Tag Archives: spam

Facebook Wins $711 Million From Spammer

Facebook has won a court case against a spammer who was abusing their site to send spam to Facebook users. The spammer known as Spamford, real name Sanford Wallace, is also facing prosecution for criminal contempt of court which could result in prison time. Wallace has also previously been prosecuted by MySpace for abusing their site to send porn and MySpace was awarded $230 million.

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Blocking IP Addresses Using htaccess

I’m writing this because blocking by domain on my hosts pretty much kills my web site and so I have had to learn to block ip addresses. Blocking single ip addresses is simple as you just need something like the following

order allow,deny
deny from 9.120.161.206
allow from all

And that will block the computer at ip address 9.120.161.206 from being able to access your site. But what if you want to block a whole range of ip addresses such as 9.120.161.0 to 9.120.161.255? Well then we just leave off the end number like this

order allow,deny
deny from 9.120.161.
allow from all

Ok so now we get to the clever and damn fiddly bit. As of Apache 1.3 we can use CIDR codes to specify ranges of ip addresses. So another way of writing the above code would be

order allow,deny
deny from 9.120.161.0/24
allow from all

and that would do exactly the same as 9.120.161. but we can do so much more. After the break (ie click the read more link) I will show a list of the CIDR codes and what they do.
Read more »

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