Strangely Perfect

From various complaints online it seems that Trading Planet Ltd and other companies may be back in business (under new names). Also found this very interesting 4 page thread which has investigated these companies and the links between them in some depth. http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r24610419-Credit-Card-Fraud-Unauthorized-Charge-for-39.71-from-the-UK On page 4 is a post from 6th January 2011 which says: [...]

Introduction There’s a well-known adage that says, Don’t believe everything you read in the papers (Point 1) Another, (which is derived from the mantra of the old UK stock market) goes like, An Englishman’s word is his bond (Point 2) Make what you want of them, but many people still go by this, replacing “An [...]

Problem As a follow up to this post, Disabled my blogtrafficexchange.com Plugin, I trawled through some likely plugin candidates for the symptoms mentioned by @Not Kevin.  These are obviously anything related to “web searching” in all it’s guises. Problem Solved The problem plugin is Psychic Search from MaxBlogPress.  In two browsers at least (Chrome & [...]

Introduction I had an interesting referral from an external website early today.  It was, http://kexhoxonxk.iblogger.org/ iblogger.com has a decent WHOIS entry and is USA based.  However, the sub-domain bit is a bit iffy. MyBookFace.net If you follow the link, it’s immediately redirected to http://mybookface.net/ The tagline for this website is: MyBookFace is a friendly social [...]

Atlantic Ocean Floor Profile Following the (as yet unresolved) crash of the Air France airbus on flight AF 447, much has been made about the ocean floor having huge cracks and being very uneven.  Most atlases, online and TV news reports say this and back the statement up with visual imagery of the bathymetry.  See [...]

WordPress User Registration Spam Last year I told how I tackled various sorts of spam hitting the website, in particular, in this post, User Registration Spam.  Even now, my main defence is SABRE, although I don’t use all the options.  This gives me the combination of flexibility, security and openness I require on this website.  [...]

What Brought Down the Air France Jet over the Atlantic? Just my tuppence worth.  The best current info on the subject is Wikipedia which has peer reviewed sifting and not a load of speculative ‘maybes’.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AF_447 Also, check http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/ for good weather, navigation and aircraft info. Prescript Aside from a bomb, which has never [...]

Introduction This is a small investigation into mail lists and scammy companies.  Some companies are fine, but I always go by the adage to judge a man by the company he keeps.  This shows how lists spread far beyond their initial purpose when you sign up for something.  It also shows how the privacy policies [...]

Introduction While fishing around for some chords I came across azchords.com – as you do.  They’ve a shedload of Google ads and I accidentally hit the banner ad while trying to get rid of pesky popups (why do sites still do this now?)  I was taken to the website of someone called Kevin Hoeffer and [...]

Just for a while I’ve closed down the open comments access a bit (but not completely) until the splurge of spam has passed that started last night.  For some reason, Akismet etc missed a lot.  Hopefully, it’ll be back to it’s normal trappy self soon. My sites went slow with all the hits, but as [...]

My Crawling Chaos website refused access to a registration spammer recently.  They had the email address of … email hidden; JavaScript is required This is a first for me for the number of extra full stops in the lead part of the address!  Perhaps it’s part of a new kind of attack – I don’t [...]

Well it’s hard to say, actually.  I run this site on WordPress which dynamically uses a backend database and various plugins.  The thing is that I chop and change the various blocking systems for testing, failures, experiments and even because I like the name!  There a host of reasons. But my website has had millions [...]

Yay! I got an interesting letter through the letterbox in today’s post.  It’s from Domainrenewalgroup.com They have an interesting way of making money.  It appears that they trawl around looking for domains that will expire in a few months, and then send off an “invitation” that look like an invoice under the assumption that the [...]

….That’s what I’ve determined empirically recently.  Matt’s (WordPress prime mover) post here and this article in the Guardian mention the various failings of CAPTCHA. It’s the kind of thing that’s dawned on me progressively and is the reason I don’t use Captcha any more.  I’ve tested it and in the WordPress plugins that use it, [...]