To anyone who knows Gabe Smith and hasn’t heard yet, he’s been missing for a few days. A bunch of people are currently looking for him, but he seems to have vanished. They haven’t found any leads, but they also haven’t found any bad news either. If you know anything about where Gabe is, please share the info.

9&10 News – Search For Missing Ludington Man
9&10 News – Searchers Look for Gabe Smith 3 Days After He Vanished (Video)
LDN – Ludington man reported missing
WZZM13 – Ludington police search for missing man

Gabe, you better come back with a tan and some good stories!

Couple more LDN articles today (12/12)…
Search turns up no clues
Search for missing Ludington man turns up no clues

Another one (12/13)…
Ludington man still missing

Ludington Police Chief Mark Barnett said rumors that Smith had been found are untrue and stressed that there was nothing new in the investigation as of this morning.

12/14
Police search water for missing man

12/15
Ice poses problem to divers, marine patrol searching for missing Ludington man

12/17 WOOD TV 8 finally decided to give Gabe some coverage…
Search expands for Ludington man

12/28 They’re still looking for him…
Search continues for Gabe Smith

1/8
Divers use sonar to search for Gabe Smith
Search continues for Gabe Smith

Been a while since I took any good pics of Louie. He shed again this weekend, and has been showing some pretty bright colors. I managed to get a shot of him while he was climbing down the thermometer wire (he likes to climb up it and sleep at the top).

Then while I had that image up on the screen, he saw it and puffed up like they do.

Those aren’t actually as bright as he’s been, but it gives you an idea how much bigger and brighter he’s gotten. Check out http://images.invisibill.net/chameleon/ for the older pics.

This is WordPress. Neato.

A while back, my brothers wanted a WiFi access point so they could play online games on the Gameboy DS. I ended up picking up a Linksys WRT54G for them, with the intention of running one of the open firmware packages on it. After getting it home, I learned that Linksys had switched the newest version of the router to VxWorks, making it incompatible with the custom firmware. I got it working mostly the way I wanted¹ with the Linksys firmware, so I mostly forgot about it.

I recently got looking at the custom firmware stuff again, and found that Jeremy Collake (aka db90h) had found a way to load the custom firmware onto the VxWorks routers. I followed his step-by-step instructions and now have a WRT54G v5 running DD-WRT Micro. There’s some bad blood between Jeremy and DD-WRT now, and I’ll probably switch to something else once I do some more research, since my opinions seem to match Jeremy’s. But for now, DD-WRT is working like a champ, making this (almost) brand new Linksys as functional as the D-Link router I got for $20 almost 7 years ago.

¹ For some reason, most broadband routers don’t seem to think reserved DHCP is important. “Reserved” or “static” DHCP is when your DHCP server always assigns a certain IP address to a certain PC. You can leave all your PCs set to automatically configure via DHCP, but each PC will always get the same address. Having a constant address is a requirement for port forwarding, which almost all broadband routers have. However, most tell you that to get unchanging IPs for use with port forwarding (something that almost everyone will need to use at some point if you do anything more than looking at websites and checking your email), you should disable DHCP on the router and manually configure the network settings on all your PCs. Not only is that more work for the user, but it also makes it much easier to make a typo in a config or duplicate an address on two devices. It also involves reconfiguring any guest’s computer to get it to work on your LAN. With more and more devices becoming WiFi-capable, the number of devices on home LANs is only going to increase, making this problem more and more of an issue. Almost every non-embedded DHCP server has this option, so it’s nothing exotic. The D-Link DI-704 I got in 2000 for $20 has it, so it’s not something too complicated for a home router. I really have no idea why most of the “advanced” routers sold today still don’t have that option. I will never purposely use a router that doesn’t. I’ve personally recommended against Linksys (and other brands) to a number of people specifically because of this.

He called Lt. Dan!

How’s that for an update?

The Syclone is on the road again!

More on the Spamhaus legal saga…

There’s a Slashdot article regarding Spamhaus’ warning that the spamhaus.org domain might get suspended due to all the lawsuit stuff. It looks like a bit of inconsistency may be their biggest weak spot – rather than completely ignoring all these legal threats (as they have no jurisdiction over UK companies), they originally had the lawsuit moved up from a local court to a US federal court. That implies that the US does indeed have jurisdiction in the matter – why should you care about the details of a lawsuit that doesn’t apply to you?

Anyway, if you want to visit Spamhaus or are having problems with the SBL/XBL, use spamhaus.org.uk instead of spamhaus.org. You may be interested in Legal Threats and Lawsuit Answers and copies of spam sent by e360insight. This spam was sent to an address that has never belonged to any person. It was created by a typo when it was entered into the Internic database years ago during a domain registration. Thus, everything sent to it is 100% guaranteed spam. <sarcasm>Hmmmm, I wonder how they opted in to receive those valid, valuable marketing emails…</sarcasm>

PhishTank is a new service by the OpenDNS guys. It’s a public clearinghouse of phishing data. Users submit phishing sites/emails, and other users verify whether or not it’s actually a phish. The data is all available via API, which means people can make cool apps that access this growing wealth of data. A web browser could check URLs you visit, or Spamassassin or your mail client could check emails for phishing links. The FAQ has more info, but this looks to be a very good idea. PhishTank is also tied into the OpenDNS free DNS service, so it will help block phishing sites before OpenDNS users even see them, and in the future OpenDNS’ other sources of phishing data will feed into PhishTank as well.

There’s a new email going around stating that Steve Linford/Spamhaus recently lost an $11.7 million lawsuit and they are now starting a class action lawsuit against Spamhaus, Linford, users/supporters of Spamhaus, and ISPs who deny service based on Spamhaus.

The email neglects to mention a few details though. The lawsuit was filed in an Illinois court. Spamhaus is based in the UK and does not have any sort of presence in Illinois, which means the court has no jurisdiction over them. This page is the Spamhaus response to the filing of that lawsuit, pointing out this fact. The page also points out other flaws in the lawsuit, including the facts that Spamhaus doesn’t block anyone from sending any email (it allows Spamhaus users to block incoming emails) and that they failed to follow proper legal procedure in the lawsuit (serving the Temporary Restraining Order via email and falsely claiming that Spamhaus does business in Illinois). This page is an answer to the current claims.

The email points to the news.admin.net-abuse mailing list and recommends searching Google for “Spamhaus Terrorists” to find out the truth about this situation. n.a.n.a currently has a bunch of posts from people who were spammed with this crap about a Spamhaus Lawsuit. The Google search returns some opinions about the legitimacy of the Spamhaus blacklist, many with responses stating that Spamhaus is one of the most reliable anti-spam organizations around.

The fact of the matter is that I too was spammed with this junk. It was sent to my abuse-reporting address. I have never used this address for anything other than listing it as an abuse contact. It did not come to my main email address, which is advertised in everything I do. A number of email blacklists similar to Spamhaus have become what the editorials claim about Spamhaus: they block a bunch of innocent users (either because they’re incompetent and/or apathetic about doing it properly or in order to cause lots of collateral damage to force the provider to get rid of spammers) and use the blacklist to further their own vendettas (blocking anyone they don’t like or who they disagree with). I can’t say anything for certain, but I’ve personally found the same results that many others have: Spamhaus is one of the better ones out there.

The email also claims that the SBL that Spamhaus charges for can be found at http://cbl.abuseat.org/ for free. Again, that’s not exactly true. The XBL is a list of exploited machines which are sources of junk. The XBL includes the CBL list as well as NJABL data. The SBL is a separate list of spammer IP addresses. There is a combined SBL-XBL which can be queried all at once. So the CBL is part of a list run by Spamhaus which is similar to the SBL. As for being free, the SBL is free for general use. For huge ISPs making lots of requests against the list, they offer a Datafeed service which transfers a copy of the list to the ISP’s own server. That is a paid service.

Also, the bottom of the CBL FAQ actually states Spamhaus is one of the most respected anti-spam organizations in the world. They recommend that you use Spamhaus’ XBL rather than querying the CBL directly.

To sum all that up, this letter is a lie from a spammer, trying to cause problems for an anti-spammer in order to increase their own profits. If you’re interested, here are the definitions of spam by Spamhaus and by SpamCop.