michaelwyres.com.au | musings of a geek

Melbourne or Mekong?

Oh dear. April Fools Day again. This story from the Herald-Sun in Melbourne is so funny – not for the story itself, but for the cleverly constructed group of comments.

Some I am sure are from real people – but plenty I am equally sure have been cleverly crafted to try and put doubt in people’s minds as to whether it’s a real April Fool’s joke or not.

This one takes the cake though:

what matter. we chinese better you you know. football is soccer. we soccer very good. we beat you any day, ha ha. anyway mcg only going ten year in fact. china going one million year. cricket, nobody ever heard. too bad. mekong best melbourne worsed. we name stadium now. name anything we like tomorrow. sweet and sour grapes you lose. go cry in stinking yara river. china strong. astralier weak like little girl. you see. we win. haha

Posted by: mi tao now of shanghai 11:02am today
Comment 106 of 147

He so funny!

Steve Gibson, of Gibson Research Corporation spoke recently to Leo Laporte on their regular “Security Now!” podcast in regards to a trojan that has been doing the rounds of the internet for quite some time.

This trojan – and others like it – infect networked computers via any number of known security exploits, and change the DNS servers that the infected machine looks up on the internet for the purposes of name resolution. The DNS servers the infected machines look up are set up to maliciously redirect you to websites, other than the one you are really looking to visit. They might look like the site you wanted – (eg: your banking website) – but really, they are hosted by the bad guys, seeking to steal your information.

There are a number of ways people – and ISPs – can alleviate this problem on their networks. Generally, this is a problem that should be addressed by ISPs.

It is as simple as blocking all outgoing DNS requests. This forces the client machines to use the local DNS server – (ie: the ISPs DNS server) – which should then be heavily fortified and rigourously secured by administrators at the ISP. They can then configure forward lookups outside of their network to DNS servers that they themselves trust.

That way, when a bad guy’s trojan comes along and configures your client machine to look up their “bad” DNS server, your ISP blocks your access to it by default, so you don’t get their “bad” information.

Any administrator worth their salt would have firewalling in both the inbound AND outbound directions to deal with this – and similar – kinds of attack.

It’s a fairly simple solution to a serious problem.

SPF – Is It Worth It?

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a system whereby special records – of the TXT type – are placed into the Domain Name System (DNS) to specify the IP addresses of all mail servers that are allowed to send email to the public internet, for that particular domain.

Receiving mail servers can look at an incoming email – from [email protected] for example – and then look up the SPF records for domain.com. If the IP address from which the email actually arrived is not in the list of authorised servers from the SPF records the receiving server looks at, it can be assumed that the email is not really from someone from within that domain.

Unfortunately, you cannot say that if an email fails an SPF check that it is DEFINITELY spam. It’s only an indication that it is MORE LIKELY to be spam.

Also unfortunate, is that SPF is not as widely adopted as would be useful. If every single domain name was forced to use SPF, and the administrators of each domain rigidly enforced policy to ensure that email is only sent via their authorised servers, SPF will stop spam dead. Completely.

So, is SPF worth implementing? For the most part, the answer is yes. If you want to give other servers on the internet the opportunity to verify that a particular email is from your domain, it’s the best currently available option.

The biggest problem is, not all RECEIVING email servers choose to do SPF checking on incoming mail. Because it’s not compulsory, SPF lacks the punch it would otherwise have.

Basically, everyone SHOULD use SPF. In particular, if your site is an e-commerce site, it would be responsible to add SPF records for your domain. Because e-commerce sites are more likely to fall prey to phishing attacks, it would be extremely useful to your users to offer this option to receiving servers, to help alleviate the world of phishing scams.

It is up to administrators everywhere to look at using SPF lookups on their mail servers to help end users identify spam. SPF is another string to the bow.

Sorry Telstra!

Telstra are already whinging after being excluded from the National Broadband Network (NBN) tender process, after submitting a non-compliant bid.

What did they expect?

The bottom line is, even if their bid was compliant, their projected cost of $39.95 per user, per month, for 12Mb speeds, with only 200MB of total download allowance is/was a complete joke.

In my opinion, Telstra don’t really care about the NBN – they are just trying to protect their 100% monopoly on the local copper loop “last mile” into everyone’s home or business.

Other bidders are talking about fibre into the home – completely bypassing the need for Telstra’s copper network for connected users.

So Telstra are panicking. Awww.

Australia to Get FttP Network?

Finally some common sense in regards to Australia’s pending National Broadband Network (NBN), currently in the tender stage.

The government proposal is for a Fibre-to-the-Node (FttN) solution, with a target minimum of 12Mb end-user speed, using current xDSL technology for “last mile” reach into customer premises.

However, Canadian-based bidder, Axia NetMedia have revealed many of the details of their tender proposal, suggesting that they want to build a Fibre-to-the-Premise (FttP) network, bringing fibre connections all the way into the home.

Doing so would significantly future proof the network, and would create a fully duplex network, capable of giving the subsrciber the same speed uploads and downloards.

On a personal level, as long as the backhaul network can cope with the amount of traffic such a network would provide, then I am all for backing Axia NetMedia to get the gig.

Uniting Against Australian Internet Censorship

Australia’s Rudd Federal Government is planning to introduce compulsory internet censorship on Australia. While some of the content they intend to block might be questionable and worthy of blocking in some people’s eyes – I have only one question.

Who are they to decide what Australians can and cannot view on the internet?

We did not vote for this. This was not “listed policy” at the last election. I have started a Facebook group to start a force against this policy.

The Rudd Government was one of the loudest critics of China’s censorship of the internet during the recent Beijing Olympics. I find it more than ironic that they now intend to do the same “for” Australians.

Spam Down Between 35% and 75%

Various news and internet security agencies are reporting between 35% and 75% of internet email spam has dropped over the last few days, after a rogue San Francisco/Bay Area ISP, McColo, was disconnected from the internet by its upstream provider.

After reports of large amounts of suspicious traffic coming from its data centre, McColo had its internet access provisions terminated, resulting in the almost instantaneous drop in global spam traffic.

On a personal level, I’ve noticed that the total amount of email traffic hitting my own mail server has dropped to almost zero. Normally about 95% of my SMTP traffic is spam.

Unfortunately, it is likely that the drop will only be temporary – the spammers will not take long to set themselves up elsewhere – but this victory for anti-spam crusaders demonstrates that a global approach to the problem can have a significant effect on the problem.

Some Re-Engineering

I’ve recently had some issues with my ISP – (who I plan to move away from, as soon as technical barriers are gone) – and have been having some trouble my all of my websites.

As the first stage of removing the “technical barriers”, I’m currently in the process of re-engineering a couple of backend aspects of my site, so you might get a few odd things happen for the next few days.

Bear with me, everything will be back to normal very soon!

Bathurst is Finally Here!

The annual wait is over – with yesterday’s (Thursday) commencement of practice and qualifying for this year’s Bathurst 1000.

These two cars are, however, unlikely to start on Sunday, after a massive accident on top of the mountain. Drivers Paul Weel, and Chris Pither are believed to be okay.

Ha Ha!

While I certainly don’t want to direct this towards all Geelong supporters, living in this town, I have seen a certain arrogance this year in regards to Geelong’s quest for back-to-back AFL premierships.

Many had themselves convinced that the second premiership was already run and won months ago. One Geelong supporter even had himself tatooed with “Premiers 2008”, before yesterday’s Grand Final.

Well, Hawthorn proved that when it comes to that One Day in September, you have to be the best team on the day. All that went before matters little.

I have never been prouder to not be a Geelong supporter. Ha ha!