Zaf’s Blog

I’m getting sick of hearing of companies that are deliberately misleading consumers, sometimes to dangerous results, and getting away with it. When a company is caught, they issue an immediate appology, and move on, all is forgiven. The government agencies responsible for protecting consumers issue a press release, and consider the matter closed. “We caught them, they’re sorry they lied to all of you lot, and they promise not to do it again”. Its getting tiresome.

The latest is the Sunscreen debacle. Numerous companies have been advertising their products as having “all day protection”, stating that one application will protect you from sun burn and skin cancer for the entire day. Consumers have, until now, been left to discover the hard way that that is very very wrong.

Even the Commerce Comission itself said that this was unacceptable:

Commission chairwoman Paula Rebstock said “Consumers should not have to find out the hard way, through sunburn and skin damage, that a sunscreen doesn’t provide the protection claimed. The onus is on manufacturers and distributors to ensure the claims made on their products about SPF are accurate.”

But the commerce commission congratulated them on being caught

Commission chairwoman Paula Rebstock said she was very pleased the companies had responded in a responsible manner.

Consider the consequence of what these companies have done: They have lied to consumers, knowingly and willfully, and caused an untold and impossible to calculate number of sunburns, which as we all know from the recent advertising campaign, leads to skin cancer later in life.

Well, I haven’t written anything recently, but I’m still alive.

Whats new? Well, I’ve got a NationState which is going ok, I guess. Having never run a Nation before, I have no idea how well I’m doing.

I also have a Facebook page now. Yes, I’ve relented to the inevitable, and I will strongly resist the urge to discuss how in my day we didn’t have…….

Oh, I’ve also just finished watching the Firefly DVD series (brought it on Amazon). Its an amazing series, and truly sad that its been canceled. Now I just need to get the Serenity DVD too.

Ripe 55 has finished, I didn’t go but I’ve read as much as I can thats come from it. I think the best thing that came from it was this.

According to the latest Herald-DigiPoll, Labour trails National with 36.8% as preferred political party. That said, Helen Clark is still the preferred Prime Minister at 47.4%. Does that means 10.6% of people want Helen Clark, but not Labour? Are they aware what party she belongs to?

Good grief, the state of New Zealand politics is a nightmare. The Prime Minister is in a party that almost 2/3′s of people don’t want in power.

Many people over the last week must feel that Telecom NZ‘s Xtra Internet service have given up on email entirely. Well, you aren’t wrong.

All email for Xtra customers now goes through Yahoo‘s systems. There seems to be very little of Telecom/Xtra’s equipment or systems involved in their own email service now.

Given that Email is an essential Internet service, it is disconcerting when an ISP decides they are no longer capable of providing an email service, and then hand their email service on to another company who seem equally incapable. I acknowledge that Yahoo in general have run an email system for a long time, and it has been generally well received, but their implementation for Xtra customers seems to be rife with problems.

Customers have been reporting massive problems using the new service. Some of the “features” of the new service are:

• The system insists on installing a program on your local computer in order to access webmail. This is just plain wrong for so many reasons.
• The spam filtering system feels that most email messages are spam, including what is, to almost any system, legitimate mail
• The default spam filtering system does not allow you to download mail put in the Bulk folder.
• There is no way to configure the spam filtering system to mark the message as possible spam, whilst still allowing you to download it.
• The system often requires double-login’s to access various pages. This means the user gets prompted for a username & password, they enter the correct details, click Login and are redirected to another page that asks for the same details. This leads users to believe they have initially entered the wrong password.
• The SMTP servers routinely reject mail with a temporary error code. This does not appear to be greylisting, as no white-list is established once the email is accepted.
• Email delays of up to an hour are routinely reported (this is because of the previous problem).

So Xtra now join my list of companies that I actively do not recommend. This means if a customer asks me if they should use Xtra, I will now say, “I strongly do not recommend Xtra as an Internet provider”. I will also be making suggestions to companies to begin moving their services away from Xtra.

My network is often subjected to brute-force SSH attacks. I have no idea how many attacks would actually occur if not for my various defense mechanisms. The first layer of defense is very very good passwords on all accounts, but the next layer is SSH rate limiting. Only a few connections per minute are allowed from each IP to the SSH port. This is done using the IP tables recent module, which is a very powerful module. There are many examples of using this module to block SSH, and the one below is very well published.
(more…)