Rick's World

On July 14, 2008 (my birthday!) I joined Twitter.  I'd been hearing a lot about Twitter for a long time before that so I finally decided to join and see what this whole Twitter thing was all about.  It's been over a year now and I wanted to give my thoug… more »

I got this email yesterday: Return-Path: >gardcm23@mail.buffalostate.edu> X-Original-To: rick@ekle.us Received: from smtp.buffalostate.edu (smtp.buffalostate.edu [136.183.139.54]) Received: from mail.buffalostate.edu (unverified [136.183.13… more »

Time for yet another spam scam email analysis. This time, the scam is an emailed plane ticket. Here's the email I got: Return-Path: <bykvjypw@brainstem.com> Received: from 37-8.2-85.cust.bluewin.ch (37-8.2-85.cust.bluewin.ch [85.2.8.37])… more »

The scare tactics in this email attack your pocketbook. It appears to be an email from my credit card company indicating that someone used my credit card fraudulently. Here's the body of the email: Received: from [67.158.232.43] (unknown [67.158.2… more »

Time for some more malware that uses scare tactics. Here's something I got in my email recently... Return-Path: <yjm@bossa-hashi.com> X-Original-To: rick@ekle.us Received: from 209-16-113-5.net.bhntampa.com (209-16-113-5.net.bhntampa.com [2… more »

Ok, time to discuss another malware email that I received today. I wanted to describe this so that I can help others learn to identify scam/malware emails. The body of the email is as follows: Return-Path: <monitoring@isp.com> X-Original-To… more »

I've been reading the Digg.com web site for a long time. It's a web site that allows readers to submit news stories. The news stories get voted up or down. The most popular stories end up the front page. Since the news stories are user submitted, it… more »

I wrote previously about how excited I was by the concept of the Amazon MP3 store. I loved the fact that they were selling high quality DRM-free MP3 files. Well, my excitement has decreased quite a bit. A couple days ago, I bought several songs from t… more »

Ok, our friend the comment spammer has picked up the pace. Today he hit me with 217 comment spams, all in the course of an hour and a half. The comment spam all came from the IP: 62.33.12.24 Let's do a little bit of investigating of this. W… more »

Last night, I updated my blog to the new 2.0 version of my blogging software. I gotta say, that so far this new version is a very nice improvement. Now I just need to figure out how to write custom skins so I can write an iPhone skin. :) more »