Computerboy.com

So, if you use a Mac and have OS 9 or earlier, then you might know a little about font management. Many people have lots of fonts, and some people have TONS of fonts. Today I met with two of them.
One has a ton of fonts but admits that he doesn’t need them all. He’s not willing to admit that his main application, used for publishing, is the root of all his troubles – which it may well be. The software version he’s using is from 3 years ago, and it’s been updated by the manufacturer several times. He refuses to upgrade because “it’s crap” and “doesn’t work” for what he does. I can’t speak to that, but I can say that it’s not helping things. The 200 plus fonts aren’t making things easy either, especially since he refuses to do any in-depth testing or troubleshooting.
The other user had over 2 gigabytes of fonts on his machine. The first time I met him, he was using many of those fonts over his office LAN – the fonts actually lived on his file server, easily explaining why his machine crashed frequently. Today I checked out his machine and all the fonts were on the hard drive. I dug a little deeper and discovered that there were many many many duplicates of the fonts – like at least four or five copies of each. So his machine had been struggling with loading the fonts over the LAN, and now it had to deal with multiple copies loaded into memory – especially since some of the suitcases had different names, so that just added to the problem.
So remember: fonts are fun, but friends don’t let friends use too many fonts.

Well, it would seem that the PC users of the world are still suffering at the hands of the virii writers – I’m still getting boatloads of psuedo-email containing more copies of the virus as it tries to spread itself. Guess what? It’s not getting through!!! I have my email setup so that it won’t download attachments over 50k in size unless I tell it to – so all that virus badness – which wouldn’t do anything to my Mac anyway – gets deleted and I get to live my life without worry.
At least, mostly without worry – I do now have a PC, so I guess I should patch it or something…..

I spent Thursday evening helping a client disinfect and patch machines that were exposed to one of the plethora of worms coming out of the woodworks for the Windows platform in the last few days. When I got there, there were two guys at the support desk answering questions. One left just after that, and that’s when people started showing up with their computers. Apparently, the IS dept. had run a scan of all the PC’s on the network and checked them to see if their RPC port was open – if it was, then it meant that the machine was either infected or likely to be infected – so they disabled the machines network access. They had warned everyone via email that this was going to happen, and apparently they also changed the outgoing voicemail for the help desk to mention this – so that explained the sudden influx of machines, I guess. Whatever it was, they did a good job setting up and planning – it’s better to do 50 machines at once in one room than to run around the buildings and try to get to them all separately.
It took about 3 hours for the 10 people to get all the machines brought in patched up and innoculated, but it was kinda fun – pizza, soda, and computers.
Oh, and the whole time, I was thinking to myself how much I love the fact that I don’t have to worry about this stuff with my Mac!!!

Been a while since I posted, so I thought I’d say something. I just bought a D-Link DWL-800AP+ – basically a new WAP (Wireless Access Point) that also acts as a range extender – so you can put it at the edge of the range of your WAP and extend it out further.
I bought it so that I could use my in-laws neighbors WAP – since it’s my sister-in-law, it’s not an issue with her. I configured the unit and put it in their kitchen, then went next door. I could only see the repeater when I was standing in a bedroom and holding the computer at a certain oblique angle – in other words, my wish to be able to just check my email whenever I wanted or IM with friends was denied.
I tried to set it up again at home, using my own LAN and WAP to see if it worked. I couldn’t get it to talk to my network, even though D-Link claims that it works with any 802.11b compliant base station. I’ll be returning it to CompUSA – it’s a nice concept, but apparently getting it to work for real is quite another story.

Well, the flood slowed to a trickle and then just drops every now and then. The total, to the best of my guesstimate, is about 2100 forged emails that were returned to me – and who knows how many others that made it through. It was good to note that some of the error messages were either software intervention – aka “White List” filters – or just flat out SPAM elimination software doing it’s job. Sadly, it wasn’t a lot – probably only about 5-10% of the total.
Now for some forensic research – i.e. who did it, and figuring out what I can do about it.

I almost checked my email today – and then I realized that there were 300+ messages waiting for me. Since I know that 95% of them are a waste of time, I’m taking a break from it all – it’s just not worth it.

Now up to 1300+ bounced emails. I can’t find any thread that’s common among all of them – besides the fact that I didn’t send them, of course – and every time I think it’s slowing down, a new batch comes in again. Ugh.
So far, I guess it’s more managable than it could be – there could be millions of them coming in, right?
Anyway, more to come as events warrant.

At last count, there were over 700 error/bounced emails that had come in. I know that there’s about another 20 or so last time I looked.
This is getting quite depressing. And irritating. I’m tempted to block the emails, but then I won’t be able to try to get to the bottom of all this – and that might be more fun than continuing to get this crap.
I hope it stop soon – it’s getting bad either way.

Now I’m starting to be afraid to check my email – everytime I do, there’s another 40 or so bounce messages. I’m moving them all to a separate folder for tracking/post mortem, but it’s getting out of hand.
I’m not sure why anyone would have picked this domain name to spoof – especially since the service that they’re “selling” in the SPAM is something that I do, probably better, and hopefully cheaper.
Anyway, I’ll worry about it again in the morning. If you’re just tuning in, you can see the start of the SPAM problem I’m dealing with here.

All of the bounces so far include emails that refer the user to a1x.net hosted emails. The company seems to be based in Poland (see below) and also seems to not care about their web presence – there is none. They’re rented a server and setup some sites – so it’s possible that who-ever is renting to them doesn’t know what’s going on. Or does, and is making some money off of it.
Here is the WHOIS info on the domain name “a1x.net”:

Domain name: a1x.net
Registrant Contact:
WAP
Katarzyna Kwiatek (kasiap@internask.com)
+48.48327814535
FAX: +48.48327814535
Agnieszki 21
Katowice, 40-120
PL
Administrative Contact:
WAP S.A.
Katarzyna Kwiatek (kasiap@internask.com)
+48.48327814535
FAX: +48.48327814535
Agnieszki 21
Katowice, 40-120
PL
Billing Contact:
WAP
Katarzyna Kwiatek (kasiap@internask.com)
+48.48327814535
FAX: +48.48327814535
Agnieszki 21
Katowice, 40-120
PL
Technical Contact:
WAP S.A.
Katarzyna Kwiatek (kasiap@yahoo.com)
+48.48327814535
FAX: +48.48327814535
Agnieszki 21
Katowice, 40-120
PL

If you happen to be in Poland and can speak to one of these in-DUH-viduals, kindly ask them to stop allowing SPAMmers onto their servers.
Now I’m off to figure out who’s hosting them….