Just an amusing update about the indianpad.com spammer.

I created an account at indianpad.com, complained about all the spam I was receiving, told them who the users were (all the same guy from the same 2 ip addresses), sent copies of the spam. Then I tried to log in 10 minutes, later to see what was said, I find my account there no longer exists. And the accounts where the spam links, are all still there. I guess indianpad.com supports their spammers. It doesn’t bother me any, I just thought I’d see how they would respond. The funny thing is, the site itself is like a cheesy Indian (East not Native American) rip off of digg.com However, the links that have been left here, go directly to a user account, who has nothing but online pharmacy links.

So if you’re looking to be a blog comment spammer, let me recommend www.indianpad.com Not only will they condone your actions, they will ignore any complaints and delete the accounts of said complainers.

There were never any stated rules here. But I do have a couple rules that I was following. The first one was, I wouldn’t do any tech related posts, I have (insert $shameless_plug) PC CyberTek for that. And the other, all the videos would be my own. But I’ve never been one to follow all the rules so here’s a little video I found over at The Smoking Gun.

To the guy that keeps leaving all the Indianpad spam.

1. I verify all comments before they are approved.
2. Your redirection links are broken anyways.

   Error: can't open redirects.log file
   Possible reasons:
   1) cron is not working (read FAQ)
   2) there is no urls in this scheme
   3) there is no such scheme or use     (LMAO)

3. Just because you use a different name, I can still tell who you are because I see your IP address.
4. Comments that are just links, unless related to the original post, will get deleted and never see the light of day (or a single pixel).
5. Comments with links to a pharmacy, especially in India, will get deleted. I don’t need your fake, or real Viagra
6. I know how to spoof my IP too, so changing your IP or using a proxy, won’t fool me.
7. It bums me out when I see I g0t a bunch of comments, just to find out they are all spam.
8. If your gonna leave spam for comments, why not do it in a recent post, not one I made months ago that no one will read anyways.
9. I think I’ll have some fun with nmap and the IP’s your spam is being posted from.
10. Thanks for stopping by and leaving comments.

Sincerely,

Your freindly neighborhood admin and computer security specialist

PS. I think I’ll make a account at Indian Pad and leave spam of my own and copy your spam to it.

I haven’t posted anything new for a bit so I thought I should. I’ve been busy at work, but I haven’t really edited anything new in a while. There was one snowboard piece, which I might post at some point, but it’s one I didn’t have much time to complete, so it’s not as good as it could be. There still might be a time when I’ll post it. And now that I think about it, I do have one I made last month that never made it here. I’ll look for it, when I’m done writing this.

What I wanted to tell you was, today I finally got some footage of last weekends Roxy Chicken Jam. I just started to capture some of the footage today. I managed to get video from more than one source, which is rare for me. Usually, I get footage that was filmed by one person, on one camera, from one vantage point.  It’s nothing against whomever has shot it. It’s just nice to get footage, from the same event, from different people with different gear, shot from different locations. It gives me more to work with. I’ve also figured out what song I’m going use. After going through the footage, and capturing some of it, I started laying down ideas on the timeline and I must say, I like where it’s going.

This time around it’s The Roxy Chicken Jam 2009 half pipe and mascot competition, held at Mammoth Mountain this past weekend (March 28th and 29th). It’s going to run in the sports segment on the news tomorrow night. So as soon as I get in to work tomorrow morning, I’ll grind some coffee beans and brew a fresh pot. Usually the morning DJ has some left, but it’s Folgers, it’s been cooking for 3-4 hours and all that’s left is burnt mud. I’m kinda a coffee snob, so I take turns buying some good whole bean coffee, with two other co-workers who are also willing to buy our own instead of making the Folgers the station provides. Once I get some of that in me, I’ll be downstairs at one of the editing bays, and get it finished. On friday, I edit all the news, including the sports, myself. So it’s important I get this piece edited ASAP. And after I get all my work done, rather than close up the studio (I’m usually that last one there on friday night), instead of locking up and comming home, I’ll feed Sorenson Squeeze my Roxy Chicken Jam video and wait for it to spit out a flash video file, that I can post here. When I get home, I’ll upload that file and you’ll be able to watch it. So please come on back and check it out because I’m staying late friday night, just for you. 

You can get the complete results for the Roxy Chicken Jam, over at Gurl Ryder

This summer Janes Addiction and NIN are going on the road for what they are calling NIN|JA 2009. Funny thing is, I saw both of them for the first time on the first Lollapoolaza tour, at Irvine Meadows, California back in 1990. Two years later I saw Rage Against the Machine open Lollapoolaza, whose singer is in Street Sweeper which will also be playing with Janes and NIN.

If you want the free music, just head over to ninja2009.com and give them your e-mail. They will send you a link and password that they call a token. After you go to the link and enter your token, you will be given the option to download the music in one of several file formats. Of course you got your mp3s, and m4a (Apple’s lossless format – meh), FLAC (lossless and my choice) and wave, which I almost got but I can convert FLAC to any format I want and it’s half the size of the waves. After you pick which format you will be able to download a torrent.

Trent Reznor has always had a good handle on making good use of techknowledgy. This isn’t the first time he has released music for free. Although the previous times he asked for a donation. This time it’s free and used as a promotional vehical for the tour. While the RIAA is out there fighting a loseing battle against file shareing, Trent, once again, has used it wisely. I also applaud his choice of using bit torrents for the distribution of this Ninja 2009 sampler.

Circoripopolo Goes Artistique

Here is how they re sized windows in the old days…

click here to watch

Try this out and be sure to upload a photon into it for more fun!

The Roxy Chicken Jam is going to be at Mammoth Mountain, March 27 – 29. It’s an all girls snowboard contest with Superpipe and Slope Style competitions. And let me tell you, these girls can throw down! You can follow the event at their blog, which is supposed to have live updates during the comp. You can also check out some of the action from last years slope style comp, by watching the video I made, below…

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

I’ve re encoded this with Sorenson and I’ve adjusted the settings a little this time. I think it plays better now and the audio is a bit better.

Since I shared with you a link to 125 free Final Cut Pro tips and tutorials, I decided to find something for Adobe Premiere. And wouldn’y you know it, the folks over at Audio Video Producer have compiled a bunch of their tips on one page. They cover everything from Adobe Premiere 1.5 up to Premiere Pro CS4 and everything in between. Also included are a few for After Effects 7 and Go Live 6. This is a real nice collection and you’re bound to find something useful, if you do video editing with Premiere.

Some of the free video tutorials you will find there are;

Creating a Moving Filmstrip Look “on the Cheap”

Using The Lighting Effects Filter in Premiere Pro 2.0

Premiere Pro Tutorials, Part 6: Using Photoshop CS3

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 Essential Training: Video Capture

Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 Essential Training: Importing Layered Images

Adobe Premiere Pro Podcast #25: Creating a Sports Highlight Reel (part 2)

And much, much, many, mucho more! For the complete list head on over to

60+ Free Adobe Premiere Tutorials Free Premiere Training Clips, Premiere Techniques, Premiere Tips & Tricks!

It’s a must have bookmark for all Adobe Premiere users.

Enjoy

Here’s a crazy story. And you read the title correctly. Normally I would reserve this story for my tech blog over at www.pccybertek.com, but I let the domain expire and I’m waiting for it to be reactivated. And this was so crazy, I couldn’t let it pass by.

It turns out that the BBC has a tech show called Click, and they wanted to show how easy it was to create a botnet, so they did. That’s right, the BBC hijacked over 22,000 computers to prove a point. Isn’t that illegal?!?! According to the BBC, what they did wasn’t against the law because they did it on the right side of the law.

“If this exercise had been done with criminal intent it would be breaking the law.

But our purpose was to demonstrate botnets’ collective power when in the hands of criminals.”

Huh?!? So if I wanted to show how easy it was to make money selling drugs, to prove my point I could? Or maybe I want to demonstrate how easy it is to kill someone by shooting them in the head, I could blast away and then say “I’m just trying to prove my point. I’m not a criminal or doing it with criminal intent, so it’s ok.  By that logic, there’s a lot of hackers out there that shouldn’t be prosecuted because many of them break into computers, just to see if they can. They aren’t doing it with criminal intent, they just want to prove to themselves that thye have the skills to do it.

After they hijacked the 22,000 computers they used them to spam some e-mail addresses and to do a denial of service attack. Both of which were successful. They did have permission from a security firm to try the denial of service attack, also know as DDOS, on a backup server. And it only took 60 computers to bring down the site.

They say the the botnet has now been shut down, and they have told the victims of the hijack, how to clean the infection and how to patch their computers. One of the things that bothers me about this is they didn’t get permission from any of these people first. Also, being a tech for the last 23 years, I know that installing any program on that many computers is bound to cause a certain percentage of them to crash. I can’t belive they could be that irresponsable and think that they wouldn’t cause anyone any damage or downtime. What about the people that noticed something funny going on with their computer and either spent hours trying to fix it or paid a tech to repair it. What if some of these computers were with an ISP that limits the bandwidth they can use per month, like the cable company does where I live, and then charge you for your overage. Seems like someone didn’t think this through very well. If the BBC doesn’t get charged for breaking laws, I think there’s a good chance of a civil or class action lawsuit. We will see.

If you’d like to see the BBC’s side of the story, check it out here.

I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this. Please leave me a comment about this story.