The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Friday, March 28, 2008

The silly situations I came across at work today …

Silliness The First

We're a webhosting company. We host websites. We also handle email for said sites. It's not uncommon for an address at a website we host to get spam. A lot of spam.

A lot of our customers have their email forwarded to their email accounts at their ISPs. A number of our customers use Comcast as their ISP.

A lot of spam comes to the customer's website email, which is then forwarded to their Comcast address. As far as Comcast is concerned, we're the source of a lot of spam. So they block us. As far as I can tell, this is an automatic thing on the part of Comcast.

Then our customers who use Comcast complain to us about not getting their email. So we have to send a request to Comcast to get our server unblocked.

This happens so often (at least a few times a week) that it has now been automated on our end. (Aren't computers wonderful?)

So, from now until the end of time, Comcast will automatically block our server because of spam. When our server detects this, it will send a request to Comcast to remove said block. Comcast will automatically comply, only to automatically block our server a while later because of spam.

Silliness The Second

I found the following in a script-kiddie script on one of our servers:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# VulnScan v7 -Final- By Morgan
#
# Note:
# DO NOT REMOVE COPYRIGHTS ...
#

“Morgan” might want to go after k1n9k0ng for copyright infringement, unless of course, “Morgan” was the one who removed the original copyrights, then k1n9k0ng should go after “Morgan.”

Or go after PcWoRm, for removing the copyrights altogether.

Silliness The Third

I search for “VulnScan v7” and come across a discussion of it at the Blackhat Forums. Of course, not being a member, I can't read the page, but Google can.

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