So I bought a copy of Windows 7 and I don't like it. Surprise. Let's see if we can make a list of things that suck about Windows 7.

1. Part of the problem with Windows XP was that it was sometimes hard to find "where you had to go" when you wanted to configure a particular option. Windows 7 has triple the number of options and has their management controls scattered all over the place.

2. The Control Panel is just a big stupid disorganized web page that links to all the shit that nobody can find.

3. The "Show Desktop" button cannot be removed without using software, and that software has to run on startup which slows boot time (even if by a small amount). What's worse is that the space taken up by the "Show Desktop" button remains blank so you do not actually reclaim the "Desktop Real estate" you were trying to gain by removing the fucking thing.

4. The borders around windows are shown as being one pixel wide but are seriously more like three which makes them look clunkier than X Windows did in the 90's.

5. The range of products is even worse now than when NT/2000 was current… you have Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate, Lesbian Edition, and on and on. How the fuck is your average consumer supposed to know what the fuck version to buy?

6. What the fuck did you do that to the systray for? And why the fuck is it that my 32bit colour desktop shows Windows Native Systray Icons in 2 colours?

7. You're kidding right? You fucks really think the new Start Menu is better? Come on!

8. If I have a copy of "Home Anything" it should probably be assumed that I am using my computer at HOME, and that asking me for admin privilege to do things is stupid. If I truly need a limited account I will create one douchebags.

9. How could you not add a "Roll Up" option for title bars? How could you not just buy up the fuckers who make WinRoll?

10. Notification Area Icons is ridiculously overcomplicated… seriously, think about it guys.

11. The Malware Service Executable is a CPU whore, I guess you get what you pay for eh? Well, unless you pay for Windows 7.

Too annoyed to continue right now… will add more later. And this is after only a few hours. :-(

That's right, the same blog website is just packed full of bullshit… let's see.

Next Post

This one claims that "but one day, SpamHaus destroyed the Freehyperspace server" – oh come on, did they hack into the server? How many other websites/forums were damaged? How did you know it was spamhaus? Seriously here is how spamhaus works:

1. spamhaus has a list of IP addresses that spam comes from
2. They make that list available using a form of DNS
3. Administrators choose to use (or not use) spamhaus' list when they setup their email servers

As far as I know, there isn't a single email server application that uses spamhaus by default, so any email server that IS using it is doing so because of intentional action on the part of the email admin. The bottom line is that spamhaus never did shit to FreeHyperSpace.

How about another one?

This one says

It's the biggest mistake – using blacklists that are IP address-based, cause SPAM (and I mean real SPAM) is sent by millions of infected machines, and users dont know that and can do nothing to stop it, because they are simply infected by computer virus.

If this person could form a sentence it would explain that spammers often do not use their computer to send spam, they use YOUR computer to send spam. They infect you with trojans/viruses/whatever when you open those fucking joke emails you just can't stop laughing at. When your computer joins their "botnet" of thousands and thousands of other "zombie" computers then YOU are the one sending spam. And yes, YOU are the problem. And yes, you should not be allowed to send mail until you get the fucking spam factory off of your PC.

Just another ass who got infected and wants everyone else in the world to fix it for him.

How about Tim?

This is great, the bold headline text says that "Tim Bolen is a very well educated man". Too bad about the grammatical error in the next sentence eh? Okay, get your head around this

If your email is being blocked, or your friends can’t reach you, and you find it difficult to communicate on the internet, then you SHOULD file a criminal complaint against the Spamhaus/SPEWS Project with Federal and State Agencies.

Yes, that's right, spamhaus is responsible for ensuring the safe and efficient travel of every packet of information across the Internet. You fucking asshole, maybe the problem is that you have a virus? Or that your 3 year old pissed on the cable modem? Or that you just don't know what the fuck you are doing? How could anyone take this kind of shit seriously?

Oh I just don't have the patience to comment on any more of this shit. The bottom line is that it is bullshit drawn up by spammers themselves in an attempt to get people to stop using spamhaus to delete their spam. You want to stay off the list? Quit letting your computer get infected and your problems will go away.

I found a blog post about wanting to stop spamhaus from publishing lists of spammers. Sounds like this poor old Mom n' Pop ISP business was really hard done by because of spamhaus eh? Too bad the story is bullshit. The third paragraph begins by saying

The IP addresses they were operating from were removed from our network, swip'd to them and were routing though big name global network providers.

Here's a tip, if you are an ISP, you might want to make sure that when you buy IP addresses, that they REMAIN YOURS. By "swip" I can only assume they are referring to Shared Whois Project which is essentially a system for maintaining a list of who owns which IP addresses.

Dipshits, you either participated in the spamming or you got swindled out of your IP addresses by a scammer… either way, spamhaus is not the problem.

Waitafuckinminute… back up the truck "beep beep beep". At the beginning of the post it is described as a "small ISP" but later in the post it says they had 16k IP addresses that were blocked by spamhaus. Let's say that only HALF of those IP addresses were being sold out to customers… and those customers are paying $20 a month for internet access (BRUTALLY conservative numbers) – that would be $160,000 a month in revenues. Sounds like a "small ISP" to me. You can argue that any way you like but someone who owns 16,000 IP addresses should seriously know how the fuck to protect them. Duur.

Paul, you dropped the ball… don't call it spamhaus' fumble.

So today I decided to list my website at DMOZ and discovered a few things I found somewhat interesting.

On their General FAQ there is an answer to the question of what DMOZ means. So if I understand the answer correctly, there is a directory called the ODP (Open Directory Project) which has no affiliation with the current Mozilla other than the fact that they also like the idea of open-source, but that uses the name DMOZ specifically because of Mozilla. Strange.

additionally, if you decide to submit a website to be listed in their directory the Submission Agreement specifically says

To grant AOL LLC. Corporation a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, publish, copy, edit, modify, or create derivative works from my submission.

Which leads me to believe that if you want your website listed at DMOZ, then you must agree that DMOZ may do whatever they wish with the content of your website. Further, it does not say that they cannot sell works derived from your own, giving them the ability to take your content, modify it as they see fit, and sell it as their own if they so wish (without providing any credit to you).

Okay, now what happens if someone has a website that they do NOT wish to list in DMOZ and I decide to list it for them? I do not see anything stopping me from adding YOUR website to DMOZ and I do not see any way for DMOZ to know who is submitting sites. By that wisdom, it seems that it is possible for assholes like Jack Chen to grant "non-exclusive, royalty free rights" to the works of others. Corporations can be such cunts with their legal buttfuckery. Fuck you AOL, if for no other reason than you are douchebags.

There, let's see if that gets me listed at DMOZ.

So in my quest to "not get anymore spam" I received a message telling me that my Battle.Net subscription had been reset. Since I do not have a Battle.Net subscription, do not intend to play WoW, and never even tried a trial of it… I thought that just maybe, this might be spam. A couple of days passed and I got another message telling me that my Battle.Net password had been reset, I was starting to think this may become annoying.

Both messages came from Hotmail servers so of course they walked right past my fancy hMailServer anti-spam RBLs. When you send mail through Hotmail though it adds a header field called X-Originating-IP and both of these messages had apparently originated in China. So some ass in China was making accounts on the US Hotmail website and sending email [SPAM] to whoever the fuck he wanted and could skip through any RBLs that only look at the IP of the CURRENTLY connected system (rather than looking at the X-Originating-IP header). So the solution to this might just be to run SpamAssassin which I believe WILL check the X-Originating-IP against RBLs. That blows.

Anyone who has read this far may be wondering who the fuck Jack Chen is. Well he is the asshole (or ONE of the assholes) who seems to be behind the shitty emails. Both of the emails have links to websites that are clearly trying to fuck me for my Battle.Net credentials… here's where one of them points to. Please note: THIS IS A FAKE, FORGED, PHONEY, AND NOT REAL BATTLE.NET WEBSITE – IF YOU PUT YOUR NAME AND PASSWORD IN HERE YOU ARE A FUCKING IDIOT!!!

http://wow-account-support.linkpc.net/login/

Now it is truly unfortunate that numerous people do not understand how URLs are structured. People are sometimes confused and fooled because they see things like "wow-account-support" in there. The actual domain name above that someone paid for is linkpc.net (click on the link you'll see that Jack Chen owns it). You'll also notice that it is registered at www.dnsexit.com. That is interesting, I wonder who owns dnsexit.com eh? Ohhhh, it's Jack Chen… of course! So the guy who owns the registrar dnsexit.com also owns the domain that is hosting the phishing website that is trying to steal Battle.Net passwords? Oh my! Further, if you use the utility at domaintools.com to do the lookup, you'll see that Jack Chen owns well over 500 other domains as well! Oh wait, almost by accident I also noticed that dnsexit.NET instead of .COM) is owned by Lisa Zheng who just happens to have an email address of jchen@netdorm.com and the same address of 988 Eight Mile Rd in Cincinnati. Oh and "she" owns 22 other domains (bringing the total up to about 600 domain names).

Then if you resolve wow-account-support.linkpc.net to an IP address it is 119.51.49.24 which is in China. And if you surf directly to that IP it presents an NCSoft login page, a direct competitor of Blizzard, Battle.Net and Warcraft. This cocksucker is scamming passwords for multiple games, from PC's in China, and uses his Ohio based business as a domain registrar to harvest domains to do it with. Fuck you Jack Chen, you are a first class cunt.

New comment posted for picture: image007.jpg (awaiting your approval)

Author: jsxewqkxb (IP: 91.201.66.101, Remote Host: 91.201.66.101)
Email: ropsoi@nxiudq.com
URL: http://kehgchhuauax.com/

Comment:
7XHV7p yehnmnlsvrpi, [url= http://rbobdesenlay.com/]rbobdesenlay[/url], [link= http://sakwoukhhnjs.com/]sakwoukhhnjs[/link], http://btifcqjkabgu.com/

You can see all the comments for this picture here:

http://photo.snork.ca/?level=picture&id=77

Assholes.

ROFLCOPTER… so mere minutes after allowing the web server to send mail again I got an email telling me about a comment being posted to my photo site:

New comment posted for picture: image007.jpg  (awaiting your approval)

Author: dncthsxccnp (IP: 91.201.66.101, Remote Host: 91.201.66.101)
Email: ztmswc@gkkoni.com
URL: http://dqkasybcjawm.com/

Comment:
kItxGP  nxwuaupubicp, [url=http://qlntlaojaasf.com/]qlntlaojaasf[/url], [link=http://zfmqigjxfrjo.com/]zfmqigjxfrjo[/link], http://yajhkafzzley.com/

You can see all the comments for this picture here:

http://photo.snork.ca/?level=picture&id=77

Sorry Fruit Cup, I don't have comments open to the whole world to see your spam you cunt. Turns out 91.201.66.101 is from "Russian Federation"… I guess this means it is about time I put an .htaccess on my web server to redirect these cocksuckers to something other than myself. Comment Denied asswipe. :-)

This should actually be posted in an "I Suck" category but I didn't feel like making one… today I saw that my web server was trying to repeatedly send emails to the outside world (and was being blocked). Turns out that a firewall rule was keeping it from sending out emails (which is required if I am going to accept registrations).

As it turns out I am not too upset by this since it seems that all 79 of the registration attempts were trying to send to IP addresses owned by Microsoft between 22:03 and 23:17 which maps out to about one per minute. I imagine it is a Hotmail address but I have trouble understanding why someone would be so desperate to leave me a comment. In any case, I believe the problem has been fixed, so feel free to sign up for an account… just be aware that all comments are moderated by me and do not get posted until I approve them.

Some people like to use Instant Messages to communicate with others… and some like to use MSN Messenger or Windows Live Messenger or whatever Microsoft will decide to call it next week. Personally I'm not a big fan of Microsoft wanting to decide which software people use. It is just like the old IE anti-trust bullshit over and over again. There's nothing stopping people from using different clients and different services to accomplish the same goal (or better ones in some cases).

My IM client of choice these days is Miranda IM. It is pretty minimalistic and works just Jim Fucking Dandy to send IM messages. There are plenty of plugins for it to extend it's abilities as well (though I don't like to load my Miranda installation with extra goodies). I have an old ICQ account that I use with Miranda and it has all the chatting ability I need.

If you don't like Miranda IM you can always find another client… there is tons of information on Wikipedia about IM clients.

So if you play video games on your PC then you may have heard of TeamSpeak. It is an application that lets groups of people carry on voice communications while playing games. Actually it could be used for ANY type of voice communication but they like to play up the gamer angle. On the TeamSpeak System Requirements page it clearly states that the server component is compatible with Windows 2000. This is not true.

It WILL work on Windows 2000 but it will not work using the native Windows 2000 DLL files. If you go to the TeamSpeak Forums and search for "Windows 2000" you'll see plenty of posts from people having all kinds of problems running it on Win2k. And if you read thoroughly enough you might even find this post which has a way of getting it to work (scroll down to the post by Arkan). Now I followed the instructions and got it to work just fine but I did find that collecting the required files was a pain in the ass (especially with the old version of IE that comes with Windows 2000). So I have decided to reproduce the information here and provide copies of the files so you won't have to go clicking all over banner-laden sites or waiting for non-premium downloads from pay sites.

1) Copy kernel32.dll, wtsapi32.dll, and ws2_32.dll from WINNT\system32 to TeamSpeak folder
2) Rename them to kernel32_ORG.dll, wtsapi32_ORG.dll, and ws2_32_ORG.dll
3) Place kernel32.dll, wtsapi32.dll, and ws2_32.dll in your TeamSpeak folder
4) Run ExcludeFromKnownDlls.reg if it's your first time using the wrapper.
5) Get Dbghelp.dll, unzip and put it in the same folder.
6) Get psapi.dll and put it in the same folder.
7) Run Teamspeak

If for any reason you are unable to download DLL or REG files then simply download this ZIP file with all of them in it.

Microsoft Exchange sucks. It is entirely too big, requires way too much administration and costs a ridiculous amount (especially considering it'll cost you extra for things like antispam). I am sure that plenty of large organizations choose to run Exchange because they feel more comfortable running an application manufactured by an enormous corporation that ripped off Stacker and forced the use of their browser. Anyways, I went searching for a better way to do email and it wasn't so straightforward.

In my search I assumed the following requirements:

- SMTP (obviously this one is required)
- IMAP (this is how I like to store/read my email)
- RBL (there's a few good ones out there)
- SSL/TLS ('cause I want to send/receive email from other places too)
- No Java (seriously, Java is a pig)
- No .NET (seriously, .NET is a pig)
- Simple backup/restore (durrr, why make it hard right?)

I started off by trying Linux, I like Debian, and began there. I found numerous tutorials explaining how to setup very enterprise-like email scenarios but they were all dependent on doing things exactly as they were explained. Deviation from the described plan seemed to be more painful than it should have been. You can make a pretty impressive system out of Postfix (MTA), Dovecot (POP/IMAP), Spam Assassin (duh), MySQL (users, domains, aliases, etc) and Squirrelmail (webmail)… but I couldn't find a reasonable interface for managing settings, domains, users, etc. I'd even settle for a simple web interface but then you'd be adding Apache and PHP and whatever the fuck else to the mix. I then checked out CentOS, quickly lost my motivation and gave up on Linux.

OK, so I am back at Windows… and trust me, I don't WANT to be. I wanted to see if I could do it on NT4 which would would be bitchin' for anyone wanting to have appropriate licensing, but that didn't work out. Maybe that was a bad idea to begin with since NT has absolute shit for USB support. Why do you want USB support on a mail server? Well, it just might be a cheapass way to back that shit up (remember, I was going for cheap). OK, so now I am workin with Windows 2000 Server…

I found a few that were supposed to be free but they had limitations that made them worthless to anyone who wasn't using it just for their family. Xeams looked good but needed Java, and hMailServer is dependent on .NET. There is an old version of hMailServer (version 4.4.4 I believe) that doesn't require .NET but doesn't have the ability to use SSL/TLS. So as it stands, right now my snork.ca email is being run on hMailServer v5.x and I have a Windows 2000 machine with SP3 that runs it. This is the best I could do? :-(

Anyone have any bright ideas? Suggestions? Annoying comments? Anything?

We humans make significant change to the environment around us every day. We have taught ourselves to create and build some spectacular things. There are people who would suggest that these changes are a natural evolution, that they are not bad but rather are a necessity on the road to further development of the human animal. Those people are as fucked as the people who believe that the Bible is a true story.