Very unfortunately, we had to move the servers from one location to another, and it is taking much longer than we thought to get everything back up again. We hope to have this complete in the next day or two. Please do notify the community that we are working as hard as we can on this, and we thank everybody for their patience. We have a big set of exciting jobs we will be sending out as soon as everything is up and running.

So hold tight everybody, R@H hasn't disappeared - just hold tight and wait for the server migration to finish.

Examples of what I've received in the past twelve months:

• Criminal Records Checks for slightly dubious looking individuals
• Correspondence for University Campus groups
• Australian pre-pay mobile telephone account details (including personal details and telephone numbers)
• Canadian mobile telephone account details (including personal information and telephone numbers)
• Birthday greetings, sadly not on the correct day
• Microsoft XBox Live activation emails
• Microsoft Windows Live activation emails (immediately cancelled)
• Pictage emails for someone's wedding
• Science Center of Iowa mailshots
• Someone's Foursquare account emails
• Tuxedo hire information
• Various invoices for purchases, including some antique furniture
• Pharmaceutical company meeting detail emails

... Plus loads of things like home addresses, relatives' names, telephone numbers etc. I email back to the people where I can to advise them of incorrect details, but I can't believe so many people can make such a fundamental mistake as to get their own email address wrong!

Monday rant over...

Anyway, given that TDK have produced their own BD-R media for a while now, I decided to plump down a few units of my local currency and purchase a ten-cake of some TDK 4x 25 GB BD-Rs (part number t78088, I paid £16.15 on the 7th of September and they're currently at £16.84). I'll shortly be doing a test burn with some mixed media and will duly report back with qualitative burn analysis, some general read/write speed observations and any other findings as to the quality of the discs themselves.

UK blank media e/retailers: if you'd like to send me test media for review please get in touch, I'm considering making a miniseries of this due to the absence of decent like-for-like comparisons of currently available blank BD media.

Chris Cook's Lock Screen app works great - and still works with 10.5.8 on the MBP1,1 I use at work. Give it a try if you dislike leaving your Mac unlocked whilst you go do other srs bsns.

(I'm also aware that there's umpteen other ways to both lock a workstation and accomplish Fast User Switching without mousing to the option; look here (StackExchange), here (MacWorld) and here (MacWorld again) for starters.

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(Incidentally if you came here because you thought this might be about me considering moving to the Three mobile network... I've been there in the past. It's a dark place. I'm glad I escaped.)

However, I'm still healthily paranoid :> and I run Peerblock on every machine I touch, including work machines.

Now, dearth of available IPv4 addresses aside - and what seems to me like the increasingly futile idea of blocking ranges of IPv6 addresses! - it's incredibly difficult to accurately maintain a blocklist of IPs, let alone administer or implement dozens of them. There's too much "collateral damage" from innocent IPs. And as more lists are used and combined, the usefulness and accuracy of the blocks exponentially decreases.

Case in point (and this has made me reevaluate the usefulness of apps like Peerblock with lists from services such as iBlocklist): in the past couple of days, on machines running Peerblock with default lists and Kaspersky Internet Security have been unable to finish their daily definitions updates. How come? It turns out that all of the Kaspersky update servers are classified on half a dozen lists as "bad" IPs. To finish an update, you must disable Peerblock - hardly its intended purpose!

Currently, all Kaspersky IPs between 38.113.165.68 and .86 are in a fair few blocklists hosted on iBlocklist, for various reasons - you can view them by going to the iBlocklist query page and tapping in (for example) 38.113.165.86. Here's what I got on a query just now:

This is clearly incorrect, and as an added inconvenience Kaspersky cannot finish a definitions update until PeerBlock is temporarily disabled.

There still seems to be no easy way of flagging up specific IPs or ranges for review if they have been reassigned or are no longer under the control of the original company (as I suspect is the case with these Kaspersky IPs) - how best should we go about notifying iBlocklist as to the inaccuracy of the blocklist entries?

Anti-Infringement

BayTSP:38.0.0.0-38.255.255.255

level1

Performance Systems International-ed2k/ap2p:38.113.114.164-38.113.175.255

level2

Performance Systems International / Cogent Communications:38.108.107.69-38.114.63.255

level3

PSINet, Inc:38.0.0.0-38.114.63.255

rangetest

Performance Systems International Inc:38.0.0.0-38.114.63.255

Primary Threats

Performance Systems International-ed2k/ap2p:38.113.112.43-38.113.175.255

Business ISPs

Performance Systems International:38.0.0.0-38.255.255.255

ipfilterX

TMEOH PSI:38.0.0.0-38.255.255.255

United States

United States:38.0.0.0-38.255.255.255

Now, this is obviously far too much of a kneejerk reaction; some lists have the entire Class A range blocked and the rest have a good old dollop listed! Hammer to crack a nut anyone? Obviously one need not use every list, but the problem remains that popular programs such as Peerblock download and use several of these lists by default (including the "level1" list), and these are not being kept up to date by Bluetack, the supplier. (This has been an ongoing problem for some time).

The more you use these lists, the more you'll find legitimate IPs being blocked - I explicitly have to allow all the BBC IP addresses to use their web sites, which is intensely frustrating. My "permallow.p2b" exceptions list grows in size each day... So take everything with a pinch of salt! Disabling HTTP is a bodge workaround, but programs like Kaspersky will often use UDP on port 2001 (for example) to update, and those will always fall foul of the egress traffic block as long as people keep on using the massively popular, but stale, blacklists.

Keep watching the log windows...

[07:06.55] * `Assassin (~blank@71-8-56-51.dhcp.leds.al.charter.com) has joined #twitter
[07:07.12] <`Assassin> PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE MAKE TWITTER GO AWAY
[07:07.22] <`Assassin> It keeps following me all over the internet.
[07:07.39] <`Assassin> I can't browse without it hassling me to follow it.
[07:08.07] <`Assassin> I don't want to follow it. Leave me alone.
[07:08.18] * `Assassin (~blank@71-8-56-51.dhcp.leds.al.charter.com) has left #twitter ("Leaving")

That is all... (if you want to follow me, feel free - I'm @christopherw, and you can see my latest 140 character utterances to the right of this entry)

However, YouTube awaits! The last time I searched for sewing knot guides all I could find were people attempting to demonstrate as fast as humanly possible, but this time I found some good 'uns:

And now my gloves are fixed! Time to go put whip stitches in everything I own.