taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Spam: eWeek recently published an article entitled ‘Spammers’ New Tactic Upends DNS’ , which notes that:

One .. technique finding favor with spammers involves sending mass mailings in the middle of the night from a domain that has not yet been registered. After the mailings go out, the spammer registers the domain early the next morning.

By doing this, spammers hope to avoid stiff CAN-SPAM fines through minimal exposure and visibility with a given domain. The ruse, they hope, makes them more difficult to find and prosecute.

The scheme, however, has unintended consequences of its own. During the interval between mailing and registration, the SMTP servers on the recipients’ networks attempt Domain Name System look-ups on the nonexistent domain, causing delays and timeouts on the DNS servers and backups in SMTP message queues.

This had me stumped when I read it, since an email from a nonexistent domain is a pretty reliable spamsign (it’s used in the NO_DNS_FOR_FROM rule in SpamAssassin, for example, which hits about 2% of spam), has been a rule in the default ruleset for several years, and there’s no sign of that behaviour in our spam traps.

After some discussion, Suresh Ramasubramanian came up with this explanation of what’s really happening:

Verisign now allows immediate (well, within about 10 minutes) updates of .com/.net zones (also same for .biz) while whois data is still updated once or twice a day. That means if spammer registers (a) new domain he’ll be able to use it immediatly (sic) and it’ll not yet show up in whois (and so not be immediatly identifiable to spam reporting tools) - and spammers are in fact using this “feature” more and more!

That does sound a much more likely explanation, and matches what’s been seen in the traps.

So: WHOIS, not DNS.

Tags: article, dns, domain, eweek, explanation, rule, smtp, spam, spammer, spammers

Hardware: This weblog is jinxed!!

That’s the only explanation I can come up with. The day before yesterday, I blogged about exploding monitors and various halt-and-catch-fire software instructions. Last night, my monitor made a popping noise, emitted a faint burning-plastic smell, and shrank the display into a thin stripe down the middle of the screen.

Great. It’s dead as a doornail — I’m working from Catherine’s iBook for now. Quite a step down from the lovely 21-inch CRT. Argh :(

BTW, needless to say, I wasn’t running any scary apps — not even Freedom: First Resistance — the only possible display-hosing culprits were Firebird, KDE, ExMH or gvim ;)

Tags: day, display, explanation, hardware, monitor, night, noise, smell, software, weblog, yesterday

Tech: Diebold tech support:

‘I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here “looking dumb”.’

Wonderful.

Tags: auditor, diebold, explanation, information, minus, precinct, someone, standing, support, tech

‘It’s the Latency, Stupid!’, a fantastic article explaining why latency is sometimes more important than simple bandwidth.

This was found via Karl Jeacle’s comments on eircom’s DSL, which are very illuminating in themselves – although probably not too interesting for non-Irish folks ;). But the relevant part is the explanation of why they enabled interleaving on eircom’s DSL network (summary: to get more reach, as far as I can see).

Tags: article, bandwidth, dsl, eircom, explanation, latency, network, non, part, stupid

Giraffes smell so bad for the same reason tourists do: to repel parasites.

(Explanation: in Laos, we heard a funny story about a tourist on the bus who noticed that no locals wanted to sit beside him. He got talking to a local kid and asked why this was, and the kid let him in on the secret: the locals reckon tourists stink of insect repellent. And they’re right) (Link)

Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2002 11:04:22 +0100
From: “Tim Chapman” (spam-protected)
To: forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Why giraffes stink

Ananova: Scientists explain why giraffes smell so bad

Researchers say they have evidence that giraffes smell bad to repel parasites.

Scientists at California’s Humboldt State University have found their skin contains a cocktail of antibiotics and repellents.

The team arrived at its conclusion by analysing hair from the neck and back of a zoo giraffe.

They identified several smelly chemicals that work to stunt the growth of fungi and bacteria on skin.

These included indole and 3-methylindole; the same chemical compounds that make faeces smell.

Another compound present - para-cresol - is present in creosote and serves to repel bloodsucking ticks.

Biologist William Wood says rangers and zookeepers have long “noted that giraffes have this overpowering aroma.”

South African vernacular for an old male giraffe is “stink bull.” He suggests the aroma probably plays an important sexual function. He told Nature an overpowering smell would give potential partners a clear signal that an individual is free of fleas.

Story filed: 10:54 Monday 21st October 2002

Tags: aroma, explanation, giraffe, giraffes, kid, reason, skin, smell, story, tourist