Empty Handed

Google Maps has a cool new feature (well, I’ve only just noticed it) where you can create personal maps with notes and locations, and publish a public URL, or generate a Google Earth KML file.

I’ve created a Fishing Map, with all of the local fisheries I either use or am planning to take a shot at.

As a follow up to this post about my domain being spoofed by spammers, a quick note on what I did about it and the current situation.

Firstly, I investigated just to make sure that they were spoofing the address, and hadn’t in someway accessed my account or the mail servers from my ISP. It certainly didn’t look this way from what I could see through my account settings, but I changed my passwords and all that, just in case. I then wrote to my domain hosts, Nativespace, explaining the situation and asking them to confirm that my account itself hadn’t been compromised and wasn’t being used to actually send the spam. They responded very quickly with some suggestions, including just failing the returned emails (although I wasn’t concerned about these, more on that in a moment), and this:

Secondly, you can look into generating an SPF record at openspf.org While this doesnt guarantee that it will prevent spoofing, it may assist you.

So I did. I won’t go into the details of SPF records here, the site linked above is obviously your best bet for that, other than just to say that I used the excellent wizards to generate records for each of my domains hosted at Nativespace, sent the records by email to support who then did the necessary with them. Excellent service, very quick, friendly and completely lacking the patronizing attitude some support teams seem to exude.

This was back on the 18th Feb. I’ve no idea if it’s made any difference, but the bounced mail from the spoofed spam has dried up now, either way, with the last serious block coming in about 3 or 4 days ago, with only one or two stragglers from that lot arriving today. I kinda expected that they’d eventually stop anyway, so it’s not clear at all if the SPF records make any difference, but they probably don’t do any harm either.

I wasn’t bothered about the bounced mails coming in because I simply set up a filter on my GMail account to label mails to the spoofed address as such and archive them. This way I was able to monitor the situation. At the moment, I have c.7500 mail items labeled ’spoofed’. God only knows what percentage of the totals sent out they represent.

I mainly use GMail as my mail client, and have several addresses directing to that mailbox. The spam filters are pretty good, but you do get the occasional false positive, so I tend to check the spam folder pretty regularly and clear it down each time. This just makes it easier to spot those false positives.

Imagine my surprise on returning home this evening to find an unusually large amount of spam messages had arrived in the spam folder in just a few hours since I checked it last. Most of these are bounced, blocked and otherwise failed messages, like:

• **Message you sent blocked by our bulk email filter**
• Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
• Spam: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
• Warning: could not send message for past 4 hours

etc.

Anyway, jrwi dot net is being spoofed by a spamming fucktard.

Just to clarify, I am NOT responsible for, nor do I allow jrwi dot net to be used to send, bulk email of any sort. If you’ve been spammed from this domain, it has been done without my consent, and you have my apologies.

Hopefully, they’ll get bored with it, or it’ll be blocked by every ISP on the planet, and they’ll move on. Cunts.

I’ve been using Google Talk for a little while now, more or less since it launched. One of the reasons I prefer it over MSN, Yahoo and even Skype is that it’s nice and quiet, by which I mean not many people use it - precisely the reason many dislike it, I suppose. I got really fed up with using MSN (is that what it’s called?) because loads of random people added me to their contacts list the whole time, and then tried to talk to me! Can you believe it!? Also, loads of people who, shall we say, weren’t random had me as contacts, and also tried to talk to me, which I didn’t really like either. Anyway, it got to the point where I would log on, but never make myself visible, like going to the pub and hiding in the corner - actually, a lot like going to the pub and hiding in the corner. Then along came Google Talk to the rescue. Now, the only people on my list are people I really want to communicate with, and a lot of types that I know who cling to their hotmail accounts and refuse to see the @gmail light can’t get me. Hah! I think that’s a pretty good indication of whether I want someone on my IM list, to be honest - if they prefer to stick to the crappy Hotmail web mail or Yahoo or Freeserve or whatever when they could have the GMail web interface, I don’t want to share the web experience with them very much at all, because they are web idiots. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to interact with them in real life, obviously, just that I don’t really want to be chatted at or chain emailed by these types who don’t take the web too seriously, really.

But today, I’ve had a completely random contact request on GTalk. The same address tried to get me to be their friend several times, so it doesn’t seem particularly accidental, and the email address used doesn’t look like it would belong to anybody I’d be likely to know, or, in fact, anybody at all. I’m guessing that this is as a result of Google opening up the GTalk network to non-Google-Mail addresses. The address (27832355627@mxit.co.za) looks like a spammer address, or is certainly of that type. What’s puzzling is what would happen if I added them as a ‘friend’? Spam chat? Does this sort of thing go on on the other, larger and better established networks?

(edit: Of course it does - I’m such a web idiot! And it’s pretty obvious that a spimmer will try and do all the stuff they normally try by spam, just in the chat. Like, oh, yeah, I’m gonna download a file that 27832355627@mxit.co.za sends me. Anyway, it’s obviously a big problem, just Google for spim and see for yourself…)

Curiously, in the same day, I got a weird SMS from The National Lottery - well, the message isn’t weird, it’s the fact that they sent it to me (and probably thousands of others):

Sat LOTTO TRIPLE ROLLOVER jackpot is an est £20 million. Outlets shoud [sic] display their Double Rollover POS until new Triple Rollover POS arrives later this week.

Loads of people have been blogging about these, and they’re pretty cool. There’s a great offer on for Flickr Pro account holders, where you can get 10 free cards. I bought 100 anyway, because they look ace and I’m in love with the idea of calling cards, and, for not much more than 10GBP, what could go wrong (well, actually, they didn’t arrive, but, you know, apart from that?).

Then, I thought, just for a laugh, I’d get the 10 free cards done out in the livery of this blog. I’m not sure what I thought I was actually going to do with them, put them on the notice board of the local Spar? Post them through random doors?

That’s not a bad idea - I’ll mail one of these dinky Empty Handed cards to the first 5 applicants who leave a comment in this post saying why they want one - Leave your email and I’ll get in touch for postal details.