Sometimes I'm so tempted to to do this: Block China Web Traffic IP Addresses and Chinese Hackers. Of course if everyone blocked everyone else indiscriminately that would go against the spirit of the Internet. What's needed is for the ISPs to get off their lazy and greedy butts and block attacks at their sources. Certainly a bunch of — Continue reading »
SYN Flood DDOS
📆 August 14, 2011
To the couple of visitors of this website, I'm sorry for the 2-day outage earlier this week. It was a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack and I never found out who was behind it and why. The problem started in the early morning hours with an outage alert from the remote monitoring service. The — Continue reading »
Kudos to Google
📆 June 6, 2011
My admiration to Google for standing up for what's right. Even in the face of Chinese retaliation, Google has gone public with the revelation that the hacking activity of Gmail accounts had a Chinese connection. The allegations are as of yet uncorroborated, but Google deserves much credit for standing up to China when there's evidence of wrong-doing. We'll see how far Google is willing to go on — Continue reading »
Gawker's Hack, Spammers' Treasure
📆 December 14, 2010
Today, out of curiosity, I downloaded the hacked Gawker files from The Pirate Bay. I'm not sure if I broke any laws by doing that, but I was only interested in checking out their PHP source files. You can learn a lot by looking at production code other than your own. While my intentions were — Continue reading »
Amazon Associates Account Suspension
📆 May 16, 2010
The email came at night, but it wasn't completely unexpected. In a terse missive, Amazon accused me of violating their Terms of Service (TOS) and terminated my account. Reasons given: copying pages and links to other sites and search engines. In other words spamming other sites with specific Amazon links tagged with my id to — Continue reading »
Your Favorite Pet Name
📆 March 25, 2009
A couple of years ago a few sites started collecting answers to a few personal questions. The idea was to strengthen security by integrating a few personal questions to the authentication process. It also would help unlock accounts in case users forgot their passwords. After all the questions were private enough that only the account — Continue reading »
DNS Vulnerability
📆 August 28, 2008
While programming is my main focus at my company, one of my side jobs at work is networking. I have no complaints as I'm curious and interested in the inner workings of computer networks. Our IT department handles most of the networking tasks, but I usually find myself getting involved in setting up connectivity in — Continue reading »
Google Lifeblood
📆 December 13, 2007
Like most people who have a Web site I check my site's ranking on Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) from time to time. It's striking how much of a Website's life depends on Google. That's particularly true with smaller sites whose lifeblood is the traffic Google sends their way. But even bigger sites would — Continue reading »
Give a few Sats