Posted by ljmacphee on March 31, 2008 under things you should know | 
So what happens when a spammer spoofs your email address and you start getting complaints from your not so techy relatives? Or your ‘catch all’ email address has a zillion bounces?
If it is a friend or relative, first have them forward you the email with full headers. Have you been spoofed or have you been hacked? Check the IP address. If you are using gmail, click the little tiny arrow next to ‘Reply’ and select ‘Show Original’. It is usually clearer on other email platforms. You will see several ‘Received: by followed by information. The bottom one is where the email was originally sent from. Are any of them your website IP? If so you need to get on the phone with your hosting company and secure your ( or their ) email server. Make sure your SMTP server requires authentication.
Most likely it did not originate on your server. Most likely it is the IP address from some spammer or some poor soul whose machine has been hacked. You may or may not get useful information by using Arin to find out who the offending IP belongs to. Each IP is a bounce that email went through on its way to the final recipient. Sometimes useful information can be gleaned from doing reverse IP searches on the bounces. Perhaps it left a home IP address from a IP pool but bounced off the work server of the person doing the spamming. So check out each and every one.
More often than not you will find a relative’s IP number whose computer is riddled with viruses, or find nothing useful at all. If it is a friend or relative’s IP number, offer to go clean out their computer. You can find your friends and relatives IP addresses in the header information of emails they have sent to you.
A ‘catch all’ email is one you set up with your hosting company. All emails improperly addressed to your domain end up in the catch all email. This is a useful tool for finding out that a domain of yours is being spoofed. It is not an email address you want downloading to your phone or home computer. It can get busy.
There is little to nothing you can do unless you are very lucky finding the source of the spoofed emails.
More information:
100 email bouncebacks? You’ve been backscattered
Spoofed/Forged email ( Cert.org)
Posted by ljmacphee on March 30, 2008 under blog information, blogging, wordpress |
I have to say this is the easiest of all the Wordpress upgrades I’ve done. Previously I had troubles if I didn’t delete the previous Wordpress install. Not this time.
I upgraded 8 blogs today. I just ftp’d the new files up to the server and everything went painlessly. Database upgrades took mear seconds, all the plugins I have installed work. The automatic update plugin worked flawlessly.
I find I like the new dashboard much more than I thought I would. I played with the release candidates last week and was so so on the new dash. However I find in actual use it is greatly improved.
The new editor alone is worth the upgrade. This one remembers where the line breaks and paragraphs are located.
The new multimedia is not yet ready to replace Coppermine or other galleries of that sort as I hoped but has greatly improved the ease of storage and embedding multimedia into your site.
I think it is a huge improvement over 2.3.x and highly recommend it.
Wordpress 2.5 information
Posted by ljmacphee on March 24, 2008 under cell phone blogging |
You can easily blog to your Blogger account on the go, WordPress needed some work to be usable from my iPhone and Windows Mobile Phone.
To post you can set up Flickr to take emails and photos and post them to your Wordpress or Blogger blog.
You can painlessly blog to Blogger by email.
I set up email notification of all comments and new members to an email I use for nothing but that. This gives me a heads up that there is activity and I’ve found I can approve comments and post comments from my internet enabled smart phones to Blogger or WordPress.
Starbucks will be doling out 2 hours free wifi daily this spring to those with registered Starbucks card. Register yours now and beat the rush. But who wants to hang out in Starbucks all day?
I purchased a data card for my laptop. All the major wireless phone companies have them. The price is about $30-$250, a $30 card works just fine. All you care about is the speed of the network the card is using. Be sure to ask about that when you buy your card. You can get pcmcia or usb cards. The monthly charge is about $70/month.
And just recently I stumbled across iPhone/WM Plugin for WP Blogs. This lets you do all the usual admin chores from your iPhone or WM phone. Install and activate the plugin on your WordPress blogs and your good to go.
Posted by ljmacphee on March 17, 2008 under things you should know |
Many of the topics on the forums I read are questions concerning take down notices, scraping, and copyright. If you want good, reliable information on these topics be sure to visit the ‘Chilling Effects Clearing House’.
Do you know your online rights? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or to stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, this site is for you.
Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we’ve noticed that not everyone feels the same way. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to “chill” legitimate activity. [ read more Chilling effects clearing house ]
Another excellent source of both news and information on copyright is the EFF: Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Don’t rely on information on forums, go to reputable sources, your rights and your responsibilities as a webmaster are too important to not have accurate and current information.