oh yeah… this is my blog-birthday. on this day, twelve years ago, i retired from LiveJournal and began my tenure on my own, personal server:
The Last Post on LiveJournal
The First Post on my own server
now would also be a good time to mention the reason behind my blog, on my own server, Bacchus’ First Law Of Internet, which is “Anything worth doing on internet, is worth doing at your own domain, on your own server, which you control.”
there’s this guy who makes music that i really like. he goes by Dominic Robertson, or Ergo Phizmiz, and he’s REALLY prolific: he’s got AT LEAST 40 CD-length albums, plus a whole bunch of soundscape/radio-theatre-like stuff, including a 12 hour 45 minute piece called The Faust Cycle which i haven’t listened to in its entirety because… well, it’s 12 hours long…
he wrote me to say that he is “running this radio station at the moment” at Wolverton FM, and wondered if he could broadcast my CD from 2015, I Breathe At It, which i put up on bandcamp and promptly forgot about… 🤩
i didn’t really forget about it, because i always carry a few copies of the physical CD with me, especially when i’m busking, but i forgot i put it on bandcamp, which is, sort of, the way bandcamp is supposed to work… sort of…
the only thing better than writing music and playing it on the radio yourself, is writing music and having it played on the radio by an artist you respect, because he really likes it… 🤩
originally, the .org TLD was intended for non-profit entities, although it was never enforced, and it has been operated by the Public Interest Registry since 2003.
on november 13, 2019, it was announced that the PIR had agreed to be acquired by Ethos Capital, a for-profit investment group, as their first “investment”.
so, basically, what this means is that the .org TLD, which was originally intended for use by non-profit organisations, is now owned and controlled by a for-profit organisation.
also, i’ve heard that some of the executives for ethos capital are also connected with ICANN, and have sneakily maneuvered around so that ICANN has eliminated the cap restricting the registration fees for domains under the .org TLD, which means that registration costs for .org domains are going to go up, MASSIVELY, in the next couple of years…
because that’s what for-profit organisations do with newly acquired resources…
i mean, they made this “investment”, and now they have to make sure that it pays off for them, otherwise why make the investment in the first place? 😒
i currently own 5 domains under the .org TLD.
i am, at this very moment, determining whether it’s possible for me to register all of them for the maximum of 10 years, all at once, rather than having to do it one at a time… because, one way or the other, i’m going to register them for as long as i can at the current price, rather than waiting to be gouged out of business, later on. 😒
🤬👎‼
i now have three /8 blocks in my email filters.
25.0.0.0/8 in the UK, 53.0.0.0/8 in germany, and 133.0.0.0/8 in japan.
the “standard” email filters, built on “and/or” and “contains/does not contain”, break down when you’re dealing with 16.75 MILLION addresses.
they break down because you can’t just filter on 25. which appears in the middle and end of IP addresses, in message ID numbers, and, occaisionally, in the body of the message.
the result is A LOT of false positives: email which i can’t forward to the correct recipient, because it will get filtered AGAIN…
which is quite annoying. 😒
so, with the help of my friend robert, i built a regular expression to handle it:
\D25\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\D
finds non-digit character followed by “25.”, followed by three repititions of one to three digits, interspersed by periods, followed by another non-digit character.
technically, this regex could be adapted to accomodate any IP address, which means that, theoretically, i have a whole new, easier, and faster method of processing spam. 😈
the next step is to learn how to search for a specific range of digits… 😈
ETA 191127 i discovered that you can’t specify a range of digits with a regex. for that, you need a script, which is too much work. also, i determined that i DON’T need the white space character at the beginning and end of the regular expression, because, sometimes, the IP address is surrounded by parentheses, square brackets, or both.
ETA 191128 i changed it from white space character — \s — to non-digit character — \D — because some IP addresses are surrounded by parentheses or square brackets, but some are surrounded by white space characters. the only thing \D doesn’t capture is an empty string, so the IP address can’t be the first thing in the line of text.
and, even with the \D, this regex, modified to capture 27.16.0.0/12 in china, captures 2.2019.11.27.23.41.02, which is part of the message ID on a LEGITIMATE message. 😖😒😠🤬
this is why i’m rerouting these messages, rather than summarily deleting them, which is my inclination… summarily deleting what i think is spam has come back to bite me in the ass often enough that i don’t do it any longer. 😒
i ordered a bunch of tibetan incense from Dakpa Tamdin, in India, this afternoon. it should be here in a couple months or less… it’s coming from india and i don’t even have the shipping details, yet. it may be sooner, but a couple of months sounds about right. keep an eye out here for further details as they become available.
this morning i added a second /8 block to my email filters.
for those of you wondering what i’m talking about, a /8 block is the largest block of IP addresses allocated by the IANA.
16,777,216 individual IP addresses.
my first filtered /8 block was in japan. my second one was in germany.
and i STILL get spam from japan and from germany. 😒
it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago that spam was something in a monty python skit, and before that, it was a canned meat byproduct.
it’s not even UCE any longer, because most of it is devoted to scams of one kind or another. actual, commercial email is a tiny fraction of the volumes of script-generated spam, these days.
spam times 16,777,216²… which is a number so large my scientific calculator chokes on it… which is to say, it says 2.81474976711e+14 rather than giving me a number i can understand. 😒
no, not Chopp’s, chops… the signature stamps that are traditionally used on chinese artwork.
i got some.
the one on the left says 沙了門多 which is prounounced SHĀ-LE-MÉN-DUŌ which is the closest the guy could get to “SALAMANDIR”.
SHĀ-LE-MÉN-DUŌ means “SAND-UP-DOOR-MANY”, which is, essentially, meaningless. it’s just a name chop.
and i think it’s kind of interesting that the word for “SALAMANDER” is RÓNG…
i made a chop several years ago, that says “CHIGAU” which means “DIFFERENT” or “WRONG”… but it’s backwards.
for the first time in a VERY long time, i booted up my computer, checked my email, and did NOT have at least 10 “bitcoin-porn-scam-spam” messages in my spam folder…
in fact, i had NO “bitcoin-porn-scam-spam” messages in my spam folder… or anywhere else…
there was spam in my spam folder, but no “bitcoin-porn-scam-spam” messages.
maybe this is a good sign.
ETA: not as good a sign as i would have hoped, but on the plus side, i now have blocks on more of uzbekistan, kazakhstan, bangladesh, and south africa than i did before.
oh well… 🤷
just as a reminder, this has been posted at the Hybrid Elephant Contact Us form:
PLEASE NOTE: This contact form is solely for the use of Hybrid Elephant customers who need to get in contact with us. Every message that is sent with this form includes a unique IP address in the header, which identifies the computer from which the message was sent. If you use this form to spam us, all you will accomplish is to put your IP address on the list of IP addresses which are PERMANENTLY BANNED from accessing Hybrid Elephant for any reason. Please DO NOT USE THIS FORM to send us advertisements or solicitations. It WILL NOT WORK! You have been warned!
this morning, i got spam from my response form (big surprise).
the difference, this time, is that the following message was included at the end of the spam:
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This message has been posted via a Contact Us form on your site. Contact forms are publicly accessible and they can be used for posting messages by anyone. We don’t use, hold or archive your e-mail addresses.
yes, contact forms can be used by anyone, but, particularly when an anti-spam message like the one previously posted is present, a concientious user of internet won’t use it unless that person is also a “Hybrid Elephant customers who need to get in contact with us”.
the message that you sent me was definitely NOT because of a need to contact me about something having to do with my business. 😒
and the fact that you say you “don’t use, hold or archive your e-mail addresses” is a moot point, because you ALREADY HAVE used my email address, and the fact that you have already used it means that, very likely, it is stored somewhere on your system, and probably gets backed up with everything else on your computer, which, for all intents and purposes, is “using, holding and archiving”… 🤬
so, the IP address from which this spam was sent is 85.203.22.215, which is part of the 85.203.22.208/28 range, located in monaco.
as of now, 85.203.22.208/28 (16 individual IP addresses) is no longer able to access my domains for any reason whatsoever.
thanks, spammer.
the message also contained references to wexxluxurycars dot com, which also goes on my block list.
thanks, spammer.
the IP address to which that domain name corresponds is 198.46.134.35, which is located in new york. because of the fact that it’s in new york, that IP address goes on my email block list, with today’s date, so that, in case i get an inquiry regarding it at some future point, i can state, unequivocally, that it was added to the list on that date, in case the person inquiring wants me to remove it…
which i will do ONLY if they can convince me that they are no longer associated with spam.
thanks, spammer.
and, of course, nobody is going to be seriously affected by all of this falderal (except, possibly, me), because the message was, doubtlessly, sent by a script that scans for “Contact Us” forms, and dumps meaningless spam into them automatically, without any one person having to do anything other than launch the script, which is why i’ve taken to blocking CIDR ranges outside of north america with no further warning. if people are going to be that careless with their own security, it’s up to people like me to take their security seriously, for them.
thanks, spammer. 🤬
#drumpf is in the midst of impeachment, but it doesn’t appear to be making a whole lot of difference (thus, the mushrooms), but there have been some good things happening.
i have been getting A LOT of incense orders: 13 since the first of october, compared to 5 or fewer per month from january to september. also, i’ve gotten more orders from england and germany, since the first of october, than i have in the entire year previous. i still don’t entirely know what’s happening, but the end result is that i’ve now got more than $4,000 in my hybrid elephant account… which is somewhat startling…
seriously, folks… i’m married to a famous author! this week, she’s staying at a hotel in times square! it’s probably about as close to famous as i’m ever going to be! 😎
so moe decided that she would find a pet sitter and we would go off on our own (which i really appreciate). she chose san diego because she has been there before, and i haven’t, but i realised that san diego is the home of not one, but two outlets of the Village Hat Shop, which is where i bought my red fedora, and it is also home to the naval amphibious base coronado, which is a building shaped like a swastika.
i saw where it was when we were flying in, but i didn’t actually see the building because we were at too shallow an angle, and you pretty much have to be directly overhead to actually see that it’s shaped like a swastika…
so we flew to san diego to go hat shopping. i bought a pork pie made out of paper (a paper pork pie), and exhibited a great deal of self restraint becauuse i really wanted to take home about half the shop.
we actually stayed on coronado island
we stayed in a hotel room that is so “far above our station” that i almost got a nosebleed. 😉
and we flew home the next day, which was sunday.
i went busking yesterday, which was good, despite the fact that we only made about $20 a piece for 2 hours of busking. today i took two packages to the post office to ship out, and went to the dispensary, where i spent it all on weed and weed-related products.
and no w m y jmushrooms have kikckedk in ahd i heeed to be g oijn go ut for a wal,,k oris oemething lll…. 😁