I can’t understand the first part of this request, but the second part seems to have to do with floppy disks. I’d tell the guy to boot off his AppleTalk disk and to call back when he had a DOS prompt.
SpamCop.net – Honeypots of doom!
SpamCop.net blocks @mac.com mail
I used to be a major fan of SpamCop. I think they have gotten sloppy these days. They have a method of finding spammers that involves seeding the net with honeypot addresses, and if your mail server sends that address email, of any sort, your server gets blocked. The problem is that some spammers are managing to figure out what these honeypot addresses are, and they use them in the From field on their spam. There starts the problem…
A while back my personal mail server became blocked by SpamCop. When I tracked down the reason, the only thing I could find was bounced spam. I had received spam through my secondary MX, so it bypassed my spam filters and user checks. When it hit my primary mail server, and was addressed to a non-existant user account, it was bounced. Because the From had been forged with a honeypot address, it bounced back to SpamCop. It would appear that SpamCop is not parsing the email sent to honeypot addresses to see whether they are real spam or bounce messages. This means that lots of legitimate mail servers will get blocked by SpamCop, and many administrators will have to disable SpamCop BlackHole services to receive legitimate mail. I’m sure this was the spammer’s intent, to poison the SpamCop well; and they are succeeding because SpamCop isn’t going the extra mile and parsing for bounces.
Today I realized that SpamCop was blocking email from Apple’s @mac.com mail servers. It looks like pretty much all of the @mac.com outgoing mail servers are blocked. Well, that doesn’t work for me. The well is poisoned, and I can’t risk so much as a sip. SpamCop is out of my RBL config.
Pixels for dollars and your hits for free?
Cash pours in for student with $1 million Web idea
If you have an envious streak, you probably shouldn’t read this.
Because chances are, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old student from a small town in England, is cleverer than you. And he is proving it by earning a cool million dollars in four months on the Internet.
Selling porn? Dealing prescription drugs? Nope. All he sells are pixels, the tiny dots on the screen that appear when you call up his home page.
This is one of those ideas that will work just a couple of times before it becomes annoying. Even now, to look at this guy’s home page is to give yourself a headache. Thank the elder gods that this guy didn’t allow animated gifs!!!
Still… It is a little inspiring. I’ve had Tampa Bay Ads sitting on the back-burner for over a year, and this gave me the impetus to change the format of the site. Do I need $1 per pixel? Nah, I’ll settle for two bits a pixel. That should give me enough for a down payment on a 1 bedroom cottage in the San Francisco area…
-Chris