Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar
The new server works, but I got sidetracked last night. I had to take care of a weird work problem, and I ran out to a bookstore where the girls who work there seem to have this competition to see who can be the nicest, and then I came back home and had a long phone conversation with an old friend I hadn’t talked to in a couple of years. Between all that and trying to make some sense of Steve Gibson’s latest discoveries and trying to figure out what he wants and whether I agree with him, my server just kept chugging along.
I need to make my homebrew spam filter too. I’m thinking I’ll press a 486 into that duty, at least initially. I’m out of good PCs to experiment on. Once I get it working, if it’s slow, I’ll get some parts and build something better to block the onslaught of spam.
Oh, speaking of spam, for those of you who have Web pages… If you obscure certain characters in your e-mail address–sub in the raw ASCII code for the at sign and the period and one or two letters–most spam bots can’t harvest it. I need to do that for my pages. I’ve also found some cool-sounding traps for spam bots, including one that tries to dynamically figure out the spambot’s IP address, then feeds it accounts like abuse@owner.com and postmaster@owner.com. If they work, I’ll most certainly toss them your way.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.