Archives
August 09, 2007
MTNL ISP blacklisted
MTNL is one of the popular broadband internet provider in the city of Mumbai. They provide broadband connection with speeds upto 2Mbps using ADSL technology that uses the existing PSTN line.
I have been using MTNL at home for last 2 years and except for the pathetic customer service and horrible billing issues, I do not have anything to complain.
But that changed recently!!!
Working with some custom php application to detect blacklisted IPs, I realized that most of the IPs assigned to MTNL are blacklisted at SORBS and other popular blacklist providers.
Realizing the seriousness of situation, I emailed the IP administrator of MTNL Triband service at dgmbbmbi@mtnl.net.in but as expect, didn't receive any reply.
I called up the customer service number 1504 to just let them know about the issue. But again, as expected, the lady on the phone had no clue about IP blacklisting. She suggested me to contact MTNL local exchange in my area.
The only solution I see for this problem is to pay extra and get a static IP from MTNL or switch ISP :-)
Posted by manish at 03:16 PM | Comments (0)
November 29, 2006
phpbb antispam
Off late one of the popular phpBB forums that I run was hit by lots of post spam. Everyday there were at least 20 to 25 fake registrations and 5 to 10 posts. Frustrated with cleaning the board every day, I decided to tweak the phpBB forum and install some mods that will prevent spam posts to be made on my forums. Now the forum receives zero spam registrations or posts. Although the board may not be 100% secure from spammers but I have certainly made their life a little difficult.
Here is a breif summary of the mods that I installed.
First thing that I would recommend to do is install the phpBB Anti-Spam ACP mod. This mod will prevent bots from doing automated registrations on your forums by removing fields you want in registration and profile form until users reach certain requirements. This will block many bots but not all of them.
The next mod that you should install is Johanan's Anti-Spam mod. This mod is also to prevent bots from doing an automated registration on your phpBB forums.
The third mod that you should install is a custom CAPTCHA mod for phpBB. The visual confirmation available with phpBB is weak and can easily be bypassed by most of the spam bots. You can read more about How to add a custom CAPTCHA to phpBB2.
The next mod to install is the Dispatched spam protection mod. This phpBB anti spam mod will protect your board from automatically dispatched spam.
These mods will stop pretty much all the spam bots from registering on your phpBB board.
You may also consider installing Links Rejector as an optional mod if you allow guest posts on your forums. Links Rejector will reject all guest posts that contain links.
These mods made the spam posts from 5-10 previously to 0 on my phpBB forums. These antispam mods are not a 100% full proof way of combating phpBB post spam however it will surely help you reduce the spam menace significantly.
Happy posting!
Posted by manish at 09:54 AM | Comments (0)
November 26, 2006
IE 7 worth upgrading to ?
Recently Microsoft decided to include Internet Explorer 7 in essential Windows XP updates. So I decided to upgrade Internet Explorer on my desktop to latest version. IE 7 looks a lot different from IE 6 in terms of skin, organization of all the buttons, menus etc. With IE 7, Microsoft has introduced the much awaited feature of tabbed browsing.
However the most important thing that I like about IE 7 is that it renders my site correctly. I had raised a issue about CSS rendering of IE 6 in the topic and how it failed to display this website correctly. Looks like Microsoft got the CSS/xHTML parsing fixed :-)
The default search goes to MSN.com, however you can install plugins to search via Google or other popular search engines. Overall I think its worth upgrading from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 7.
Posted by manish at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)
June 02, 2006
Blue Frog Shut Down?
We all know that Blue Frog is being targetted with DDOS attack for past many days. However a recent article in Washington Post suggests that Blue Frog may be closed forever.
For those who are not aware, Blue Frog was an innovative way of fighting spam. Blue Frog maintained a list of "do not spam" email list. If a spammer sent out email to any email id in this list, they would be bombared with opt-out emails.
However the list was encrypted. A spammer could submit one email id and see if it exists in the list but could not download the entire list. Recently, though, a spammer based in Russia, through the use of dictionary based attacks, was successful in downloading most of the email ids in that list.
The Spammer community then threatened to spam these email ids or worst, send virus, trojans and other malicious programs via email. After weeks of attack and counter-attack, Blue Frog finally decided to give up and shut shop. What a shame!
Posted by manish at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)