Diana the Valkyrie's Newsletter - August 2006
A hard man is good to beat
Galleries added this month.
Stories added this month.
Nothing new
Movies added this month.
Keeps on running.
An interesting thing. I noticed that someone was trying thousands of different usernames each with a password. It was a brute force attempt to guess a username/password. I've seen those before, but I didn't really think about it, it just seemed that it would almost never work.
But it is working. On a run this month, the attacker successfully guessed about 20 passwords! Surely that's impossible?
When I looked more carefully, I found that the ones that were being guessed, are the ones where the user is choosing the same username and password on several sites (I look after several dozen web sites).
Here's what I think is happening. Someone sets up a web site, maybe a freebie. And they get people to register, choosing a username and password. So they get thousands of username/password pairs.
People use the same username and password on a lot of different systems, it's easier to remember. So, if you give that to a rogue web site, then that rogue webmaster can try your username/password in a lot of places.
And it's easy to set up a rogue site - you just offer something attractive, and have a free registratoin. A lot of people will sign up giving the same username/password that they use elsewhere, and the fisher has caught a fish!
If someone gets your username/password on my site, that's a little bit of hassle for me, no big deal for you. I just change the password, and maybe also the username, and tell you I've done that.
Except for people whose email address doesn't work any more. Then I change the password, and I can't tell them until they email me.
But if someone gets the username/password of your main account (your AOL account, maybe) then you could have big hassle. They might log in as you, and send lots of spam out, for example. Then AOL would blame you and pull your account. You can imagine other annoying scenarios.
So that's why people advise "use a different username and password on all systems". That's maybe not very practical. But what is better than using the same one on all systems, is, for example, use the same username, aand *almost* the same password. So, if your password is "partjim" then you might use "partjimaol" on AOL, and "partjimdtv" here, and so on. it's not ideal, but it's better than using the exact same password everywhere.
And that would foil the automated password guessers.
Nothing new.
I'm not counting carefully, but I reckon I'm getting over 500 spams per day now. About 99% of that falls straight into my spam trap - the other 1% is a bit of a nuisance, but not too bad. Email without a despammer will soon be unusable - it might already be for some people.
The comments on the spams are mine, of course. These are actual spams sent to me, which just strike me as funny. I don't include their contact details - go find your own spammers!
By the way, if you're using StoneColdMail
(which is free to web site members) then you won't see most of these spams, they'll be delivered
into your "Spam" folder.
Most of the sponsorships now are by giving women server space and bandwidth, so they can operate their web sites without having to pay these fees. There's also photoshoots, which gets some revenue into their hands, as well as the traditional direct-funding sponsorship.
| Site name | Description |
| Footflavor | All about feet |
Here's the full list of DtV family web sites
Member | Posts |
| TomNine | 1702 |
| madman3579 | 1218 |
| darwin666 | 1184 |
| buffy18976 | 828 |
| hiram2000 | 798 |
| boomerflex | 763 |
| GrappleJack | 650 |
| zig563 | 635 |
| gaily304 | 610 |
| Jerroll | 559 |
| mac999 | 501 |
| aos2002 | 495 |
| mit19237 | 458 |
| vas1024 | 419 |
| bro007 | 352 |
| rainer0000 | 327 |
| heather.pedigo | 309 |
| april069 | 219 |
| lilguy31 | 202 |
| betacub1 | 181 |
Tom is outstanding again.
There's been a major discussion on my board, about the message board software. Once again, we're talking about the idea of changing to a different software package, possibly to YaBB (that's the package I put on Herbiceps and other sites). But I've also been changing the existing software to accomodate many of the things that people say they want.
Look here to see a new style of board, with threads, and multiple posts on the same page, and the ability to handle as many inline links as you want to have. The old style of viewing the boards will still be available when that version of the software starts to be used.
2167 posts this month.
Most posted Board of the month | Poster of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Politics and sports. | GrappleJack is number one this month |
Mavis is counting the number of times the message list is checked for each board. This gives a very different picture from the one above.
Most listed Board of the month | Most read Board of the month | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Politics is back. | Politics and Scooby |
I checked the site statistics that Sandra counts up each night.
At the end of July 2006, there were about 920,000 pictures (73 gigabytes), 187 gigabytes of video, 10,400 text files (mostly stories) and a total of about 260 gigabytes. There's about 195 million pictures altogether in Newsthumbs, increasing at about 5 million per month.