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Archive for September, 2004

Using RBL checking to prevent comment spam, can cripple your blog

27 Sep

In a move to prevent comment spam, The Serendipity Team recently implemented the ability to lookup the IP of comment posters in different RBL databases. After a few live tests it became apparent that RBL checking can cripple your blog if your nameserver is not setup correctly.

RBL checking works by looking up X.X.X.X.sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org, if the result of this lookup is different than the original hostname it is assumed that the IP is listed in the selected RBL. However some nameservers does not follow this vital step, they resolve “nonworkingdomainflaf.com” to an IP, which in affect makes RBL checking useless and prevents people from submitting comments on your blog.

Here is an example of a broken nameserver, when using gethostbyname():

Working nameserver:
147.147.197.80.sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org => 147.147.197.80.sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org

Broken nameserver:
147.147.197.80.sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org => 212.212.212.212 (example IP)

A symptom I like to call “The SiteFinder Effect” (adopted from VeriSign’s attempt to destroy the internet, where unknown hostnames gets resolved despite the lack of existence).

To make a long story short: make sure your nameservers are correctly setup before you even attempt to use an RBL.

Using RBL to prevent comment spam has been disabled by default in Serendipity

 
1 Comment

Posted in Serendipity

 

Profiling PHP

24 Sep

George just released the notes from his php|works presentation about PHP Profiling and also comitted a fix for my problem with APD.

I started profiling Serendipity 0.8-alpha2 with XDebug a few days ago, and can now finally move on to using APD.

I also installed Turck MMCache on my home server (this server), to speed up PHP opcode. I had no idea you could speed up PHP that much by installing an opcode cache, it’s quite impressive.

 
1 Comment

Posted in PHP

 

PHP5, object clone compatibility with PHP4

23 Sep

This is interesting, and disturbing.

 
No Comments

Posted in PHP

 

Affiliate me this

15 Sep

All these affiliate links for spreadfirefox.com is quickly infecting blogs all around the net. In a move to promote Firefox, and offer something in return, spreadfirefox.com has unleashed a hell of which there is no stopping. I generally disapprove of using or promoting these kinds of links, because I find the whole idea of someone profiting (in one way or another) from luring people to click these links, wrong.

What ever happened to just promoting a good project? Do people really have to get something in return before they’ll pay their respects?

Note: No affiliate links can be found in this entry.

 
No Comments

Posted in Browsers

 

Comment spam

11 Sep

Ahh, you gotta love Serendipity.
I just got hit by comment spam, almost 50 comments – all with different IP addresses and different bodies (if they had all had the same body or same IP, they would have been rejected by the Spam Protector plugin). Anyway – it took me only a few seconds to clean up the attack with the comment management, introduced in Serendipity v.0.7. Just click “Invert selection” and “Delete selected comments” a few times and BLING, it’s all clean again :)

 
2 Comments

Posted in Serendipity

 

Sterling takes a shot at Social Networking

07 Sep

Sterling Hughes takes a shot at Social Networking and Internet Privicy, an interesting read. What freaked me was his sick passion for “Saved By The Bell” and “Growing Pains” :-O

 
1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

 

Serendipity v0.7-beta1 released

06 Sep

The Serendipity team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the first beta-release of Serendipity 0.7.

Serendipity is a PHP-powered weblog application, aiming at giving you an easy way to maintain your own individual diary or personal homepage.

The development of Serendipity is based upon offering a flexible, expandible and easy-to-use framework. We use a sophisticated Plugin architecture, affecting both the appearance of your blog and its core features. It ships with a variety of plugins (31 bundled with the distribution) to plug-and-play with your blog.

The latest 0.7 release vastly improves the featurebase of Serendipity.

A complete list of changes for this release can be found in our NEWS file, located in our CVS Repository.

Visit the Serendipity website here

 
No Comments

Posted in Serendipity

 

Gmail is no longer desirable

03 Sep

I’ve been having a hard time getting rid of my 6 GMail invites.
What was once almost a status symbol is now owned by everyone.
When asking someone if they want a GMail, they either:
1) Don’t want one
2) Already have one
3) Are in the exact same position as yourself

TomSommer : I never use it, just noticed now that I had 6 invites
@thesaur : I have my own server, so technically I don't _need_ a gmail accounts
@awormus : TomSommer: the more you give, the more they give you... it's a psychological thing
TomSommer : bastards
@awormus : resistance is futile
@thesaur : lol
TomSommer : lol

Since Google are constantly handing out shitloads of invites, one could suspect they were close to releasing gmail to the public.

I must admit I don’t use my gmail for anything :)
If anyone wants a gmail account, let me know and I’ll try and hook you up – I got four invites left.

 
15 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized