It has been my experience that most companies which provide virtual private servers (VPS), bare-metal servers, web hosting, or other cloud services are incompetent at handling abuse complaints. Some of those companies never even respond to an email to their published abuse email address. Others send an automated reply telling you to use their web browser URL to report the abuse (fuck that). And a few are outright antagonistic towards abuse reports (see my articles about aventice.

One week ago I started seeing password guessing attacks using “POST /xmlrpc.php” requests. Yes, that type of attack has been happening since WordPress was first released to the public. What made the recent attacks unique is that they include a “User-agent” header. Something that is exceedingly rare. Even more interesting is that the user-agent values are all from this list: Poster Windows Live Writer WordPress wp-windowsphone wp-iphone wp-android Those are the literal values.

Todays I received the following email from the Family Research Council (FRC) headed by Tony Perkins. A theocratic grifter of some renown. Kim Davis is the county clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky. She has been jailed by a federal judge for refusing to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple. And Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear (D) wants to keep her there. Gotta love the gratuitous swipe at a Democratic governor.

Recently my next door neighbor acquired a female puppy. My two male dogs have been having a great time playing with the puppy. I finally grabbed my expensive Canon 5D Mark III DSLR camera, put the 50mm lens on it, and recorded the dogs playing a couple of nights ago. This is the first time I’ve used the video feature of the camera and was pleasantly surprised. Especially since it was late evening and the light level was low.

When I placed my order for Comcast Xfinity Internet service I deliberately did not provide them with a credit card number. I knew this would cause the Comcast installer to ask for the information needed for Comcast to be paid. I did that because I prefer to pay my utilities from my checking account each month when I receive a bill. The Comcast installer was great to work with. At the end of the process he asked me for my email address.

Just what the world needs — another book about how Christians in America are persecuted. Tony Perkins, head of the FRC (Family Research Council) just emailed me to inform me that I can pre-order his book “No Fear”. I love the first sentence of his email to me: What could God do through you, if you had no fear of man? Clearly the world needs more religious fanatics willing to martyr themselves by committing acts of terrorism so they can be rewarded with 47 virgins in paradise.

The group Majority Ohio has created a video showing how easy it is to edit video footage to make it appear that “pro-life” supporters who are trying to shutdown Planned Parenthood actually support the organization: [https://www.youtube.com/embed/f-8DZ4UfLjA] It isn’t difficult to take sentences (or fragments) out of context and portray them to mean the opposite of what the speaker intended. The irony is that if the forced-birthers get their way and Planned Parenthood didn’t exist there would be even more abortions.

I just watched “Straight Outta Compton”. Which I highly recommend. But that isn’t the reason for this post. The reason for this post is the trailer for “The Martian” which played before the movie. It looks awesome and has a fantastic cast. Best of all the trailer makes it clear the movie will hew closely to the book with a strong emphasis on reason, rationality, and respect for science. I can’t recommend the book highly enough and the movie looks like something I’ll probably watch twice in the theater.

Between 21:00 and 21:30 on 2015-08-17 (UTC-7) my primary server lost its public IPv6 address and my monitoring script started nagging me about the problem. The next morning I rebooted both my public facing router and my primary server. Neither action restored my IPv6 address. After several more hours I decided to power-cycle my NetGear cable modem. I did not power-cycle or do anything else to my public facing router or primary server.

Today a system in Serbia issued a “POST / HTTP/1.1” request to my web server. The data consisted of a seemingly nonsensical sequence of key/value pairs separated by ampersands. This first one was this: n764b3b=ZWNobyAnMW9rMScuIlxuIjtleGl0Ow All of the subsequent key/value pairs had the same value. Here are the keys: n764b3b n828e00 n318a65 nbc8a20 n9e5e25 n22ec2b ndfbe75 n0e7f9c n9e5e25 n95e668 ne91e7a n4a90f1 n39d576 n13e558 nd6e706 n33beb2 nc06699 n78cd5a nb78204 nd335c3 nf03a5d n93bc3c n55d3bf n81977d nf26eee n036581 n108fc5 nb89d65 nfb8c26 n46b398 n01b955 n92001e n1c1ae6 n93bc3c n760097 n23f412 nbc8a20 n59a097 n5388ff n8f249d n9e5e25 n95e668 n93bc3c A Google search suggests that WordPress might have used those keys as nonces.