Chovy's Blog - Humor, Rants, Internet

Who Do You Let Filter YOUR Spam?

My apologies for the fear mongering headline....(but I wanted you to think about this).

Ok, so my web host started restricting everybody to 1 database user account per database. Here's the problem with that:

(in response to another user complaining about having write all the user/pass combos down).

yup. major !@#$ insecure writing this down. Here's what everybody will do:

list of names:
username1/password1
username2/password2
username3/password3
username4/password4
username1/password5
username100/password100

Ok. I can't commit a list of 100 username and password combos to memory. so what do I do?

I write them down....wait, nope. I can't access that unless I'm at home.

So here's what I do:

I save it in Notepad and ftp it on my web server as plain text, or in My online "notepad" my email service provides, or as an email in my "saves" folder.

Now at least I can get to it, but then again, so can everybody else who reads my email. (if you don't think this is happening, do it again...wtf do you think a spam filter does? - it reads your email. WHO is filtering my spam?)

I'd be surprised if this post makes it past the 5 minute deletion time :) (referring to hosting provider perceived deletion of posts - may just be the search sucks. I can never find any of my threads).

Once again, the case can be made to ask the question:
"Who do you let filter YOUR spam?"

1) YourISP, Co
2) TheirISP, Co
3) MyISP, Co.

If you answered yes to one of the above, then face it. "THEY" are reading your email.

SO what...It's a commonly known fact that email isn't secure. FINE - this is absolutely true. But does everybdoy know that? I do NOT like writing down passwords, however because nobody will come to agreement on an authentication standard in this area, or it's too difficult or costly to implement in legacy systems, we as the human species will have to continue to jot down these numbers which are overloading our short-term memory.

THIS is waht I REALLY Hate:
Choose password:
(Usually something like "@BUck!off&!")

Here's the error message I get:

"Sorry! It's not valid, we don't like those "funny characters". Please use something simple and guessable like "abcdefgh" (but please make it 8 characters so the people trying to crack into your account will know when to break out of the loop...if you think that's dumb. please include up to TWO digits of your choosing! Yes that's right (but they can only be between 0-9). Remember, we'll be crunching these 8 million per second on our hopped up version of Jack the Ripper. So it DOES make a difference, at least to them!"

--- your friendly neighborhood Cr4k3rH3ad

ps - we'll continue to work on your password while you're asleep, or simply read your list you emailed to yourself (yeah, we saw that too).

I went off on a tangent with the spam filtering conpiracy thing (this just occrured to me while I was thinking about automated filtering). It's completely possible, however. GMail anyone? - it IS a great service, and out of the spam filtering I tested, got the best rating among the two free email services I tested. But when you find out they were reading your email and buidling a profile on you, don't come cryin' to me baby ;-)

You've been forewarned, your ignorance is their gain.

It's difficult to be anonymous online :-)

IVR Sucks - Voice Menu Navigation

I've been writing down techniques for getting through voice menus, otherwise known as IVR (Interactive Voice Recognition).

Here's a great IVR Cheat Sheet!

It's updated, and I've even added Home Depot's hotline :-D

Fix Indentation and Tabs in VIM

Thanks to the folks in #vim on freenode, here's a quick tutorial on how to fix the indentation and tabs in an xml file from within VIM...

First find out what your current settings are by typing:

:filetype

Should return something like "filetype detection:ON plugin:OFF indent:OFF"

1) :set filetype=xml
2) :filetype indent on
3) :e
4) gg=G

Basically what this is doing is setting the filetype to xml (so it can pickup the XML indenting rules (see :e $VIMRUNTIME/indent for a list of available languages)

Then turn on indent, then reload it (:e).

The last step is 'gg=G' which will acutally retab the entire file (gg is line 1, and G is last line).

You can find more info by reading vim help files:

:he gg
:he =
:he G
:he :filetype

Note: Most commands in vim are run with by typing ":command, you can find help by typing ":help command" or simply ":he cmd". HOWEVER, the main command to retab "gg=G" is NOT preceeded by a ":".

Managing Clients with Linux

On my hosting provider account, I want to seperate each client from the rest of my web sites.

Since I can create shell users, I can manage this seperation using groups:

myusername (I'm the "admin") Ok, not REALLY an admin, but for this purpose I am.

I have two clients:

client1 and client2

I also have about 15 other web sites I run (which I don't want my clients to have read/write access to).

/home/myusername/domain1.com
/home/myusername/domain2.com
/home/myusername/domainN.com
/home/myusername/client1.com
/home/myusername/client2.com

So, what I did was create two groups:

Syntax: user:group
client1:client1
client2:client2

And then I add myself to both groups (client1 and client2).

Then I set the umask for each client to 002 (~/.bash_profile or ~/.bashrc).
I also use 'newgrp client1' command for each client (in this case 'client1'). This will make the default file ownership client1.client1 and permission 664. (because I'm the group, I can also read/write).

so then I symlink their domain to their home directory:

/home/client1/client1.com -> /home/myusername/client1.com
And type "chgrp -R client1.client1" if files already exist.
also: "find . type -f chmod 664 {} \;" and "find . type -d chmod 775 {} \;" inside their domain directory so both of us can read/write to it.

Then I change my own home directory to drwxr-x--x so they can't read my stuff (I also change my home group to myusername.myusername.

Here's a nice little tutorial on linux administration.

Dreamhost Review - Day 25

Only one user per database??!!

Why is it that we can no longer use the same database user on multiple databases?

Thorn in my side I tell ya!!

I create one admin, and then add under privileged db users for each app that needs it's own database.

However, i can still access them all from my admin db user.

Seems dreamhost suddenly decided NOT to allow this anymore.

Happy 30th Birthday Microsoft

Dave Child over at ILoveJackDaniels has a post entitled
Happy 30th Birthday Microsoft.

My sentiments exactly. Were it not for Windows 3.11 and trumpet winsock, I never would've gotten online. After the bluescreens of death from windows 95, and Wierd Al Yankovik's "Boot Me Up" paradoy song, I started realizing MS had it's drawbacks.

Pretty much since my career start in 1994 I've been an open source fan, it allowed me to buy hosting for $30/month for 2 megs with shell access using Linux+Apache.

Microsoft is a necessary force. It drives innovation. It's just most of the innovating is not being done by them :)

United Airlines Voice Menu: Getting an Agent

Keep hitting *, 0, # repetitively :-) eventually the guy gives up and transfers you to an agent.