7152 – Ah, the sea… so mysterious, so beautiful… so wet.

I didn’t do a ding-dong thing outside of my apartment on my birthday. I did get some rest and relaxation.. but no journeys anywhere, no dinner out, etc. I liked having a day off mid-week, certainly.

Dinner was a veggie sub from Quizno’s. Got to see Mel for a few hours, but not as long as I would’ve liked… If I’d known that she was going to be running so late, I’d have gone on a day trip in the morning.

Mom couldn’t do dinner, due to her being sick.

It doesn’t feel like I had a day off. I had to take a call the night prior, and still babysit the company to switch phones and supply access codes yesterday. I had to wake up early to switch the phones over. All petty grievances, but it certainly disrupted the desired “big sleep” I wanted.

Mel was really the high point, I got a lot of nice birthday wishes and played a bit on LJ, too. I don’t know why I’m not more thankful or grateful for the day. It just sort of came and went… feels mostly wasted.


Mm.. Cheese enchiladas and mimosas sounds like a nice belated birthday breakfast for this weekend. (randomly found at negatendo while looking for why apple makes a one button mouse.)


Someone has been reading my journal in Polish.


My referrer links are getting polluted a bit by advertisers for hold-em poker-type places. I don’t know why.. I’m the only one that reads my referrer logs. Sort of a dopey spam method if you ask me.


Melissa is Greek for Bee. hm. Pretty appropriate. Industrious, soft, defies most laws of physics, and has a sting if needed. Plus, she makes things so honey-sweet when she’s around.


Moment of Lyric –

Life is something set to music
I can hear it when I’m sad
There’s a chord in every muscle
Every kiss you ever had
There’s a power when you’re near me
In our heads or in our bones
I know nothing but I’m guessing
When we die we’re not alone


I'm Destiny!
Which Member of the Endless Are You?


Anytime I try to doodle Mel, she looks like Whats her face from Teen girl squad. (except Mel isn’t one for baggy pants.)


I used to love Choco Tacos, but the Cool Dog ice cream sundae is sort of wacky. I think because since it’s vanilla and looks like a sausage that there’s too much “bratwurst” association in my mind to properly eat it.


Zombie trick expected to send spam sky-high

Spam levels are about to skyrocket, according to experts who warned this week that spammers have developed a new way of delivering their wares.

According to the SpamHaus Project–a U.K.-based antispam compiler of blacklists that block 8 billion messages a day–a new piece of malicious software has been created that takes over a PC. This “zombie” computer is then used to send spam via the mail server of that PC’s Internet service provider. This means the junk mail appears to come from the ISP, making it very hard for an antispam blacklist to block it.

Previously, zombie PCs have been used as mail servers themselves, sending spam e-mails directly to recipients.

“The Trojan is able to order proxies to send spam upstream to the ISP,” said Steve Linford, director of SpamHaus.

Linford believes that this Trojan horse was created by the same people who write spamming software.

ISPs in the United States may have already been hit. “We’ve seen a surge in spam coming from major ISPs. Now all of the ISPs are having large amounts of spam going out from their mail servers,” Linford said.

This will cause serious problems for the e-mail infrastructure, as it is impractical to block mail with domain names from large ISPs. Linford predicts that ISPs will see a growth in the volume of bulk mail they send and receive over the next two months, with spam levels rising from 75 percent of all e-mail to around 95 percent within a year.

“The e-mail infrastructure is beginning to fail,” Linford warned. “You’ll see huge delays in e-mail and servers collapsing. It’s the beginning of the e-mail meltdown.”

Linford said that ISPs need to act fast to take control of the problem. “They’ve got to throttle the number of e-mails coming from ADSL accounts. They are going to have to act quickly to clean incoming viruses. ISPs have so much spam–they are too understaffed to call people up and tell them they have Trojans on their machines. And no one would know what you’re talking about.”

Antispam company MessageLabs confirmed Linford’s findings.

“This ups the ante in the need for filters,” said Mark Sunner, chief technology officer for MessageLabs. “It makes it more difficult for people who compile blacklists, which is why spammers are doing this. It will put more pressure on ISPs to take greater interest in the traffic they carry and filter at source.”

The Information Commissioner’s Office, the United Kingdom’s point-of-call to report spam, said it had received no complaints of bulk spam from ISPs.

Some U.S.-based ISPs contacted by News.com said an e-mail meltdown has yet to arrive. But technicians at some of the largest Internet providers have acknowledged the issue and similar exploits in the past. Many, but not all, U.S. ISPs have blocked open relay ports, such as port 25, to shut out spammers from disseminating messages from home-operated servers. The block has helped some broadband ISPs limit the output of zombie spam, and some have noticed the new form of malware taking shape.

Time Warner Cable, the nation’s second largest cable company, said it had become aware of this spam “vector,” as it calls it, and has mechanisms to control it, according to company spokesman Keith Cocozza. He noted that the company’s ISP, called Road Runner, has outgoing e-mail limits in place, but declined to elaborate on how the company monitors and responds to this malware issue.

Earthlink, which runs a dial-up and broadband service, said it noticed a gradual increase in spam volume coming from its legitimate mail servers since the beginning of 2004. The company claims it has implemented safeguards, such as authenticated SMTP servers and re-routing of legitimate e-mail, to cut down the flow.

“Overall we’ve been able to greatly reduce the amount of spam from our network by routing activities and applying choke points,” said Trip Cox, Earthlink’s chief technology officer. Cox added that the measure have reduced spam from 30 percent of the ISP’s total e-mail volume to 2 percent.


1 year ago – bday loot, Danny lick pic

2 years ago – os quiz, littler big sis writes me a birfday song, palm-cam pics, suction crab

3 years ago – nice day after, Newt-stalks, S & D = B & C, haiku

4 years ago – SPOOT, correspondence old school, vagg, go ask Alice and afraid to ask

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