hard to try to spam my silly little site.

Addendum: It seems that virtually all my referer spam comes from four distinct IP addresses. They are now in my blacklist. We shall see how long this holds.

Fighting Referer Spam

In the last couple of days, I’ve been targetted by referer spam bots. These dorks access pages on a weblog repeatedly in an attempt to get their referer tag listed on your home page. I’ve been trying to figure out how to combat this behavior, and can see two different ways of dealing with it:

  • Ping the referer back, and make sure it does link to my site. Probably slow and not scaleable, particularly in the situation I have with asymmetric bandwidth.
  • Blacklist sites which generate bursts of referer traffic. If we get lots of referers to a particular url in a short period of time, put them in a database of blacklisted sites and keep them from ever appearing in the referer list.

The second seems easy, but I must admit: the query to find such lists seems difficult to write. I’ll continue to think it over, but does anyone have any suggestions?

Black Sunday For BitTorrent

Slashdot is reporting that TorrentBits.org and SuprNova.org have gone dark. There seems to be little really solid news as to the reason, but widespread speculation is some kind of crackdown on illegal copying.

When more details are available, I will likely have more to say about it, but for now I merely point out that BitTorrent relies on centralization, and as such is easily targetted both by the legal system as well as computer forensics. If you choose to illegally trade files on BitTorrent, you are on thin ice in both regards.

If you are a P2P developer, you should probably read Fred von Lohman’s piece so as to educate and arm yourself.

Building Carma Karma

Well, as the holiday approaches, I’ve got all three cars in the shop virtually simultaneously:

  • My Expedition, for shocks, two tires and alignment
  • The Jeep, for body work, and
  • The Cavalier, for one highly fu-barred transmission.

To deflect some of my bad Karma, I decided to do something nice and selfless: I went out and gave blood at the Red Cross. I hope this restores some of the natural order to things, but even if it doesn’t, it’s a nice thing to do. Consider donating blood this holiday season.

Addendum: Upon returning to pick up my car, I’m greeted with the news that it still needs $350 more work. On the way back, my wife tries to deposit a check at an ATM, and it jams and requires me to come help her out with tweezers to retrieve her check.

I think I want my blood back.