Bits & Pieces - Diane Frank

AO and Spam

I don’t understand SPAM or the virus carrying messages arriving in the Alpha Omega mailboxes on a nearly constant basis. Viruses are, so they say, propagated from the contents of people’s address books. But how many people are really going to have "meals@" or other variants in their address books? I’ve concluded that there is something larger and more sinister at work, where some email addresses have been harvested and stored and are used by viruses in addition to the email addresses they collect from a freshly infected system. Perhaps there is a virus owned database of email addresses sitting out there. In the past few days I’ve been yet again learning more about the web than I’ve wanted to know. For now I think I’ve shut off all the virus attacks and SPAM, without shutting down legitimate messages. (Note added later: I just read a C/NET security article that shows this is exactly what is going on...virus writers are working with SPAM senders. The Virus writers aim to generate "zombie" servers that spam senders can use to broadcast their junk. One particular worm, BOBAX infects a Windows XP server, calls "home" and picks up a SPAM message and a list of email addresses to SPAM. It’s a hard working worm, because it’s also busy trying to infect other machines.

During the course of my "studies" I’ve learned of internet blacklists. One such blacklist is maintained by SORBS. When a server allows or has holes in its system that let viruses or spam disguise their origins, then that server may well be discovered, tested and listed. Once listed, responsible servers, and web hosts may refuse to have traffic with them. This is more information than I wanted to know, but I’ve had to use this kind of knowledge to make our email traffic a little more sanitary.

A recent problem that just turned up was an accelerating number of hits from x-rated and highly dangerous websites. Click on one of these and they can take over your computer. Of course, I must click on them, as they show up in our log files to see if we are being linked to by a responsible organization. I have no idea whether these sites really listed us or not, but it’s really odd to see different domain names from the same URL. This kind of SPAM is called "referrer SPAM", and the motive for it is apparently to get click-throughs from published lists of website statistics. I guess we’ve attracted that kind of attention since I publish site statistics every once in a while.

Sometimes things get really bizarre-

That of course, is a strange title for something in our little pocket of the world, but it happens. We index our site using the PICOSEARCH service. Most people clearly don’t know how to use the service, and enter ill-thought-out requests such as "crossdressing". That term shows up on just about every page of our site, so it’s a little hard to see how one could find out much useful by entering that term. Every so often we get a collection of search reported that strikes me as really odd. Here is what we’ve got right now:

1. girdle 2
2. the bible tells me so 1
3. +ties +skirt 1
4. boys in dresses 1
5. paris hilton 1
6. girls just want to be mean 1
7. levine 1
8. nude men 1
9. toledo 1
10. makeovers 1
11. macarth 1
12. shopping 1
13. ties 1
14. study bible 1
15. bookstore 1
16. sheffield

Numbers 2, 5, 8, 11 and 14 really make me wonder what people were thinking. Number 4 was surely someone looking for something sexy. As I reported a while ago, we’ve had a lot of hits because of the article on adolescent female socialization that provided the basis for the current movie "Mean Girls". There was an article a while back about making skirts out of ties. Levine is the name of a psychiatrist who has a practice in Beachwood, and whose services are listed with us. Toledo and makeovers are sensible inquiries, as I suppose are shopping and bookstore. But Sheffield?

Oh well.