Okay, I've gotten sick of the Anonymous spammers filling up my comments inbox, so for now I am changing the settings to where you have to login with a Google account to post a comment.
If this is a problem for you, I apologize, but I am sick of the spam.
If there is another way of making the comments options more open to non-Google accounts, let me know. Tweet me at @PaulWartenberg or direct email me at my Gmail account (It should be on my About page, check the tab above)
Showing posts with label big brother is swamped with spam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label big brother is swamped with spam. Show all posts
Sunday, August 11, 2019
Saturday, July 27, 2019
Robbie Payton Is a Spambot And Deserves Exile To The Nearest Black Hole
Robbie Payton keeps trying to spam my blog articles. Blogger.com does not provide a clear/clean way to have these bots hunted down like the ducks they are.
Do not click any links on its comments. Do not answer or reply (its comments never relate to the topic at hand anyway). I shall purge it in due time.
Damn these things though.
Monday, July 22, 2019
To the Anonymous Spammers Filling My Comments... AGAIN
I've been getting hit the last three weeks by these comments for outdated posts (especially one from 2016 that I guess is the top Google Search result for a certain Comic Con).
All of the comments follow three patterns.
1) Happily saying "gee I found your fun article" without actually spelling out that article's specific arguments/content.
2) Loving the layout/design of my blog, even though it's a cheap Blogger template using cheaper graphics and borrowed clip art.
3) Offering to provide an important link to another website that likely is a virus-laden sales page for terrible marketing plans.
This is why I have filters up. Even more than trying to block Anonymous commentators who show up to insult me or others (I get one of those for every hundred I get of the spambots).
I'm not trying to block people from making comments, I would like to hear more from some of you. I'm just trying to keep my pages clean and reduce bad traffic.
I just want honest commentary with at least SOME semblance of an online ID to back up your talk.
At least this current wave of spam isn't all Chinese glyphs I can never read like what I get at my librarianship/writers' blog.
All of the comments follow three patterns.
1) Happily saying "gee I found your fun article" without actually spelling out that article's specific arguments/content.
2) Loving the layout/design of my blog, even though it's a cheap Blogger template using cheaper graphics and borrowed clip art.
3) Offering to provide an important link to another website that likely is a virus-laden sales page for terrible marketing plans.
This is why I have filters up. Even more than trying to block Anonymous commentators who show up to insult me or others (I get one of those for every hundred I get of the spambots).
I'm not trying to block people from making comments, I would like to hear more from some of you. I'm just trying to keep my pages clean and reduce bad traffic.
I just want honest commentary with at least SOME semblance of an online ID to back up your talk.
At least this current wave of spam isn't all Chinese glyphs I can never read like what I get at my librarianship/writers' blog.
Saturday, April 12, 2014
Some Tips On Surviving Heartbleed
With the latest news that a particular bug in OpenSSL has pretty much made everyone's passwords to every registration-based website vulnerable, I felt it was necessary to use my computer-training skills to provide some helpful tips to all.
First off: Don't Panic. Heartbleed has been out there for two years, so everyone's pretty much f-cked already. If you're worried about the government or any private corporate entity getting into your emails and personal stuff, it's too late especially since the NSA has been exploiting this bug for all that time, and stressing about it now isn't going to change that. Those cosplay photos of you hanging out at the Furry Con has already been passed around the NSA and Booz Allen offices and openly mocked.
Second: You're Gonna Need To Change Your Passwords and Security Questions to All Affected Services. Which means you gotta change every security detail for your Yahoo!, your Google/Gmail, your Windows, your iTunes, your Blogger pages, your Facebook, your MySpace, your Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Bumblr, your online banking, Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Costco, Sams Club, Fight Club, Wikipedia, TV Tropes, Transformers Wikia, Playboy.com, that strip club on Dale Mabry that offered a good VIP membership deal...
You'll need to make sure the fix/patch for Heartbleed has been verified before you go changing those passwords though.
Third: Come Up With a Decent Password That's Easy To Remember But Difficult For The NSA To Guess. This is always hard to explain to library patrons when they come in asking for help creating their first email accounts (yes, it still happens after 20 years of free Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail services. Not everyone got an email account back in 1998...).
The rules for passwords are pretty simple: letters and numbers and special keystrokes like exclamations, asterisks, parentheses, percent signs, pound signs, and umlat. Hope that's not too confusing...
Okay, let's make it a little easier. The letters (a-z) can be lower case OR Upper Case (A-Z) when you create the password: passwords are Case Sensitive. One or more letters cAn be upPer caSe.
NEVER use a common word out of a dictionary - Esoteric, for example - and especially NEVER use a name associated to yourself - say, Aunt Jessificiantia's middle maiden name Frank. Hackers use social gathering info through other researched resources and they'll know about Aunt Jessificiantia, oh yeah...
Try not to use numbers that relate to yourself personally, such as: Year of birth, year of high school graduation, year of getting married, year of getting divorced, year of getting hacked by the NSA, etc. Last four digits of your Social Security is WAY WRONG do not do that (last four of your SSN tends to get used for other things... oops). A lucky number could work as long as no one else knows how unlucky that lucky number is to you.
The best tricks involve using abbreviations you can remember - nobody's gonna know what WDTSHTM stands for - and then a combination of numbers mixed in. To make it harder, follow off the last number in the password with another smaller (two or three-character) abbreviation.
Oh, and the password is usually a minimum of 8 characters and a maximum of 14, maybe 16 chars.
A decent password is gonna look like this Wdts7htM601Ga. Some sites will insist on throwing in a special keystroke character so Wdts7thM6Ga# is a workable variation.
Fourth: Do NOT Use the Same Password for EVERY Site that requires a password. Yes, it may be simple to remember just the one password, but if someone hacks into your Facebook account they can use the same hack on your online banking records. Mix 'em up. You could try variations of a base password - changing numbers and/or abbreviated letters around, using different keystroke characters, etc. - but make the variation hard to guess. Most sites WILL lock down an account after three failed tries, so don't make the passwords something that's just one character change between each other.
On that note, you can write down the different passwords you're using, but that sheet has GOT to be in a secured location and unavailable for anyone else to look at. Best tip: don't write the password itself down, but write down a memory clue / hint that will make your remember "oooooooooh that's what my password is".
Fifth: Get the VOTE OUT and vote into office candidates sworn to make the NSA answer for their evil hackery. Make the candidates swear on a copy of Orwell's 1984 for good measure.
Now. Don't you feel better?
First off: Don't Panic. Heartbleed has been out there for two years, so everyone's pretty much f-cked already. If you're worried about the government or any private corporate entity getting into your emails and personal stuff, it's too late especially since the NSA has been exploiting this bug for all that time, and stressing about it now isn't going to change that. Those cosplay photos of you hanging out at the Furry Con has already been passed around the NSA and Booz Allen offices and openly mocked.
Second: You're Gonna Need To Change Your Passwords and Security Questions to All Affected Services. Which means you gotta change every security detail for your Yahoo!, your Google/Gmail, your Windows, your iTunes, your Blogger pages, your Facebook, your MySpace, your Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Bumblr, your online banking, Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Costco, Sams Club, Fight Club, Wikipedia, TV Tropes, Transformers Wikia, Playboy.com, that strip club on Dale Mabry that offered a good VIP membership deal...
You'll need to make sure the fix/patch for Heartbleed has been verified before you go changing those passwords though.
Third: Come Up With a Decent Password That's Easy To Remember But Difficult For The NSA To Guess. This is always hard to explain to library patrons when they come in asking for help creating their first email accounts (yes, it still happens after 20 years of free Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail services. Not everyone got an email account back in 1998...).
The rules for passwords are pretty simple: letters and numbers and special keystrokes like exclamations, asterisks, parentheses, percent signs, pound signs, and umlat. Hope that's not too confusing...
Okay, let's make it a little easier. The letters (a-z) can be lower case OR Upper Case (A-Z) when you create the password: passwords are Case Sensitive. One or more letters cAn be upPer caSe.
NEVER use a common word out of a dictionary - Esoteric, for example - and especially NEVER use a name associated to yourself - say, Aunt Jessificiantia's middle maiden name Frank. Hackers use social gathering info through other researched resources and they'll know about Aunt Jessificiantia, oh yeah...
Try not to use numbers that relate to yourself personally, such as: Year of birth, year of high school graduation, year of getting married, year of getting divorced, year of getting hacked by the NSA, etc. Last four digits of your Social Security is WAY WRONG do not do that (last four of your SSN tends to get used for other things... oops). A lucky number could work as long as no one else knows how unlucky that lucky number is to you.
The best tricks involve using abbreviations you can remember - nobody's gonna know what WDTSHTM stands for - and then a combination of numbers mixed in. To make it harder, follow off the last number in the password with another smaller (two or three-character) abbreviation.
Oh, and the password is usually a minimum of 8 characters and a maximum of 14, maybe 16 chars.
A decent password is gonna look like this Wdts7htM601Ga. Some sites will insist on throwing in a special keystroke character so Wdts7thM6Ga# is a workable variation.
Fourth: Do NOT Use the Same Password for EVERY Site that requires a password. Yes, it may be simple to remember just the one password, but if someone hacks into your Facebook account they can use the same hack on your online banking records. Mix 'em up. You could try variations of a base password - changing numbers and/or abbreviated letters around, using different keystroke characters, etc. - but make the variation hard to guess. Most sites WILL lock down an account after three failed tries, so don't make the passwords something that's just one character change between each other.
On that note, you can write down the different passwords you're using, but that sheet has GOT to be in a secured location and unavailable for anyone else to look at. Best tip: don't write the password itself down, but write down a memory clue / hint that will make your remember "oooooooooh that's what my password is".
Fifth: Get the VOTE OUT and vote into office candidates sworn to make the NSA answer for their evil hackery. Make the candidates swear on a copy of Orwell's 1984 for good measure.
Now. Don't you feel better?
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
You Know Booz Allen Hamilton Could Have Hired Me Instead of Snowden, And I Work Cheap
It's true. During my 4-year-long journey through the bowels of Unemployment Purgatory, one of the companies I put in for was Booz Allen Hamilton. They had openings for some basic tech, some writing/editing skills, some research skills. And I sure as hell wouldn't have cost $200k oh okay $112k the amount Snowden was signed for. I could have gone for $79k tops, and I wouldn't have spilled my guts at $79k. If they paid me $40k, then yeah maybe I'd be a little disgruntled, but I can live on $79k...
Even though I'm now gainfully employed, I still get updates from Booz Allen with opening notices. I haven't seen one yet for "Whistleblower" position, I guess it's gotta clear HR first and... okay, I kid. I kid. I... why is that unmarked white van in the parking lot aiming a seemingly empty Pringles can at my wifi router...?
As the debate on what Snowden did continues, I have to 'fess up that in some respects I'm... underwhelmed with the nature of the issue. While the "ZOMG TRAITOR" crowd are screaming treason they can't actually prove specific harm: Snowden and his ally Glenn Greenwald seem to have calculated how to release this info to leave some wriggle room for pleading out to a misdemeanor whenever the trial on his whistleblowing ass begins.
Basically, this is what I'm getting about all this:
1) Snowden proved that some of the people testifying before Congress about our intelligence gathering lied, and someone's head is gonna roll for it.
2) Snowden's choice of Hong Kong/China as a safe haven is about as stupid a place to go than maybe Cuba or Venezuela. China's record on Big Brother behavior is worse than the United States. Snowden, in your next life of whistleblowing, go someplace scenic like, oh, Czech Republic, Sweden, Costa Rica maybe (Costa Rica's got a good human rights record, yeah? yeah...?).
3) The real issues are being ignored: our entire intelligence gathering system is bloated, under-managed, primed for abuse.
While there's no evidence of serious abuse under Obama's tenure, you can't always trust the guys in charge whenever a new executive rolls into the West Wing. There are far too many people with the power to classify documents as Secret: hiding way too much information that would otherwise give us transparency into government functions.
Instead of hiring into our government to have some bureaucratic means of accountability, our intelligence gathering was farmed out to private vendors who don't answer to a lot of oversight.
The NSA gathers all this data but has no manpower to evaluate it: that would normally be the CIA, but there's still a lot of bureaucratic in-fighting over who does what and having third-party vendors handle all that data brings in too many meddlers.
Our FISA court is entirely one-sided: only the government's argument for wiretap warrants are given, there is NO ONE arguing against the need for a warrant - which is probably one reason why the FISA court rarely refuses a warrant request.
As it stands right now, the best we can hope for is a serious honest dialogue about our intelligence gathering, its impact on our Fourth Amendment right to not have some tech geek snicker at our DVD purchases, and honest reform to make the FISA system more balanced and more accountable.
...But with this Congress, I'm willing to bet we'll just get more "Blame Obama" investigations out of the House and dithering from a Senate that doesn't want to get blamed for "weakening America's security". /sigh
Even though I'm now gainfully employed, I still get updates from Booz Allen with opening notices. I haven't seen one yet for "Whistleblower" position, I guess it's gotta clear HR first and... okay, I kid. I kid. I... why is that unmarked white van in the parking lot aiming a seemingly empty Pringles can at my wifi router...?
As the debate on what Snowden did continues, I have to 'fess up that in some respects I'm... underwhelmed with the nature of the issue. While the "ZOMG TRAITOR" crowd are screaming treason they can't actually prove specific harm: Snowden and his ally Glenn Greenwald seem to have calculated how to release this info to leave some wriggle room for pleading out to a misdemeanor whenever the trial on his whistleblowing ass begins.
Basically, this is what I'm getting about all this:
1) Snowden proved that some of the people testifying before Congress about our intelligence gathering lied, and someone's head is gonna roll for it.
2) Snowden's choice of Hong Kong/China as a safe haven is about as stupid a place to go than maybe Cuba or Venezuela. China's record on Big Brother behavior is worse than the United States. Snowden, in your next life of whistleblowing, go someplace scenic like, oh, Czech Republic, Sweden, Costa Rica maybe (Costa Rica's got a good human rights record, yeah? yeah...?).
3) The real issues are being ignored: our entire intelligence gathering system is bloated, under-managed, primed for abuse.
While there's no evidence of serious abuse under Obama's tenure, you can't always trust the guys in charge whenever a new executive rolls into the West Wing. There are far too many people with the power to classify documents as Secret: hiding way too much information that would otherwise give us transparency into government functions.
Instead of hiring into our government to have some bureaucratic means of accountability, our intelligence gathering was farmed out to private vendors who don't answer to a lot of oversight.
The NSA gathers all this data but has no manpower to evaluate it: that would normally be the CIA, but there's still a lot of bureaucratic in-fighting over who does what and having third-party vendors handle all that data brings in too many meddlers.
Our FISA court is entirely one-sided: only the government's argument for wiretap warrants are given, there is NO ONE arguing against the need for a warrant - which is probably one reason why the FISA court rarely refuses a warrant request.
As it stands right now, the best we can hope for is a serious honest dialogue about our intelligence gathering, its impact on our Fourth Amendment right to not have some tech geek snicker at our DVD purchases, and honest reform to make the FISA system more balanced and more accountable.
...But with this Congress, I'm willing to bet we'll just get more "Blame Obama" investigations out of the House and dithering from a Senate that doesn't want to get blamed for "weakening America's security". /sigh
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