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June 27, 2008
AVG 8, Twenga bot and the sharp rise in bandwidth
Bandwidth is not free. It is paid for by someone, somewhere and despite the illusion of unlimited and infinite bandwidth available to us, an illusion fostered by the growth of faster access solutions and mobile connectivity, it can be pretty damn expensive! Website owners ultimately pay for this bandwidth use, through their hosting bill, and broadband users tend to get hit by the cost of it too.Over the last few months we have noticed a sharp increase in our bandwidth use that was not easily explained. It turns out to be coming from the new AVG 8 LinkScanner. When you use AVG 8 and do a search on Google, AVG 8 starts to scan each site on that Google page, before you have even clicked on it! How clever is that?! Very clever, but not very economical! It's a bit like going into a restaurant and find you are being charged for the whole menu, although you have only had a haddock and chips!
And to make matters worse, AVG pretends that this bogus traffic is coming from real user clicks, specifically, it disguises itself as Explorer 6, so webmasters and website owners who traditionally scan their website statistics and log files to measure their websites' performance are being duped into thinking that their websites have become more popular. It is difficult to isolate the AVG traffic, and AVG deliberately makes it so.
Apparently Wikipedia-watch have estimated that LinkScanner traffic now outstrips legitimate traffic to the Wikiepedia website by a factor of 10! Have a think about the implications of that for a moment.
And of course it doesn't stop with AVG. Looking at the statistics for this website, this morning, I noticed that our top visitor this month has been the Twengabot, with 10009 visits to the website. Why Twengabot - a price comparison site - should even visit this site once would be a mystery, as we have no prices mentioned anywhere. But to visit 10,000+ times is just ridiculous. And each visit consumes bandwidth paid for, not by a Twengabot, which also brings us no benefit, but paid for by us.
Probably it is only a matter of time before bandwidth, like water perhaps, becomes chargeable to the user rather than the provider of it. There might well come a time when you pay to visit each website, even in some form of not yet invented micro units.
That might stop the bandwidth leechers dead in their tracks. Currently their business models rely on theft and deception really.
June 24, 2008
Sharp Practice and Hypocrisy from Network Solutions
From The Register
After spending the last six months front-running internet domains, Network Solutions has announced that ICANN should prevent people from front-running internet domains.
In early January, the well-known domain registrar began self-registering domains that web users show interest in. If you searched the NetSol website for a given domain without immediately buying, the company would hold the domain hostage for the next four days. You could still buy the address from Network Solutions, but you couldn't buy it from anyone else.
According to the company, certain people have found a way of monitoring searches on its site. If you show interest in a domain, these mystery front runners are waiting to snap it up, NetSol says, and that self-registering trick prevents them from doing so.
You see, in NetSol's world, front-runners are synonymous with domain tasters - those net miscreants that register hundreds upon hundreds of domains just to test their "marketability". And NetSol insists it would never sell to tasters.
Of course, self-registering domains is also a very good way for NetSol to boost its profits.
Network Solutions can pull this trick because under current ICANN rules, anyone can return a domain within five days without paying a penny. But the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is now considering a non-refundable 20 cent fee for every registration.
This would kill NetSol's front-running scheme. But it would also kill domain tasting. And if others are front-running - which we highly doubt - it would kill that too.
Naturally, NetSol continues to say it's merely interested in preventing anyone else from gaming the system. Yesterday, the company issued a press release announcing that it fully supports ICANN's 20 cent proposal. And the release specifically badmouthed front-running.
The release also said that Network Solutions continues to practice its own front running scheme - but it didn't use those words. It called the scheme "an opt-in domain protection measure that reserves available domains for four day." Fair enough - except the opt-in bit is new. When the company began front-running domains, there's was no opt-in, no opt-out, and no press release telling the world what was going on.
Network Solutions can say whatever it likes. It wanted the extra revenue. ®
June 2, 2008
Explosion at HSNTX1 - Aftermath
Well, we finally have everything back online after the explosion and subsequent fire at HSNTX1. Typically enough, we had just finished migrating 50+ websites to new servers, when the datacentre finally came back online. So if we had done nothing at all, we would be in a similar position to where we are now. But who was to know that?
Explosions in datacentres are pretty rare occurrences. But it is something we will have to bear in mind, having experienced it once. At least our backups were good, and it provided a good test of our systems.
As for The Planet, one of the largest datacenter companies in the US, the disruption for them will last much longer, and the repercussions will be much more serious. The loss of business and damage to reputation will also be tremendous.
Sadly, we were aware of the catastrophe several hours before the Planet kicked into action. Our SMS monitoring system let us know that two servers were down immediately, and logging in to the forums just before midnight we could see that around 100 others were also aware. However, the first statement from thePlanet came several hours later, and it seemed to take them several hours more before a full mobilization occurred. By Sunday morning, almost 4,000 people were logged in clamouring for news.
Personally I won't complain about that delay, since midnight on Saturdays most people have better things to do than to worry about exploding power plants.
Anyway, just glad the drama is over for us at least, till the next time ....
June 1, 2008
Explosion and Fire Incident at HSNTX1
Major incident
May 19, 2008
Online Credit Card payments - new rules
The deadline for PCI Compliance is June 30!
May 2, 2008
We are aware of an issue currently affecting LINX, the largest UK traffic exchange point utilised by the majority of the large ISPs. This is causing widespread disruption to UK Internet traffic, as the majority of UK routes will pass through LINX at some point on their path, even if the ISP does not peer there directly. This is causing periods of packet loss, slow connectivity, and disconnects to hosts.
You could see the sudden drop in traffic from the LINX status page at https://www.linx.net/pubtools/trafficstats.html.
This disruption is likely to be short-lived.
April 28, 2008
Sitellite Pro Version 5 now available
Fantastic new sitellite update available.
April 14, 2008
RIBA db hacked without trace
Tip of the iceberg!
March 28, 2008
ORDB is now configured to return each IP as spam source
From nixCraft Linux Sysadmin Blog
ORDB is now configured to return each IP as spam source
ORDB was a database of open relay email servers, provided until 2006 as a voluntary service to block spam. Now ORDB.org service has been re-activated and it is returning every IP address queried as being on its blacklist. I guess this was done to punish lazy sys admin / mail administrators 
If you or your mail server / gateway / firewall querying relays.ordb.org; please stop it immediately. If you query relays.ordb.org - mail server will rejecting all incoming mails from that server.
Symantec Mail Security for MS-Exchange Server - Spam Filter
Symantec Mail Security for Microsoft Exchange configuration in the list of Anti-spam blacklist servers including relays.ordb.org. Immediately remove the entry.
Remove ORDB.ORG from MS-Exchange Server Spam Filter
In Exchange Server 2003 you can find the feature for blacklist support within the global settings of your organization. Visit MS-Exchange System Manager > Global Settings > Message Delivery Properties -> Connection Filtering tab > Remove relays.ordb.org
Remove Linux / UNIX - Postfix Mail Server - Spam Filter
Open postfix configuration file and remove the following line:
reject_rbl_client relays.ordb.org,
Restart postfix mail server:
# service postfix restart
March 25, 2008
HIE - how to obfuscate - lesson 1!
It is always an education to read reports from the "public service" quangos.
We've just been having a laugh at the HIE (Highlands and Islands Enterprise) annual report from 2006-2007. If you need a lesson in how not to be transparent, then look no further.
Here's the section on expenditure - how the HIE spends your money :
Business Growth and Research --- 29m
Global Connections ---------------- 34.2m
Developing skills and learning ------ 14.1m
Strengthening communities --------- 12.2m
Administration --------------------- 24.5m
Does any of that actually mean anything? Is any of it a cause for worry? Yes, indeed.
Why is the Highlands and Islands Enterprise board spending 34.2 million pounds on global connections? Why is it spending almost a quarter of its budget on administration? Why is it spending any money at all?
Here's another juicy item from the report:
There has been an increase in the liability arising in the Highlands and Islands Enterprise superannuation scheme of £11.8 million as a result of strengthened mortality assumptions and a reduction in the discount rate used in the relevant calculations for this scheme. The liability arising from the various local government pension funds to which the Network contributes increased by £0.5 million."!
To me that sounds like the HIE spent one sixth of its annual budget on funding the pensions of its employees. It increased its spending on pensions by a factor of 3 in one year alone. And that was all down to "strengthened mortality assumptions". Those guys are planning to live to 150!
I suppose after all that is only fair, since the HIE did manage to answer 97% of all phone calls to it within 5 rings! Those guys definitely deserve a big bump in their pensions. In fact, let's give them another big pay rise. It's only taxpayers money, after all!
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