Embarrassing hack at MacRumoursLive.com

Monitoring the feed on the 2009 Keynote just now and a rather alarming ALL CAPS post popped in:
9:27 am Retraction on Steve Jobs comment…we don’t know how that got in our feed.
9:26 am Showing a “pumpkin patch” event with no geotag. Starts typing name, and iPhoto assists using its database of locations.
9:25 am Hovering over a pin at [...]

Hardly a well baited hook?

I recieved this email today:
MR. FRANCIS JOHNSON
TELE:234-7031622282
FINAL NOTIFICATION
GOOD DAY,
- I AM WRITING TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR OUT STANDING PAYMENT OF $10.5 HAS BEEN APPROVED FOR PAYMENT AND WILL BE RELEASE TO YOU AS SOON AS YOU RESPOND TO THIS LETTER, KINDLY REPLY WITH YOUR NAME INFULL, TELE/FAX, CONTACT ADDRESS, YOUR AGE AND OCCUPATION, SEX, [...]

Personal Spam?

Votes please; should I respond or not?
This mail arrived this morning and is the first personalised one of its type I have seen:

YANG LIM & ASSOCIATES
SOLICITOR AND ADVOCATES
NO. 101, JALAN PUDU RAYA,
TAMAN DESA RAYA
MALAYSIA
TEL: +60122473440
Email: barryanglim@XXXXXX.XXX
I am Yang Lim, an attorney at law. A deceased client of mine, Mr. Andrew  Curd, that shares [...]

BT’s Bad Phorm

Following on from Garan’s piece about Phorm, BT have announced a trial involving 10,000 subscribers. Read about it on The Register.

Phorm, an opinion

Garan has beaten me to it with a recent posting on his blog. He writes about some very important news for the majority of UK internet users.
If you want the internet to remain the relatively open and free place it is today and you want your browsing habits to remain personal, I suggest you read [...]

Wordpress User Registration

Over the past few days I have seen about 20 “people” try to register with this blog – I’m not really sure why. “They” all seem to come from Poland, which in itself isn’t a problem, but I don’t know anyone Polish I don’t think!
A little further investigation reveals that there seems to be no [...]

Family Forum back up and running

After months of spam abuse I had to take down the Curd family forum . Seems phpBB is just too open to abuse and requires constant tweaking and attention  to keep running.
I have now switched to another system and am hoping it won’t be such an “open target”, we’ll see..
Check it out at www.curdfamily.com/bbs.

Defeating Wordpress Spam Registrations

For some time I have been bugged by the spambots registering as users on this blog. So far it seems pretty easy for them to get through the basic defences which are built in, however, help may be at hand!
Paul Marek has written about the problem and seems to have found an answer via the [...]

Spam count over

After 100 days of recording spam statistics I have today stopped updating the graph. There’s not a lot of point continuing with it as the levels seem to have flattened out and, while the average is dropping slowly – about 1 per week, the downward slope is so shallow that it will be about 9 [...]

Latest Wordpress

I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1.3 on April 3rd and, so far, all is good. The main thing I have noticed is the lack of attempted comment spam posting.
Over there in the right hand toolbar is a little Akismet counter, it’s been sitting on the same number (1064) since the day I upgraded – seems like [...]