ArchiveOctober 2015

Finally! Spam has a purpose

Author Julie Czerneda posted about some of her writing techniques on Jim C. Hines’ blog today. Julie is one of my favorite authors. She’s a biologist so her science writing flows well for me. Too many folks try to write biology and get little nitpicky details wrong and it can disrupt the whole book for me. I spend way too much time thinking about the actual biology and lose track of...

Weird Lashback listings

I’m seeing some reports from various ESP folks that they’re experiencing an increase in Lashback listings the last day or so. They have contacted and are working with Lashback to identify what might be going on, if anything.
I’ll update once I know more and have permission to share.

Brian Krebs answers questions

Brian Krebs did an AMA on Reddit today answering a bunch of questions people had for him. I suggest taking a browse through his answers. A few quotes stood out for me. Q: Why do you think organizations seem to prefer “learning these lessons the hard way”? It doesn’t seem to be an information gap, as most IT executives say security is important and most individual contributors...

Trawling through the junk folder

As a break from writing unit tests this morning I took a few minutes to go through my Mail.app junk folder, looking for false positives for mail delivered over the past six weeks. We don’t do any connection level rejection here, so any mail sent to me gets delivered somewhere. Anything that looks like malware gets dumped in one folder and never read, anything that scores a ridiculously high...

88 Miles per hour!

A lot of advertisers are really getting into this whole Back to the Future Day thing. A number of companies are compiling emails related to the phenomenon.
MailCharts
Milled
What other ads have folks seen referencing Marty and his trip back?

DMARC News – Gmail p=reject and ARC

DMARC.org announced this morning that Gmail will be moving to publishing a p=reject DMARC record in June of next year, much the same as Yahoo and AOL have. Unlike Yahoo and AOL, Gmail are giving those who will be affected plenty of time to prepare for any issues, and have waited until there are some potential ways to mitigate problems in the development pipeline. The ARC proposal, mentioned in...

Silly Spam

I was cleaning out my inbox over the weekend and found a spam that actually made me laugh. Yes, it is spam advertising the “Official Greed[sic] Card Lottery.” It’s been 20 years since I’ve seen one of those! Live, work and study in the USA The American Dream Within Reach 50,000 people and their families will get a green card Simple registration within 5 minutes Yeah...

Glitchy Google Postmaster tools

A bunch of folks today mentioned they were seeing poor reputation for formerly good reputations on Google Postmaster Tools. I’m seeing a lot of screen shots that look like this one. It looks like something is going on over there that has nothing to do with actual reputation. Could be a reporting bug, could be a filtering problem. I’m not seeing people mention delivery problems, just...

Network Solutions email issues

According to twitter and mailop Network Solutions is having issues with inbound mail, with both TCP level disconnections and 451 deferrals. @annaciamp @netsolcares We're seeing email from our servers to netsol queuing up, consistently since 9:51 am (U.S. Central) — Frank Bulk (@frankbulk) October 14, 2015 Down Detector and other reports suggest it’s been an issue since about 8am...

Ethics in Internet Operations

In early September, I posted about a survey being done by Jan Schaumann regarding how sysadmins viewed their ethical obligations with regard to users. The results of this have now been published by Jan. He’s also shared his talk and slides on the data. Well worth a look through the data. I took a quick run through of his talk and it looked interesting and is definitely going on my to-read...

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