My GMail spam count held steady from last week and stayed at 392 spam emails stopped in the last 30 days.
Comment spam at The OS Quest exploded and closed in at 1,000 but stopped at 976. With a 98% increase in just a week It came close to receiving nearly as much comment spam in the last week as it did since the site was established in November 2006. Trackback spam became a problem and two of them ended up being posted,
Comment Spam to this site jumped 380% with 58 pieces of new comment spam this week to bring the total to 73.
News Summary
A summary of news that didn’t make it into their own posts.
If you use AOL you might want to check your password if it’s over 8 characters. According to the Washington Post AOL allows 16 characters in their account password. But it seems they were only using the first 8 characters and ignoring everything else. The Washington Post article gives the example of someone who thinks they have a good 13 character password except the problem is the first 8 characters are their name. So someone trying to access the account may assume the person used their name and try it. Even though the person tried to make it more secure by making it longer the hacker would get into their account. At least if they said there was an eight character limit people would have known and made their passwords fit the size.
Also in the category of stupid, a big topic this week was the attempt by the AACS to suppress the hex code that can be used to decrypt HD-DVD’s. The AACS sent out a bunch of take down notices to sites that had the number posted. One of the sites was Digg.com which complied. Then the Digg community revolted and did nothing but post the number in hundreds of articles. Digg finally gave up and left the articles up. The AACS says they still intend to pursue people who publish the number. They’ve stopped using the number with new DVD’s and as old systems get updated the key will be revoked. The story made the mainstream press, so now everyone knows the number. Plus, there’s news of a new hack available and this one claims to be unpluggable. Since the encryption has to be self-contained on the DVDs it’s going to be crackable given enough time and resources. All it does is cause problems for the consumer who lays out their money while forcing people who pirate as a business work a little harder but still make their money.
There was a problem with the RSS Feed for this site earlier this morning. There weren’t any posts while it was broken and it’s fixed now so you shouldn’t have a problem if you’re subscribed. If you tried a new subscription you got a 404 Not Found error. Kudos to feedburner for noticing the feed was broken and sending me an email (through an optional free service they provide). It took me awhile to sort out since I didn’t think I had changed anything. But I eventually found my .htaccess file was missing. I had copied it to use at another site, so I thought. But I must have moved it instead. A restore from backup and all was well.
Summary of Week Ending May 5th
Spam Counts
My GMail spam count held steady from last week and stayed at 392 spam emails stopped in the last 30 days.
Comment spam at The OS Quest exploded and closed in at 1,000 but stopped at 976. With a 98% increase in just a week It came close to receiving nearly as much comment spam in the last week as it did since the site was established in November 2006. Trackback spam became a problem and two of them ended up being posted,
Comment Spam to this site jumped 380% with 58 pieces of new comment spam this week to bring the total to 73.
News Summary
A summary of news that didn’t make it into their own posts.
If you use AOL you might want to check your password if it’s over 8 characters. According to the Washington Post AOL allows 16 characters in their account password. But it seems they were only using the first 8 characters and ignoring everything else. The Washington Post article gives the example of someone who thinks they have a good 13 character password except the problem is the first 8 characters are their name. So someone trying to access the account may assume the person used their name and try it. Even though the person tried to make it more secure by making it longer the hacker would get into their account. At least if they said there was an eight character limit people would have known and made their passwords fit the size.
Also in the category of stupid, a big topic this week was the attempt by the AACS to suppress the hex code that can be used to decrypt HD-DVD’s. The AACS sent out a bunch of take down notices to sites that had the number posted. One of the sites was Digg.com which complied. Then the Digg community revolted and did nothing but post the number in hundreds of articles. Digg finally gave up and left the articles up. The AACS says they still intend to pursue people who publish the number. They’ve stopped using the number with new DVD’s and as old systems get updated the key will be revoked. The story made the mainstream press, so now everyone knows the number. Plus, there’s news of a new hack available and this one claims to be unpluggable. Since the encryption has to be self-contained on the DVDs it’s going to be crackable given enough time and resources. All it does is cause problems for the consumer who lays out their money while forcing people who pirate as a business work a little harder but still make their money.
As CNet News.come reports, hacker’s continue to target 3rd party apps. In this case a critical security flaw was found in a Photoshop Plug-in.
Site News
There was a problem with the RSS Feed for this site earlier this morning. There weren’t any posts while it was broken and it’s fixed now so you shouldn’t have a problem if you’re subscribed. If you tried a new subscription you got a 404 Not Found error. Kudos to feedburner for noticing the feed was broken and sending me an email (through an optional free service they provide). It took me awhile to sort out since I didn’t think I had changed anything. But I eventually found my .htaccess file was missing. I had copied it to use at another site, so I thought. But I must have moved it instead. A restore from backup and all was well.
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