Grab my latest userContent.css to pick up the current state of the art in ad blocking. Installation directions here. Also with the directions is some new information on how to block Flash advertisements. Clean up your web surfing the easy way!

Now you can block ads in your email as well. If you are using the Thunderbird email client, simply follow my instructions here to get rid of pesky ads in your email.

Looking for a good Oldies internet music station? Capital Radio is way out in front of the rest. You can find them in the 70's/80's section of your iTunes Radio listings, or you can go to their website and click on the listen link.

The station plays 50's through 80's. The best aspect (aside from being commercial free) is that the playlist stresses the songs that aren't played by those other oldies stations. You are much more likely to hear Elvis's Guitar Man than Heartbreak Hotel.

I have no financial interest in Capital Radio, just sharing the love for my favorite station.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer has written a letter meant to put the heat on the P2P providers. Or has he? In the metadata of the email a "stevensonv" is present as an author.

Vans Stevenson is the Senior VP for state legislative affairs for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The MPAA denies writing the letter.

Check out these stories (New York Times, Guardian Unlimited) on how Amazon accidentally revealed the real identities of book review authors in the Amazon store.  It's an amusing example of the privacy risks and the spoofing risks of anonymous commentary on the net.

Check out these recent entries in my Apache log files:

Both of these entries have a few interesting points. They are from the same ip address, which does not resolve to anything. They both report a user agent of "MSIE 6.0", which is not the actual user agent string of any version of IE. And they both point to fake blogs.

Neither of these sites has an actual link to my site. So the referrer strings are fake.

Looking up the domains reveals that both sites have a lot in common:

Domain Name: kwlablog.com Name Servers ns1.kwlablog.com 141.85.3.109 ns2.kwlablog.com 141.85.3.109 Domain Created: 11/8/2003 Domain Expires: 11/8/2004

Domain Name: jennifersblog.com Name Servers ns1.jennifersblog.com 141.85.3.106 ns2.jennifersblog.com 141.85.3.106 Domain Created: 11/8/2003 Domain Expires: 11/8/2004

But the sites have different names/addresses for Administrative, Billing, & Technical contacts.

Visiting the sites reveals that they have blog entries that are just links to news stories. And most of the other links on the sites (like the archives links) don't actually do anything.

What is the purpose of these fake blogs? And what is the purpose of scattering them around webserver logfiles in the form of referrer strings? Are these sites trying to take advantage of the recent trend to post referrer links within page content? Are they using this fact to try to boost their search engine pagerank by appearing in this generated page content?

I've found some blog entries on the referrer spamming I mention in the previous floppaganda post. You can find some good discussion at net warriors.org blog.

Check out these blog entries in particular: More Referrer Spamming, Referrer SPAM updates, Referrer Spamming, wrap up.