Blizza Blizza

First, a bit of background.

Since 17 November, I’ve received over 150 copies of various Windows viruses, via e-mail, from users at Mount Saint Mary’s University. On 03 December, after 75 copies, I had had enough, and I e-mailed the administrators.

I heard nothing.

I got Ti Cobb back a couple days ago, and after downloading nearly 2000 e-mails that had accumulated since it went in for repair, I found ANOTHER 75 from Mt. St. Mary’s users. That was the proverbial last straw.

I e-mailed the administrators again.

This time I cc’d every single spoofed @msmary.edu e-mail address, telling them to inform their friends that they were probably infected, and to remove my e-mail address from their address books.

That got the attention of the “Network Manager,” who was somewhat less than clueful:

Chris,

I am opening your address just long enough to send this message.
You are experiencing the frustration a lot of people have with being
spammed.

Since you wrote your first message there has NO email traffic to you
from this institution. Your address was blocked from any traffic coming
from our exchange server. [Emphasis added. -cl]

If you need further assistance please call me. I will not be able to
respond via email.

Best regards,
[“Network Manager”]

Note the emphasised sentence: “Your address was blocked from any traffic coming from our exchange server.”

So now legitimate users can’t send me e-mail, but all these Windows viruses, which include their own SMTP engines and don’t use a server to send copies of themselves, are free to continue doing so.

<sarcasm>Gee, that gives me a LOT of faith in the network reliability at Mt. St. Mary’s.</sarcasm>

In the immortal words of The Donald, Network Manager, “You’re Fired!”

Red Forman Dumbass Rating:

…to The Simpsons, which debuted on Fox on 17 December, 1989.

Here’s to many more great seasons, guys!

My mom has been having intermittent problems sending e-mail for, well, ever since we got DSL last January. The problem was something related to SBC’s SMTP server(s), which for some reason would occasionally decide not to accept her authentication from Eudora. Complicating the issue was the fact that SBC has utterly no idea how to set up Eudora to do it properly, and won’t support anything but Outkook over the fone. (All three pages of Eudora info are on the Web site.)

So I wrestled with the problem off and on for about six months, and Mom dealt with it, though she was rather annoyed by the random e-mail outages. It didn’t help matters that my dad, on his ancient work-provided Win95 laptop upstairs, was having no issues whatsoever.

Well, I finally got tired of it and happened to be here to do something about it at the same time. For the record, the solution can be found in these two discussions on DSL Reports’ forums: use one of the legacy ameritech.net SMTP servers, which does authentication based on IP address, not user/pass.

If anyone has a clue why Eudora Pro 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x on Mac OS 9 all failed to work, when Eudora 6 on Win95 and Mac OS X worked fine, please tell SBC, and instruct them to fix their worthless support pages.

IE renders most of the MT interface wonderfully, and — shockingly enough — renders the blog properly. (Actually, I think I knew that. Now if I could just figure out why iCab doesn’t.)

But IE doesn’t work with MT-Blacklist. Specifically, it can’t pass any comments to de-spam to the plugin from the comment interface, probably because IE uses a horrid, broken Javascript implementation. Fortunately, iCab can deal with MT-Blacklist quite nicely, if you can find your way around the scattered (stupid broken CSS in iCab!) interface.

I can’t believe I never noticed this about iCab’s history feature before, and I think something must have changed, because its behaviour now annoys me to no end. The way iCab does its type-ahead/predictive history thing defies explanation, so you’ll have to grab a copy and try it for yourself after using it to browse for a day. The way IE (and Camino, incidentally, and, IIRC, Safari) handle this is about a thousand times more useful.

Boy, I sure love iCab’s tabs and ability to block popups, though. IE certainly fails miserably at providing both those features.

Both of them have pretty atrocious support for putting the window focus back where it was when you leave the window. For example — and this is one of the things I absolutely adore about Camino, though I didn’t even realise it was different until now — when I’m editing a blog entry and I want to copy-n-paste a URL from another tab/window/application into the entry, Camino is smart enough to bring the focus back to the text field where I’m doing my editing when I switch back to the tab/the window/Camino.

Neither iCab nor IE does this (well, OK, IE does it when switching back to IE from another application), which ends up making my editing terribly inefficient. I have to move my right hand off the keyboard, pick up the mouse, click in the text field to bring the focus there, and then move my hand back to the keyboard, where I can continue typing. If I’m pasting in more than one or two URLs, this gets very tiresome.

A general observation: with as much complaining as people do (or did; I haven’t heard this one in a while) about how OS X wastes screen space, I have to say that these thick window borders on OS 9 are really driving me crazy. See, not only am I stuck with the ass-end of the Macintosh browser spectrum, but I’m doing it on an Apple Multiple Scan 15, which works (barely) at 1024x768. I have the browser windows on both IE and iCab expanded to nearly full screen and they’re still too small. And yes, that extra 10-20 pixels I could get from taking away those bloody borders would help me. So would the extra 40-50 pixels of height I could gain if IE’s toolbars could be customised as much as Camino’s. iCab is better in this department, and the built-in Google search is great (though, for the record, I still prefer Camino’s ability to type ‘g [search string]’ in the URL field). I’m stuck relying on a now-kludgy-feeling JavaScript-based bookmark in IE.

A photographer, who apparently feels pretty darn comfortable futzing with electronics, has turned a Dual USB iBook into an “iTablet” (original link). Slashdot, of course, has picked up the story. Interestingly, comments seem to be leaning more toward “Apple should build one of these!”

Penn State University has told its 80,000 students, faculty, and staff to ditch Internet Explorer in favour of alternatives, primarily Firefox and Safari.

Here at CLN headquarters, Camino continues to be the browser of choice for its superior Macintosh experience as compared to Firefox.

And one more nail is put into the coffin of an abomination on the Internet. Hopefully, other major universities will follow suit. This could be the beginning of the end for IE, and to that I say, “Good riddance!”

(From Slashdot)

Ti Cobb arrived in Texas on Thursday morning, so here’s hoping the screen got replaced today and he’ll be back on a DHL truck on Monday.

Meanwhile, I’m stuck on Mac OS 9, which leaves me with two choices for browsers:

iCab

or

Internet Exploder.

I want to like iCab. I really, really do. In fact, I once declared it the best browser for the Classic Mac OS.

Now, I’m not sure what’s happened in the last two years, but iCab can’t render sites worth beans any more. I suspect the Web is slowly but surely migrating to more standards-based design (good!), which is beginning to show off the glaring inadequacies of iCab’s CSS engine (baaaaad!). Movable Type’s back end is hideously difficult to use, and whilst the front page of this site looks decent, the entire blog — along with every other Movable Type installation I’ve visited in the past three days — looks absolutely awful.

Wikipedia, an eminently useful site for reading up on obscure topics when one can’t sleep at 0200 (as per the current situation), is entirely unusable from within iCab.

Please, Alexander, hurry that iCab 3.0 release out the door as soon as you can. A new CSS engine is promised, and the world sorely needs a browser for OS 9 that Doesn’t Suck™.

MSIE isn’t it.

Ti Cobb is headed back to Apple again.

I was typing away on it last night and all of a sudden BOOM! the backlight died.

If you want to simulate what my computing experience is like right now and you have a laptop, turn the brightness on the display all the way down and then try using it.

Expect me to be MIA for the rest of the week.

A group of Australian architects has developed a house made entirely of cardboard, Velcro, wing nuts, and tape.

(From Slashdot)

From BoingBoing comes this gem about MSN’s censorship of hosted blog titles:

MSN Spaces: seven dirty blogs

According to Eudora, I have…

Read only 20 percent of my messages this year. This probably means about 80 percent of my incoming mail is spam.

Received just over 10,000 messages so far this year. Coupled with the above, this means I’ve gotten some 2000 real messages, and about 8000 spams/viruses/other junk. Sadly, that sounds about right.

Sent somewhat more than 1500 messages so far this year.

Kept all sent (non-list) mail and some 6000 incoming messages, for a total of 7631 archived messages this year. Of these, 2703 are not spam, viruses, or other junk. That’s just over one-third.

Replied to 786 of those 2000 real messages. Assuming about half of the messages necessitated no reply in the first place — I subscribe to a few low-volume mailing lists and the like — I’m doing pretty well on getting back to people; you have about an 80 percent chance of getting a reply if you e-mail me.

Received 481 (and counting!) spams in languages (Chinese and Russian) whose alphabets I don’t even understand, much less read. Of these, only 37 have been to an address other than my ATPM address.

Received 1249 spams to addresses at this domain, including Movable Type e-mail notifications of comment spams on this blog. Discounting those 1173 e-mails, that leaves 72. Fifty of these went to two addresses that are fairly heavily distributed. The other 22 went to info@ or sales@, two addresses that were listed on the site until a major revision in June. Interestingly enough, spam to these two addresses stopped completely after July. This proves two things: first, that spammers use scraperbots to great effect, and second, spammers seem to rely on the results of the scraperbots, rather than the success or failure of sending an e-mail, to determine if the address is valid. Mail sent to either address will still go through, but since neither has been listed on the site, the spam has stopped completely. Fascinating!

Most disturbing virus e-mail of the year: one from Commission Junction, to an address given out only for CJ’s internal use. This means someone in that company had a virus infection on a computer that was used to distribute e-mails to their entire client base. Which makes me wonder how safe their other information is.

Microsoft is directly to blame for 1234 e-mails to my ATPM account, 48 to my Reidsrow account, 34 to various accounts at this domain, and 749 to my Binhost account. That’s 2065 e-mails, representing over 60 megabytes of garbage, that could have been prevented if Microsoft knew a hill of beans about security. I don’t have any good way of telling how many unique IPs those e-mails originated from, but I do know this: a handful of individual IPs accounted for at least half of that junk.

E-mail is an incredibly useful tool, but looking at the last 330-odd days’ worth of e-mail really makes me question whether the 80 hours — that’s the equivalent of two full work weeks! — I’ve spent in Eudora this year were worth it.

Spam sucks.

This is mostly for the month of November. I highly doubt I will be lacking for a Shameful Statistic of the Month come 31 December.

I have received 74 copies of various Windows viruses to my ATPM e-mail account in 16 days from a user (or users, though a majority of the e-mails have come from a single IP address) at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland.

That’s nearly five per day.

Stop opening your e-mail, you dipshit. And fix your damn computer already. Your network admins have been notified.

This time in the form of today’s Slashdot Poll.

My vote: “Verbing weirds language,” of course.

Thank you, Bill Watterson.