I hate the tv

This page is effectively a diary right now because I have very very few non-robot visitors. For instance, the MSN Robot has visited this page 711 times this month. Thats about 7x the amount of IE users. They’re probably robots too.

It doesn’t bother me, but spam does. I’ve been getting comment spam from assholes trying to sell pills. I installed SpamKarma2, a plugin to WordPress. Installation was painful, but it’s too early for me to judge the product.

Here you can see a presentation given by Danny O’Brien and Jason Schultz about the EFF.

” Danny O’Brien
Danny O’Brien is the Activism Coordinator for the EFF. His job is to help EFF’s membership in making their voice heard: in government and regulatory circles, in the marketplace, and with the wider public.

Jason Schultz
Jason Schultz is a Staff Attorney specializing in intellectual property and reverse engineering. He currently leads EFF’s Patent Busting Project. Prior to joining EFF, Schultz worked at the law firm of Fish & Richardson P.C., where he spent most of his time invalidating software patents and defending open source developers in law suits. Jason maintains a personal blog at lawgeek.net.”

Broadbandreports / dslreports has a nice utility for scanning your IP address to check for open ports on your computer. Open TCP or UDP ports can be used by an evildoer to crash your machine, propagate a virus, guess your password and log in, etc.

A basic firewall, such as the ones built into practically all routers and OSes today, will fix most of these problems. This test is good to run if you don’t know much about networking or if you, like me, have to do a lot of configuration edits on the router and are not sure if the thing is still secure or not.

If only I knew about this back when I used a smartcard laundromat.  I found nothing on the site that they provided, when I emailed I got this link