What's New

September 8, 2007

Music collection:
Here's a list of some of the music I recently acquired. Where do I get all this stuff? I find a lot of free (actually free) music by visiting several of the new music web sites out there. Artists want you to hear their music - If you like it, you'll buy it. The major labels want you to pay for their product - letting you hear it for free is contrary to their business model. Well, guess what? I won't buy it unless I can listen to it first. The major labels are killing themselves with their restrictive distribution and dissemination policies. If you like new music, you can do a google search to find your favorite artists web site, a new music web site, or an archive of free music. Free music is available - Legally! Don't believe the major labels propaganda - Not all free music is illegal. You can legally download music for free. I download music from websites, newsgroups (when I already own rights to the music), and a couple of commercial sources. Here's a listing of some of the music I legally downloaded.

eMusic downloads:
* Westbound Train - Transitions: (15+1 songs) Ska - Boston style. An American Ska band that mixes some jazz, soul, funk, R&B and soulful vocals to create something special. Discovered via 3hive.com. I downloaded a single earlier this year. Liked it so much I decided to buy the whole album.
* Great Lakes Myth Society - Great Lakes Myth Society: (13+2 songs) Discovered at 3hive.com. A folk rock band based in Michigan. The surprising thing is the vocals. Is the lead singer from Ireland? I don't think so, but the accent does remind me of the folks back home (Northern Wisconsin, near the U.P. border). Fantastic instrumentals, and powerful, mythic lyrics that brought me back to the U.P. I downloaded a couple of singles earlier this year. I enjoyed those cuts so much that I decided to purchase the entire album.
* The Fall - Real New Fall LP: (14 songs) A favorite band, rediscovered with the help of Troy's podcast. This particular album doesn't start out very well, but it gets much better in the second half. This album spans a large range of styles, and I can't wait to listen, again, and again and again. The Fall is one of those 70's punk/post-punk alternative bands that didn't fit in anyone's specific groove/genre. Thankfully, they failed to pin down such a silly title.
* Sugarcult - Lights Out: (11+1 songs) American rockers from California. This album features a fantastic line-up of power pop, tinged with a bit of cynicism and defiance. Great instrumentals and catchy lyrics, hammer out an energetic up tempo torrent of terrific rock steady beats. Turn it up! Here's another example of 'free track becomes album purchase'. Several months ago, I downloaded a free track (Los Angeles) from iTunes. Now I'm back buying the entire album on eMusic.
* Extra Blue Kind - Cobat Vixen EP: (3 songs) This short EP contains three tracks from a band with more energy than a double-shot of Red Bull. This is my second selection from this Indiana band's collection. This EP came out before 'The Tide and the Undertow'. It's not quite as polished, but the promise shines through brightly. Clean instrumentals and driven vocals. I first discovered this band while checking out a fantastic music website - Musical Family Tree. Fresh alternative tracks, with an amazing amount of variety.
* Mason Jennings - Use Your Voice: (10 songs) Alt-Country/Folk Rock. I first discovered Mason Jennings by listening to an eMusic sample. This is my second selection from his line-up. Raw and honest sentiment lies buried deep in this acoustic folk offering.
* Craving - February: (10 songs) Low powered rock with plenty of thoughtful lyrics. Slow-core rock with plenty of promise. Discovered by listening to an eMusic recommendation.
* Loudon Wainwright III - Strange Weirdos, Music from and inspired by the film Knocked Up: (14 songs) A folk/rock musician since the late 60's, this man's lyrics contain decades of insight and heartfelt feeling. The instrumentals are excellent. Melodic, well paced, perfectly performed, they accompany the vocals splendidly. This album is the lyrics version of the Knocked Up soundtrack.

Web site download:
* A. A. Bondy - American Hearts: (3 songs) Here are three songs. Two from 3hive.com, and one from the artists MySpace website. Folk, blues, alt-country - Americana. Well crafted debut effort. Not overloaded with overbearing instrumentals.

These are just some of the items I added to my music collection during the month of September. Since returning from Japan in 2001, I've been rediscovering my appreciation for music. I really picked it up again in September of 2005. Since then, I've been slowly adding, revising and updating my music collection. With these acquisitions, I've updated my online music listing. If you have a comment or a question regarding my music collection, please don't hesitate to send me an email.
<https://www.robsworld.org/mymusic/index.html>
<https://www.robsworld.org/music.html>

Die spammer, die!
Beginning on the 4th of September, a spammer launched a spew campaign with my email address in the spam's Reply-To: address field. As a result of his forgery, I received an auto-generatedblow-back message. This server generated messages was sent to me in response to spam sent to some unsuspecting internet user. I warned the system administrator off of auto-responders, but I doubt that they'll listen. Hopefully, there won't be any measurable effects on my domain or its standing. I haven't been black listed yet, not that I know of anyway. Oh how I hate spammers!
<https://www.robsworld.org/forgery.html>

The 4th Edition of D&D:
It was bound to happen sooner or latter. Wizards of the Coast - The company that produces my favorite game, announced (on the 16th of August, 2007) the pending release of version 4.0 of the game. The company that owns D&D is best known for their Collectible Card Game - Magic The Gathering. With this release, they've proven their true ethos. Profit over purist. Recently, I had the time to view a bunch of 4.0 videos on YouTube. In viewing the videos, it became clear to me that they've decided to go with a monthly subscription model for their online tools. While many of the tools look interesting (the digital gaming table looks awesome), they won't be offering stand-alone downloadable versions of these tools. Instead, gamers will be forced to pay a monthly subscription fee in order to use these tools. I don't like this decision. I think it stinks. If I pay for something, I want to own it! Some small amount of good news. With all these new online tools, you still won't 'need' a computer to play the game. I also learned that there won't be a 3.0 - 4.0 conversion document. That sucks! The absolute worst thing I heard while watching these videos, was a comment from one of the developers. He said something like. 'The Book of Nine Swords was something of a preview to the 4th edition.' If the 4th edition is anything like that book (I own it), then it's going to suck big time. That book introduced a group of incredibly overpowered characters with little in way of story. The rules introduced in that book were difficult to understand, very complex and overly ornate. I guess if you had a computer to manage your character, you wouldn't have such a hard time managing such a character.

An entirely new version of D&D means that my $1,875.00 plus collection of 3.0/3.5 books is obsolete. A hefty exercise in planned obsolescence. There's nothing wrong with these books, but Wizards of the Coast has decided that I need to buy all new books in order to continue playing the 'official' version of my favorite game. I don't like it. What am I going to do? I'm not quite sure. I haven't made a firm decision yet, but I'm leaning towards - Screw that! For now, we'll continue to play 3.5.
<http://www.enworld.org/index.php?page=4e>

Spammers forge email dates:
A distressing development in my fight against spam. The service that I use to report spam, will not accept reports on spam that is more than 72 hours old. Well, on the 4th of September, I received several spam messages with 'received' dates that were four or more days old. When I attempted to report the spam, SpamCop reject the reports. That's not good. SpamCop reads the most recent date from the email. That date is stamped by my ISP (I wish I could remember what service these arrived through), and SpamCop uses this most recent date in order to determine whether the email is more than 72 hours old. Sometimes an ISP simply copies the date from other parts of the header. I certainly hope that none of my ISPs are doing that. There's more than one date in the header of an email message, and I know that it is possible to intentionally change the date stamp on an outgoing email. Thankfully, I only encountered this phenomenon on one day.

Greylisting to fight spammers:
Today (4 sep 2007) I started using a new technique to fight spam. SpamCop now offers greylisting to it's email members. What's greylisting? Well, let's start by defining a white list and a black list. A whitelist would be a list of email addresses that automatically gets through a spam filter. Once a spammer figures out a 'whitelist' address, he/she will use it in order to bypass any filtering efforts. This is why you often get spam from yourself. A blacklist is a list of IP address (or email addresses) that are not permitted to send you email. They're automatically blocked. Spammers send from multiple IP addresses and forged From: addresses in order to avoid blacklisting. A greylist is somewhere in between. It treats all email as suspicious. When an email arrives at an email server using greylisting, the server checks to see if the sender (IP address) is known. If it isn't, the email gets delayed with a 'Try again later' message. It isn't rejected, and it isn't delivered. It's left in limbo, waiting for a certain period of time. Most legitimate servers will attempt to re-deliver the email after a specified re-try time. Spammer operated email servers, on the other hand, typically shut down after they send their spew. They don't bother checking for delivery status, and they don't like to stay on for too long (someone might do a trace route). As a result legitimate email will get delivered late, and spam will simply never get delivered. Granted, this will only affect email delivered by way of my spamcop account, but the vast majority of my email makes it's way through spamcop, so this should have a big effect on the volume of spam I'm receiving.
<http://www.greylisting.org/>

Fighting Spam:
<rant>Too good to be true. Back in November of 2006, I signed up for a new email service. A free 'Challenge Response' email address, where spammers have to pay money in order to send me email! I could actually make money off spammers - Imagine that! By publicly disclosing the associated email address (as of 21 Dec 2006), I was fairly certain that the email address would get scraped by spambots — and it did. By the end of April, 2007, I was receiving an average of 90 messages a month. As I indicated back in November of 2006...

Only time will tell how effective this approach to spam reduction will be. The most favorable outcome would be revenue for me. The worst? Well, if spammers manage to find a way around the CR mechanism, I can always disable/delete my account. As long as the service is free to me, I can't really complain.

Well, guess what? Too good to be true. That's the end result of this adventure. While I was under the impression that spammers couldn't use this email address without paying, the truth of the matter is - Spammers were able to send me their messages without paying anything. Boxbe collected all the spew sent my way, dumped it into a "Here's the crap you received" bin, and then sent me an email indicating that I had received email. I kept going back to this garbage heap on a regular basis, sifting through it, hoping I'd find a legitimate email. Hoping I might even find that a spammer would pay to have his messages white listed.

I was deluded. Boxbe didn't reject unpaid senders, they simply collected all the spew, while asking me to 'check it out' - 'see if you wanna keep any of it'. The challenge response messages sent to the spammers never reached the spammers. Those messages were likely sent to the 'From', 'Reply-To' or 'Return-Path' address listed on the spam. As I'm keenly aware, that address is usually (99.99999999% of the time) forged. In many cases, the address is that of an innocent victim. Someone that the spammer has targeted for reprisals, or it might be the email address of someone who's computer has been compromised by a spammer. In either case. The advertisers/spammers never saw the challenge response message. If they did, do you think that they would actually pay to send me email? I don't think so!.

Back in April of 2007, I officially requested that my boxbe.com address/account be deleted. I won't be using it anymore. It's a pipe dream, spammers (or legitimate advertisers) aren't going to pay to send me email, and the challenge response messages are only making this problem worse. So much for that idea. As a result of this recent development, I took the opportunity to update my Feedback page; removing the boxbe.com address and cleaning up some bloated code. I had to write back two more times, and still they didn't terminate my account. Finally, in June of 2007, I began reporting the monthly 'status' message as spam. Once I started reporting their email as spam they deleted my account. This month (September of 2007), I finally deleted my boxbe.com address. I haven't 'received' any email from them in over a month. </rant>

If you ever need any help figuring out a problem involving unsolicited email, or help hunting down a spammer, don't hesitate to ask for my help. I'm willing and eager to help. Just drop me an email. I'd put the email address here, but this email message is also posted online, where spammers could scrape the email off the web page. Damn those spammers!
<https://www.robsworld.org/index2.html#fightingspam>

Apple Security Update:
Another security update released by Apple - iTunes update 7.4. This update addresses a security concerns regarding iTunes and arbitrary code execution via buffer overflow. The condition could be brought about by maliciously crafted web pages. Apple's software update makes it easy to find out about, and implement these security updates. If you own a Mac, you can rest assured that any potential security concerns will be addressed in a timely and thorough manner. You can read more about the update at Apple's website. Keeping my Mac safe from malicious hackers and such.
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/security/>

D&D update:
We played D&D on the 25th of August and the updates are in. During the last three meetings, the party continued their exploration of the caverns and catacombs of Firestorm peak. While exploring the passageways, they encountered an immense cavern, seemingly guarded by urquirsh. Upon entering the cavern, they discovered a microcosm of hungry and hostile creatures. Entering this dark realm triggered a series of attacks, as the creatures seek food and territorial protection. As the battle carried over into a third day of play, the party's battle continues. With two characters unconscious, you don't want to miss that next journal entry!

The Adventurers journal:
The tale of our adventurers. A series of journal entries from various party members. This document contains details of their encounters. Victory, defeat, desire and glory. Here is the tale of S.C.R.E.W.O.F.F.S., a group of adventurers who set forth from Whillip, seeking fame, fortune and the defeat of evil in these lands. Thanks to a contribution from Lars, I was able to update this session's journal entry. Adding Tanar's point of view to the journal is interesting, given the fact that he was knocked unconscious during this battle. Be sure to read about the party's journey into Firestorm Peak.
<https://www.robsworld.org/ajournal07.html#aug25_2007>

Our next gaming date is 08 September, 2007. Stay tuned for more adventure; there will be lots of thrills and excitement in the months to come. The parties next big challenge is beating the clock. In this quest there is a time limit that the party must be cognizant of. If they spend too much time fighting beasties, they just might find that they've run out of time to unravel the mysteries of Firestorm Peak. Be sure to follow our adventurers as they search for Tanar's father, and seek out the source of taint inside Firestorm Peak.

September 30, 2007

September 27, 2007

September 23, 2007

September 21, 2007

September 12, 2007

September 8, 2007