Spammers annoy me... we're being targetted by a couple of new spam engines, one in Russia and one in Brazil The pink names are the ones caught in the spam trap, the ones with cross throughs are the ones that escaped the filter and had to be manually caught and banned by the staff team today We all have better things to do with our lives
just curious (as i know nothing of the more intimate side of the computer matrix): how can you tell which countries bots come from?
Hosting control panels all have a program included (in CPanel it's called Awstats) that gives you a lot of information about your visitors. Country is determined by IP address. One of my domains looks like this: United States us 160 391 3.43 MB China cn 13 13 7.18 KB Great Britain gb 8 8 2.56 KB Russian Federation ru 7 7 1.73 KB Seychelles sc 7 7 2.56 KB Sweden se 3 3 579 Bytes India in 1 1 0 Ghana gh 1 1 0 Netherlands nl 1 1 193 Bytes Poland pl 1 1 193 Bytes Turkey tr 1 1 193 Bytes Ireland ie 1 1 193 Bytes Greece gr 1 1 195 Bytes Others 0 0 0
In this context its a packet of code that mimics the actions of a human signing up to a forum... having done so it then either posts spam, or more commonly the account details are sold on the dark web to other spammers or scammers (or at least they would be if we didn't immediately shut them down.). to give some idea of scale the spam filter has caught 4.5 thousand such accounts in the last year while another 600 or so have been banned manually A spam engine is a program that sits on a server and spits out bots... while a spam farm is a server farm full of engines... the largest two in the world are one in Vietnam just south of Hanoi and one in Ukraine near Kyiv (that ones currently off line due to the war). There are of course many others, the two that targeted us last week one was Russian and the other Brazilian It is worth mentioning that not ever bot is a spam or malicious bot - if you look at the members online thing and it tells you that we have x members, y guests and z bots... most of those bots are harmless webcrawlers from search engines and the like, indexing content (theres also lots of other types of bot which mostly aren't relevant here) for those wanting to know more this is an interesting report https://assets.barracuda.com/assets/docs/dms/Bot_Attacks_report_vol1_EN.pdf There are multiple ways but the two most obvious are a) from the ip address - not infallible since many spambots use proxy servers or VPNs to pretend to be where they are not, and b) the email address associated with sign up - again not infallible since many webmails are available that can be accessed from anywhere... in ref of the Brazilian spambots they were associated with domains in Brazilian Portuguese and the ones not using VPNs were coming from IP addresses near San Paulo. The Russian one was a fairly amateur affair using a domain known to be associated with Russian spam, .ru email addresses and all the bots were associated with a single ip address also in Russia There's also spam research sites and forums dedicated to forum admins that have sections containing useful on what different people have encountered lately and where it probably came from
I remember Wrey talking about one of those admin forums as a collection of the worst power-trippers he'd ever met.
some of them definitely are... i don't spent much time on discussion with them - it can turn into cock measuring real quick. Like wrey I tend to only use them for spam type discussions and also to lurk and learn stuff. For XF related issues the XF's own forum is pretty good and remarkable trouble free
Many of the on-line technical support chat "agents" for legitimate (purportedly) companies are bots. Mostly they only function as filters, trying to figure out where to direct inquiries or (more often, IMHO) doing there best to ensure that the customer never gets to bother a live person.
Dammit, I just had to install Adobe Acrobat reader (again) because one of my employers simplified* things. *simplified, really, except for I had to re-install something that I thought was dead software. So fucking sick of needing to keep 4-6 different programs on my devices that all do the exact same thing except for comply to individual X's preferences. Spoiler Yes, I know that monopolies are bad, but imagine if you couldn't make phone calls outside your Friends&Family plan...
I wanted to put some air in my tire today. Air pumps are typically free. They get you to the station where you lose money to the gas pumps. Sometimes they cost a quarter just to keep kids from messing with them. This one cost $2. I guess I'm old fashioned, but that's just nuts. It even had a credit card swipe on it. I miss the old days.
Yeah...sometimes if you ask the counter though, they just turn it on. The last two I did were like that. Also,I have a Costco membership, where it's ties into the membership. Hell if I'm paying 2 dollars for air.
In the uk they are usually coin operated and £1 . I kinda get it you’re paying for the power to compress the air not the air itself course we have a compressor at home and one at work so I only use garage air in an emergency
I haven't seen a free air pump in years, but any kind of auto maintenance in RI is a license to print money.
There was a bicycle shop in my old neighborhood that charged a buck to let you use the manual pump to fill up your bike tires. Did that once and never went back.
Speaking of garages, it annoys me that the only 24-7 shops we have in this country are (outside of London), garages and the occasional Co-op, and they're all massively overpriced. Oh for want of a 7-11 or Family Mart (I'm sure Lawsons is just as good, but I've never been in one).
In Britain is a garage (pronounced like carriage - garriage I think?) the same thing as a gas station (petrol station) or convenience store?
Its a gas station generally with a convenience store bolted on sometimes it can mean a mechanics shop as in’ my cars in the garage to get fixed’ or it can be a garage like Americans mean.. a building attached or near your house where you keep your car
I switched my gas business to the Marathon station because they still have free air. I also went in and told them so. The manager told me they hear that all the time. The tire stores have free air, but only when they're open.
I have just been reminded of how annoying drivers are who are in so much of a hurry that they tailgate you even if you are driving faster than the speed limit, and if you don't speed up (on 2-lane roads) they then start flashing their lights and honking at you. And then flip you off when they finally get an opportunity to pass. Makes me want to rig my Jeep with depth charges ...
Hearing the British pronunciation always makes me think of Elton John. In a garage by the motorway...
