The Hypocrisy Weblog

According to swedish IT-news agency “IDG“, a third of the broadband giant Telia Sonera’s customers email-services are down since yesterday. However, reports speaks of trouble since last thursday.

I don’t want to be a “I told you so”-kind of person, but if your email is truly important for you – then spend 10 euros a year on a commercial service at an email-provider of your choice.

Not only do you get independent of your broadband company, you also get to keep your email-address if you ever switch providers of your broadband.

A new trend within organized crime is “pump and dump”-techniques for low-rated stock. This behaviour is about to surpass the regular porn and viagra spam-mails we all get in our inboxes.

Pump and dump basically works in this way; A spammer finds a low rated stock and buys up a large volume of stock. Then he sends out spam-mails about this company’s stock, saying that it is the next great thing and when more and more people start to buy this stock, the price per stock increases (naturally) and the spammer can sell off his shares with a good profit.

It is understandable that criminals are using this technique, as it is a low risk and very profitable area of doing business for them. However, this is a plague for us server-administrators and end-users out there, who gets our inboxes clogged up with this crap. I have noticed that the emails that has the subject in the topic of this post; “Hi, it’s *insert name here*” seem to be much harder for Spam Assassin to filter out than even some picture spam that is floating around.

Woe humanity – what a sad day; Spammers are learning that our bayes-filters…

“Fonero” – what the hell is that?! Yes, if you haven’t heard about this term before you might be a bit confused, but fear not. “Fon” is a spanish-based award-winning wifi-community where you can get free or cheap wifi-access (meaning that you make money on your own FON access-point) wherever there might be a Fon wifi-router around. The Fon “what-is” webpage sums this up pretty well;

“FON is the largest WiFi community in the world. Our members share their wireless Internet access at home and, in return, enjoy free WiFi wherever they find another Fonero’s Access Point.”

Watch the above video for a short run-through on what FON is all about (I am sooooo sorry for the South Park ripoff though )

Now you might think to yourself: -”Aren’t there any security concerns with sharing my wifi with others?!” My answer to this is… no. This text from the FON webpage sums it up pretty well for you:

“La Fonera offers you two wireless network signals (SSIDs), a private and a public one. The private signal is encrypted and offers you complete privacy.

The public signal will be accessible to Foneros only. This signal is the one that turns your broadband connection into a FON Access Point.

Furthermore, all Foneros connecting to the public WiFi signal within the FON Community are registered users. They need to identify themselves by a username and password.

Running an Access Point with La Fonera is not only secure but also easy to control. You can choose the amount of bandwidth you want to share.”

On top of this you can limit the speed allocated to the users on your FON SSID.

In essence; Martin Varsavsky, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of FON, has struck gold when it comes to having and going through with a brilliant idea! He also managed to get funds and support from both Google and Skype, which speaks well for the future of the FON-network. A note in this context is that Google helps FON out with the technical infrastructure.

My personal experience with FON is that it is pretty easy to set up. If you have a DSL-modem, Internet access directly from your ISP through a TP-cable (twisted pair) or through cable-modem it is no sweat to get it to run. The Fon access-point will then get it’s IP-address automatically (via DHCP) from the source it is connected to through it’s Internet-port and then the rest of the information how to get rolling is stated in the information packed with your router-package. The Fon access-point even works in a NAT if you run this at your office / home, though this might mean that you have to go into the access-point and edit a couple of settings regarding which network segment the access-point is in etc.

I really didn’t have any problems besides a bug in my Intel wifi-card sitting in my laptop related to the card’s energy-saving mode. (This isn’t fixed even with the latest drivers even if you said it would be, shame on you Intel.)

Apart from the mishap mentioned above, my first week being a Fonero has gone without a glitch. The access-point I got from FON works well, I can utilize my entire allocated bandwidth from my ISP and the access-point seem to be able to handle high bandwidth and durable datastreams. All protocols work fine, protocols demanding low latency such as server-management via SSH works as good as it would through my TP cable-based connection.

Another important aspect of joining a service is the support you get if something goes wrong, and I can say that the support at FON are knowledgeable and friendly, so if you ever run into a problem you can count on getting help from them.

Do you find all of this interesting?! Then don’t hesitate and join the Fonera network to either get free wifi-access wherever you are (Linus), or make a buck on sharing your Internet connection with the world (Bill)!!! (I am a “Linus”)

Take care everyone!!!

The co-founders of Dreamhost, Josh&Dallas, gets interviewed by the ISPcon-moderator Joey deVilla, where Dallas&Josh talks about Dreamhost’s brilliant affiliate program, and how it gives them revenue despite their crazy offers and high affiliate payout.

A personal reflection on this is how friendly and down to earth they both seem, it is such a relief to see a bunch of “caring geeks” (yeah yeah, I know… ) doing what they love, and making money out of providing the Internet community with such a great service!

The Registry writes:

“Level 3, the supposedly secure back bone provider, has lost all services at its Braham Street data centre thanks to a robbery.

The company refused to speak to the Register this morning but many of its customers have been in touch.

According to Level 3 customers thieves got into the building on Braham Street, E1, and stole core router cards.

An email sent by Level 3 to its customers said only: “There was a security breach in our Braham St gateway early this morning. A number of service affecting cards were removed without authority from live equipment. This has resulted in the loss of IP and voice services to a number of customers at Braham St. We are currently attempting to restore service as quickly as possible. We will issue further updates as information becomes available.”

We were told no spokesperson was available or likely to be available.

Other technology companies hit by the downtime include easyspace.com.

The theft has raised fears that data centres and large IT departments in the City of London could be the target of an organised gang – last month Easynet’s centre on nearby Brick Lane suffered a similar robbery.

In other news BT Broadband suffered a major failure last night.

A spokesman for BT told the Reg: “About 100,000 BT Retail customers lost access late last night but normal service has now been restored. There was an authentication problem with our servers and it was not related to events at Level 3.”"

The above is a warning sign to all of you whom is looking for the cheapest deal possible. When you pay a little bit extra you not only pay for better network accessibility, but you also pay for physical security at the datacenter where your equipment is standing.

It is most unfortunate if thieves start to target datacenters, as this will bring the costs of hosting and co-location up, as well as it will bring uncertainty for us customers of these datacenters.

One of my sites, located at Easyspace, was down during a long night because of a said power-failure, though this article “Mystery surrounds Easynet ‘robbery’” and the attached customer letter really makes me wonder. I know that Easyspace and Easynet aren’t the same company(?), but I can’t help but put two and two together. Perhaps I’m conspiracy-minded, but it is a very fitting co-incident…

Perhaps the problems at Easyspace was linked to the issues with Easynet, I am not sure. But what is serious is that customers were in fact lied to regarding the status of their services. I can understand the “cover-up” from Easynet’s view point, but they will only lose in the long term by hiding the status of their organization’s services.

From the Wordpress blog:

“It’s new release time. The latest in our venerable 2.0 series, which now counts over 1.2 million downloads, is available for download immediately, and we suggest everyone upgrade as this includes security fixes. We’re breaking the tradition of naming releases after jazz musicians to congratulate Ryan Boren on his new son (and first WP baby) Ronan.”

There are a number of changes / fixes to this spectacular  publishing software, and the most important ones are listed here.

Personally I consider the security fix to wp-db backup to be the most important, but also changes such as plugins are sorted by plugin name, instead of filename and that the authors dropdown is now sorted by display_name handy as well. (Not to mention that “make_clickable()” no longer adds links within links)

Speaking about wordpress-hacks; I’m about to install a tag-cloud plugin, anyone have experience of this? Aka; You have installed such a plugin with good results?

Every user of vbportal (vBulletin add-on) should check this thread over at The Admin Zone! Apparently the software contains security holes which makes it possible for an outsider to edit the content of a site running vbportal as well as editing the apache-configuration.

The “f” in http://us.f348.mail.yahoo.com stands for “farm”, as in which server-farm your mail-account with Yahoo! Mail is based on.

The staff behind Yahoo! Mail made a post on their blog, which they gave the entertaining name “We’ve parked your Mail account next to the tractor“.

An interesting thing that the staff write in this blog-post is:

“But we regularly move accounts from farm to farm to balance the load on our servers. So there’s no guarantee your account will be on any specific farm for any amount of time.”

I know Yahoo! has immense traffic and a gigantic datastorage over at their end, but why not do what Google has done and only point to “mail.google.com”, or in Yahoo!’s case: “mail.yahoo.com”?! This would make such questions never pop up in their customers, aka their users’ minds.

Speaking about Yahoo! Mail; The beta of their webmail-service is a nice, yet a bit heavy on the local computer, but it does have more features making it closer to a “real” email-client than what their biggest competitor Google Mail.

Though, one of the major downsides of Yahoo! Mail is their advertisements. It takes up way too much of the usable space. I can’t wait, or at least I hope this day comes, when Yahoo! ditches their banner advertisements in their webmail-service and implements context-based text-ads.

Hacker group Hacktivismo has released a secure instant messenger client known as “ScatterChat”, which encrypts all conversations and on top of that tunnels all transfers over the onion router service “Tor“.

Hacktivism says:

“ScatterChat is a HACKTIVIST WEAPON designed to allow non-technical human rights activists and political dissidents to communicate securely and anonymously while operating in hostile territory. It is also useful in corporate settings, or in other situations where privacy is desired.”

ScatterChat is built around the open source instant messenger program Gaim and can be downloaded here.

According to Swedish IT-news site IDG.se, movie company Universal Pictures is
about to launch a download service for movies in Sweden. This is apparently the second of it’s kind in the world and no details are known so far, so it remains to be seen if it will be a serious option to use for consumers and a competitor to the Peer to Peer networks that offer free downloads for a small risk and little effort for the end consumer.