VSU

You are currently browsing articles tagged VSU.

Email Harvesters

June 24, 2009 in Photography, Work by Ezra S F | No comments

Good Sign I missed the story about brothers convicted of harvesting emails the first time. Well, I noticed a followup.

Back around 2001, the CIO received complaints about performance for the web server. So, I went log trolling to see what the web server was doing. A single IP dominated the HTTP requests. This one IP passed various last names into the email directory. Some quick research revealed Apache could block requests from that IP. That calmed things down enough for me to identify the owner of the IP. The CIO then bullied the ISP to provide contact information for the company involved.

Previous little adventures like this landed me a permanent job, so I jumped at similar challenges.

Well, a few years later, it happened again. This time my boss had made me develop a script for the dissemination of the anti-virus software package to home users. Basically, it used email authentication for verification if someone could get the download link. So, I applied the same technique to the email directory. Well, this upset some people who legitimately needed email addresses. So the human workers would provide email addresses to people with a legitimate need.

I’m glad since I’ve left, VSU no longer looks up email addresses for people. (I thought some of the requests questionable.) Also, my little email authentication script was before LDAP was available to the university. I think the new solution much better.

One the more vocal complainers about my having stopped non-VSU access to the email directory was my current employer. We apparently list email addresses for employees freely. Which makes me wonder how much spam we get is due to the brothers described at the beginning of this story? Or other email harvesters? Just hitting the send button potentially exposes the email address.

No worries. I’m sure Glenn is protecting me. :)


Related posts

Tale of Defeating the Crazy Woman

March 19, 2008 in Interweb by Ezra S F | 1 comment

Babies are fascinated by me. When the two of us are in a room, they often find me the most interesting thing in the room. Usually, it is mutual.

So, a mutual friend of a friend, Mojan has a fantastic blog. The past year or so has been about being pregnant and most recently figuring out how to be a parent for the first time. Well, a crazy woman set up a ‘blog” which hotlinks images from Mojan’s blog and falsely represents the child in the photos. Ick. I offered to help with this identity theft issue.

Once upon a time, I was annoyed with people taking images from my last employer’s web site. Since I was the campus web designer, I created an image which said, “All your image are belong to VSU.” Also, as the web server administrator, I figured out how to defeat hotlinking with .htaccess by using mod_rewrite to give them my annoyance rather than their content. For the next couple days I watched the perpetrators try and figure out what was wrong. The hate mail I got was fantastic! I recommended Mojan do the same. When she agreed, I went researching to do what I did once upon a time. This is the .htaccess file I recommended she try.

# Basics
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On

# Condition is true for any host other yours
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mojansami\.com/ [nc]

# What to change gif, jpg, png to which target. In this case does not exist.
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|jpg|png)$ http://mojansami.com/images/stolenpic.jpg [nc]

My directions were not all that specific. So the next thing I know, her site is sporting an Internal Server Error. *headdesk* She used Dreamweaver to create the .htaccess file and upload it to her site. She reported the file she uploaded disappeared. Eventually, it did occur to me to look for the error.log and see what it said. The log complained about DOCTYPE in the .htaccess file in the home directory. A file which did not show in the FTP listing. So, replacing the bad .htaccess file with a blank one fixed the Internal Server Error.

The .htaccess file in the right place, of course, resolved the issue with the crazy woman hotlinking.

Nothing can fix the pain of another person committing identity theft against you or your loved ones. I really hope Mojan doesn’t become discouraged and abandon blogging entirely. Between moderation and authentication she might find a better balance.

Do you have any stories of online identity theft?


Related posts

A Well Dressed, Smokin’, and Woodsy Team

December 15, 2007 in Sports by Ezra S F | 1 comment

The Valdosta State Blazers have another shot at the Football Division II National Championship. This is an impressive feat for new coach David Dean who replaced Chris Hatcher. Chris defected to Georgia Southern to coach I-AA. I hope they win. I’ll be watching the game at home.

Game is at noon on ESPN2. Or drive fast to Florence, AL.
:)


Related posts

RE 2007: Birds of a Feather: Luminis

October 25, 2007 in Work by Ezra S F | 2 comments

Kathy Kral, University of West Georgia

  • Luminis IV CPIP connector: Clayton, Augusta, West GA.
  • Issues with IMS when allowing IMAP from outside the Luminis application? VSU no issues with IMAP and POP allowed outside. Augusta initially restricted but opened up access without advertisement. Mention on one of email lists Blackberries fail to do a close with connection resulting in stale sessions accumulating.
  • Mailbox sizes: West GA 10MB, Augusta 40MB for students and 125MB for faculty, Valdosta 250MB.
  • Makarand Kulkarani, Sungard – Created a replacement so mailbox is Gmail. This is a professional service engagement. Engagements start at 90 hours with unused hours un-billed. When GCF connectors are built Training similar, typically 48 hours.
  • Name changes are a pita.

Jesse Lyman built a Luminis to Vista 4 single-sign on connector to handle multiple institutions.


Related posts

Connotations of a Pronoun

March 24, 2007 in Work by Big Eazy | 1 comment

Ezra Freelove, Information Technology

“When she saw that the web address was wrong on letterhead, she helped us correct the problem. Thank you, Ezra!
Valdosta State University I Caught You Caring

I do recall an occasion while at VSU in which I noticed a memo telling people to go to an address using “www.” when the host didn’t support that as an alias of the host. So I contacted the DNS folks and got new aliases so it would work.

Why she? It suggests whomever wrote this knows very little about me.


Related posts