Month: November 2004

  • Log file and Blog comment spam

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    by

    Tom Raftery
    in ,

    I use AwStats to monitor traffic on the tomandpilar.net site. I monitor the traffic regularly and recently started to notice that my site was apparently being linked to by some very strange sounding sites – Online Poker sites and Online Pharmacies! A quick bit of investigation (and a quick word of explanation from FrankP) told…

  • Makelovenotspam – Is Lycos becoming a spammer?

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    by

    Tom Raftery
    in

    The Register have posted a story saying Lycos have launched a screensaver which is designed to utilise the bandwidth of spammers and therefore slow down (but critically not stop as this would be a ddos and therefore illegal) the spammers networks. It is targeted at spam sites (identified by Spamcop) Lycos claims, where the site…

  • Free RSS reader for Mac OS X

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    by

    Tom Raftery
    in

    I use Mac OS X as my main OS (Operating System) on my Powerbook 15″. I also have Windows XP SP2 installed and running simultaneously on the PowerBook (thanks to the magic of Virtual PC) but I only switch to XP when I absolutely have to (to run SQL Server Enterprise Manager, for instance). I…

  • Cracker Targets Ad Servers with IE Exploit

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    by

    Tom Raftery
    in ,

    Falk eSolutions is an Ad Serving company who according to their website “is now the third-largest ad management solution worldwide, serving over 12 billion ad impressions per month”. On 20/11/04 some clever cracker broke into one of their load balancing servers that handles ad deliveries and successfully loaded exploit code on servers serving ads on…

  • Ireland's Revenue Online Service (ROS) and Mac OS X

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    by

    Tom Raftery
    in

    The Irish Revenue Commissioners have an online service called Revenue Online Service (or ROS for short). I tried to sign up for Revenue Online’s service over the last week. However, I failed to get it working because of a problem installing KCrypto (a custom Java application) onto my Mac. The Kcrypto appears to be required…

  • Firefox extensions

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    by

    Tom Raftery
    in

    One of the reasons I like Firefox so much is its extensibility – something annoying you about your browsing experience? Well, if your browser is Firefox, the chances are that someone else has been frustrated by the same issue and written an extension to overcome that it. My current favourite extension is called Adblock. Adblock…

  • Gmail rolls out POP3 support

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    by

    Tom Raftery
    in

    According to numerous reports in the press, Gmail is now going to be available for download using POP3. This is a very useful facility, as it will allow people to access their mail when they are away from an Internet connection by downloading their mail to their favourite mail client – something they have been…

  • Firefox 1.0 review

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    by

    Tom Raftery
    in

    I downloaded the Firefox 1.0 browser this morning and have been using it throughout today. There are very few differences between 1.0 PR and 1.0 but one change which I found straightaway (and loved) is the ability to control how links from other applications (like an RSS Reader) open. You can choose to open them…