lolacunetix
The Talkback page at my Hungry Hacker Industris website has been getting more and more attention from spammers these days, despite the fact that they can't actually spam anything worthwhile - all it does is make a mess for me to clean up. I'm not sure if the incident below had anything to do with the rather nasty result of an attempt to spam on my server or not, but I like to think I pissed someone off enough that they decided to step it up a notch.
Well, someone decided to be a smartarse this weekend and point a lame-ass rip-off of Nessus at my server (unauthorized, by the way). The almost 1,000 garbage posts this troglodyte left on my talkback page took me a good ten minutes or so to clean up, so I thought I'd make them someone else's problem. I tracked the offending poster back to an NTL (UK ISP) address, which is apparently now owned by Virgin Media. The RIPE whois entry for NTL's netblock is even nice enough to include a webpage which you can report abuse.
So I pasted an explanation and an excerpt of the logs, along with the time and date and the other pertinent information. I figure since I had to clean up the mess an NTL customer made, the least they could do is take a couple of minutes to read and delete my abuse ticket. Heck, maybe they'll do something, and the little smartarse who made the mess will get a nice "knock it the hell off" letter in their mail. That'd be nice.
What strikes me is the "bull in a china shop" mentality of the internet's nefarious evildoers these days. Nessus et al have their place in authorized pentesting, they can cut down on the time it takes to rule out the stupidly obvious (which let's face it, a good portion of security flaws fall into this category, and also "lol" at the companies that just take a Nessus report and put it in a .PDF and call that a pen-test)... it's my opinion though that they don't have any place in actual blackhat hacking - they make such a collossal mess that it's almost painfully obvious that you're trying to get in.
It's like using a C4 breech satchel when what you really need is a lockpick.
Kart not pushk self!
I almost forgot to drop entrecards today! Yep, it's 8:45 and I literally just got done, I spent the entire day playing Team Fortress 2, and during the breaks I worked on re-doing our gaming community's website.
Many moons ago, my wife and I were addicted to an 2D platform-based MMORPG originating from Korea, called "MapleStory". I'm not even going to do them the service of linking to them, because if you're visiting my site and reading what I have to say, then I count you as a friend - and friends don't let friends play MapleStory. Nexon America, despite intermittent periods of trying really really hard, are basically a terrible game provider.
My wife and I have literally spent several thousands of dollars on imaginary shit over the years, and then finally the problem with cheating cost me some very powerful equipment. Basically, the cheaters were crashing channels in order to duplicate items, and under certain circumstances it can cause players to lose items. I lost some, and in the in-game marketplace it would cost me in excess of three hundred dollars to replace them. Nexon were absolutely zero help in getting it back, stating that they had no way of knowing if I'd just given them away and was lying about it.
Discounting the time we spent on this game - 16 hours a day wasn't uncommon through winter when there wasn't too much else to do, after I figured out how to use a controller with MapleStory - there's also the amount of money you can find yourself spending on NX.
The money we'd spent on imaginary items in MapleStory could have gone to any number of better things, so we stopped playing. Lately we've been playing games like TF2, because you buy it once and it doesn't cost you any more. Valve are also quite good at answering email if something doesn't work right. New content for TF2 comes out periodically, despite the fact Valve really doesn't receive any extra compensation for this (though I bet the free weekends and such don't hurt sales any).
Our MapleStory guild grew into quite a tight-knit group of friends, so today I decided to resuscitate the dying website and make it so it was no longer centered around MapleStory. We now have several sections, and I copied a few of my old Maple threads over and started hacking on things like templates and stuff. I'm really starting to learn my way around PHPBB3, which is awesome because it's actually not really that bad as far as "please hack me" software goes.
So yeah, that's what I did all day. :\
EntreCard? kthnx!
EntreCard's a pretty good aid to get your site some traffic to get it started - it's effectiveness is directly proportional to the amount of effort you put into it. I am obsessive about doing it, to me it feels like a waste if I don't drop every single one of my 300 cards...
... and it's paying off! Today, combined with my usual ~250 regular drops that I reciprocate in the hopes of continued traffic (why, I really don't know - it's not like I get anything from PPP to need a realrank) and a few ads on some high-traffic websites, as Friday grinds to a close I'm looking to nudge precariously close to 600 cards dropped on my website.
Six hundred! The first thought through my mind is how the heck am I possibly going to return all those cards? So I've come up with a system of skipping some people - I hope they don't mind, but I don't imagine that the types of people I'm thinking about skipping are going to read this. Anyway, since I don't particularly care about my realrank any more, I want to start refining the quality of my traffic and hopefully start getting some regular readers instead of just regular droppers. So here's the plan.
Step #1: If the user's blog is spammy, regardless of how dedicated of a dropper they are, they go to the back of the line. That is to say, I'll skip them, and continue skipping them, until I run out of higher quality sites and need them back again. By spammy I mean the Forex people, the SEO people, and the people who blog about nothing but blogging for profit. I drop cards to read something interesting as well as improve my traffic - these things aren't interesting to me.
Step #2: If the dropper's blog is stale, to the back of the line. To reiterate, I like to read the sites I drop on as well, and if every time I go to your site I'm looking at the headline of the same article I read two weeks ago, well... you know where I'm going here. I'd rather spend 30 seconds at a well updated webcomic or a YouTube trawling site than hear your hopes for Hillary or Ron Paul for president.
Step #3: If the dropper has media that auto-plays on their website, I'll close the tab immediately. Yes, you are My Chemical Romance's #1 fan, and I can say unequivocally that no one likes them as much as you do so please stop subjecting us to them unless we ask for it (ie, by clicking play). Polite people embed videos that only play when the viewer clicks play.
Step #4: I know I'm skirting the boundaries of political correctness here, but if you know me, you know I'm not afraid to walk that line like a drunken highway motorist. I realize that english is not everyone's primary language, but if Babelfish writes better english than you do, your blog will probably take a back seat for me. All things (specifically, your dropping habits) being equal, I'd rather "reciprodrop" with someone I can understand who has something interesting to say, rather than miss "kekeke hubby give me computer tiem!". Heck, even someone I might disagree with (in case you missed the link, I, in general, don't get along with religious folk) is more interesting than someone I can't understand.
So there you have it, my dropping plan for the coming week. At the end of this post I realised it sounded a little high and mighty (who am I kidding, if there's two words in the english language that describe my online persona, they are "high" and "mighty"), so I went back through and linked to a few of the sites that I consider among the better cards that land in my inbox. Don't take it personally that you weren't there, I just picked them at random as they fit to the point. Or take it personally, and use it as an excuse to try harder, I don't care.
