If you are active online in liberal politics, you’ve probably received email from a company called Blue State Digital, even if you didn’t realize it. Blue State Digital is a digital advocacy platform used almost exclusively by liberal organizations and candidates. If you get email from Democratic candidates, a lot of it comes from Blue… Read More »
[See Adding malicious IPs in DNSBLs to iptables automatically for a new and improved version of this that uses iptables instead of hosts.deny, which is necessary since tcpwrappers is mostly deprecated at this point.] I run my own mail server, which means that there are hackers trying 24×7 to break into the server by connecting to… Read More »
Much has been written about the fact that Zynga is evil. From my own experience, I’d like to add massively incompetent and law-breaking to the list of adjectives that accurately describe them. A number of days ago, I decided to give Words With Friends, a Scrabble™-like game, on my smart-phone. I was bored, and I wasn’t… Read More »
I’ve recently started receiving a lot of spam from people claiming that they got my email address from Cision. Needless to say, I never gave my email address to Cision, nor have I ever in any way given them permission to spam me themselves or give my email address out to other people. Cision is… Read More »
Earlier this year, my wife and two of my daughters attended CELEBR-8 U, a conference for middle school and high school girls organized by Moving Traditions, a wonderful organization for which our family has a great deal of fondness and respect. One of the co-sponsors of the conference was BBYO. Unbeknownst to us, Moving Traditions… Read More »
In June, I wrote about a technique used by spammers to harvest names and email addresses of “live” targets for their spam. In a nutshell: you post an ad to Craigslist; the spammer sends you an automated email which makes you think that maybe the sender is interested in your ad; you send a response,… Read More »
UPDATE [2013-02-13]: According to this article on Craigslist, as of February 10, 2013, they have implemented and are testing the idea I described below for fixing the problem described in this posting. I recently placed a for-sale ad on Craigslist. I anonymized my email address in the ad, which means that the published email address… Read More »
Long-time readers of my blog may remember my multiple postings about Honda Village in Newton, Massachusetts. You can read the whole series of Honda Village postings here.
I wrote several days ago about spam I received from Nation of Change at an email address which had previously only been shared with Brave New Foundation. Earlier today, I wrote about Nation of Change apparently attempting to cover their tracks after their unauthorized use of email addresses was discovered and reported by me. I… Read More »
I wrote recently about spam I received from a new, shady-seeming progressive organization called Nation of Change, sent to an email address that I had only ever used to subscribe to another organization’s mailing list. I asked a lot of questions about Nation of Change, and thus far they’ve failed to respond to any of… Read More »