3 posts tagged “spam”
Last night a friend noticed that using his domain there were a couple spamhosts floating around on the Internet promoting the usual (porn, cialis and the like). We host(ed) his DNS through everydns.net's free service (which aside from one downtime and this incident has been outstanding over maybe six or eight years). It's a free service, powered by donations.
Here is the run-down
The DNS (Domain Name System) is used to map fancy hostnames to IP addresses, so for example whenever you go to www.google.com, the name servers listed on google.com make sure that you are send to the correct computer so you can do your search.
My client's domain: example.org
The spam host: freejoin.example.org
How did it happen?
Everydns.net treats all domains equal, so when we put ns1 through ns4.everydns.net on the domain as authoritative nameservers, the abuser added freejoin.example.org to his account on everydns.net and added a dozen of hosts "beneath" it to advertise their services.
I am surprised that no one had noticed anything like that before.
Solution
In this case we moved the DNS to another server and that fixed the situation for us.
David Ulevitch, the owner/founder of everydns.net, was notified (2008/05/04) prior to writing this blog post and he let me know that the bug is being fixed.
I joined Digg almost three years ago, I use the website weekly at most, sometimes daily - I just never go there as a news source, I digg stuff when I read about it on some blog and find it generally useful or funny. Recently I got friended by some people who just send me shouts every day to digg their stuff, and you can see how they setup fake accounts, friend me again - and my own contacts. Which is annoying too.
I wish instead of this shitty abusive shout feature, they would allow you to make your network private.
That would be better.
Privacy is lacking big time in web2 anyway.
My Skype experience has been wonderful so far.
Over the past year I called so many friends and have used it for the job - 90% of my calls are free - the rest I actually use my credits for. I also got this cool mailbox and then there are ten other cool things about skype, for example how it works right about everywhere, from every network, unlike some other messangers.
So anyway, keeping in touch is good, important and great - however, I recieved my first spam via Skype just a couple minutes ago.
[13.09.2006 21:27:59] Didi : Did you know you can talk to American Women on Skype by calling +9903936003
[13.09.2006 21:27:59] Didi : It only costs 1 euro per minute. For more information visit www.ifriendnetwork.com
I can already see it coming. Blacklists, whitelists, annoyance. Ridden by spam like networks like ICQ. So make sure you block "Didi".
