First off I better explain what a WISP , it means Wireless Internet Service Provider. For this sorry tale the WISP in question is OceanTelecom who operate in West Waterford/East Cork.

I got a call the other day from my friend’s wife who was having problems receiving mail from her eircom.net account when using POP to retreive it. Sometimes she would get some mail and other times none. Using the webmail interface to her account she could see her mail there. All this started she claimed around two weeks ago.

Strange thought I, but then she mentioned that she had gotten a few spam reports in her mail.

Even stranger thought I, so I asked her to forward one of them on to me and here’s what I saw:

This mail was generated automatically from Endian Firewall, which runs on
efw1-oceantelecom.localdomain.(none) for scanning all mails for spam and viruses.

In a mail sent to you a virus has been found.

Virus name: Suspect.Bredozip-zippwd-2
Sender of the email:  “DHL Manager Felipe Dove” <shipping@dhl.com>
Subject: DHL delivery problem number 25130.
Connection date: POP3 from 149.5.34.3:11778 to 159.134.198.135:110
Message File: Per instruction, the message has been deleted.

Instead of the infected email this message has been sent to you.

Regardless of the fact that it was a virus, it was the very fact that it had been intercepted before it got to her PC was annoying her. Her POP session to eircom’s mail server was intercepted by her ISP. Her ISP acted as a POP proxy without her permisison. Therefore her ISP is effectively snooping on her mail. You can see clear as day in the report above that their firewall intercepted her connection to eircom’s POP3 server.

As you can imagine this really, really annoyed her so she rang ComReg (Ireland’s Communications Regulator) to find out if OceanTelecom were allowed to do this. ComReg said it was a grey area and advised her to contact the office of the Data Protection Commissioner which she duly did. The advice she received from the DPC was that they should not be snooping on her mail as her mail is not being hosted by her ISP.

With this information in hand, she rang OceanTelecom to compain and promptly received torrents of abuse from the owner! Ranting and raving about how he is protecting his network, etc, etc and if she didn’t like it she could cancel her account! How about that for customer service?

But when she informed him that she had already contacted ComReg and the DPC he terminated the call! He hung up a call from a loyal customer of over two years!

She rang me yesterday to tell me what had happened and that that she was naturally going to change her ISP which is only right IMHO.

So, for anyone looking to choose an ISP keep this information in mind. An ISP is an internet service provider. Their only obligation should at it’s most basic level to provide you with access to the internet and nothing else. Everything else should be optional. How you use your internet connection should be of no interest to your ISP once you keep within the terms of your contract, the laws of the land and adhere to their fair use policy. You can view eircom’s policy here.  Some choice quotes from their policy are:

eircom net will use its reasonable endeavours to prevent unauthorised access to the Service by third parties, but shall have no liability to the Customer for any unauthorised access to the Customer’s computer system. The Customer is responsible for selecting and properly using any security procedures made available by eircom net as well as other procedures and measures necessary to safeguard and back-up the Customer’s files, data and programs or any other form of information

and

You acknowledge that eircom net has no control over the information which can be accessed by using eircom net services and that we do not examine the use to which you or other users put the Services or the nature of the information you or they are sending or uploading. We therefore exclude all liability of any kind for the transmission or reception or such information of whatever nature.

Pretty much common sense. The onus is on the customer to remain secure, eircom as an ISP only provide a service which is more than can be said for OceanTelecom.

However I understand that OceanTelecom is a privately owned business and ultimately it is their network and they can pretty much do what they want but I would not have expected that to include interfering with clients  e-mail that is hosted elsewhere. I certainly wouldn’t like my ISP reading my mail before me. Some serious privacy implications there.

If you are an OceanTelecom customer or are considering becoming one, based on the above I would suggest you avoid them or terminate your subscription. If anything the shocking and abusive customer service alone should be good enough reason.

So from the 17th August to today here are some interesting (I think) stats:

30.3% of visitors are running Windows XP
12.2% are using Windows Vista
10.2% are using a Linux Distribution
6.7% are using MacOS

The web browser stats are probably more interesting:

40.2% are using a version of Firefox
25.1% are using a version of Internet Explorer
8.2% are using Safari (Google Chrome is included as Safari)
2.2% are using Opera

I have my reverse proxy configured to reject libwww-perl as it is only ever used for something dodgy but from the logs it shows that there were 1,399 rejected libwww-perl useragents making up 0.8% of all browsers.

Next up are spiders. Again I have some of these blocked either by useragent or by IP. For example I have all of Amazons EC2 netblocks dropped on my firewall because again nothing good ever comes from there. However the ones I have not blocked by IP will still appear in my logs albeit having been served a 403. As expected the busiest crawler is Googlebot:

42.8% of spider traffic is from Googlebot
27.4% is from MSNbot
26.3% is Yahoo!’s Slurp

While on the subject of search engines:

98.9% of search engine traffic to my sites came from Google.
1.0% from Yahoo!
1 single solitary visitor came from AOL search!

I already mentioned dishing out 403s based on useragents, well 1.9% of all server responses were 403 with a total of 641 unique IP addresses.

The last time I posted about visitor stats was back in November 2007. Back then as expected the vast majority of visitors were using Windows XP and the most popular browser was Firefox for visitors to my wiki and Internet Explorer on my blog. Windows Vista has also been released by then and was only making up between 5 and 7% of all visits. This time around it is interesting to see that Windows 7 despite being a release candidate and not officially launched yet accounted for almost 3% of visitors.

It’s going to be interesting to watch the uptake of Windows 7.

Someone in Brazil changed their theme on blogspot and very nice it is too I have to say. His design is excellent but for one thing. He is hotlinking to an image on my server. I’m getting hundred of hits for it so I figured I might goatse him.

Here’s what his site looked like:

Before

I decided not to go for the full on goatse and instead substituted in a picture of an erect penis I got on wikipedia. I have a screenshot but obviously it is not safe for work so you need to click below to see what it looked like after I made the switch:

After

Number 1:

And number two:

Anyway I chose a name for my potential business but it was going to be dependent on the availablility of the domain name. Much to my surprise the domain was available so I snapped it up straight away.(via the ever efficient and affordable Blacknight of course.)

But there is a downside. The domain name had belonged to a previous business and the amount of spam being targeted to the domain name is quite significant. Fortunately 99.9% of it is being filtered by my mail gateway.

Another interesting and curious side effect is that the previous owners of the domain had also registered a shortened version of it which they still own. Unfortunately for them they configured it as a CNAME (alias) to the domain that I now control and subsequently my servers are busy rejecting mail and web requests for this second domain.

I still haven’t decided whether or not my business plan will make it off the drawing board. I hope to reach that decision in the next few weeks as I’m currently in negotiations with a potential client so watch this space.

First up was to try to aggregate all my online presences from Twitter, Flickr Last.FM etc. I was considering using FriendFeed but since I’ve recently been extolling the virtues of Microsoft’s Web App Installer, I noticed a new application was available to install called Amplifeeder.

As I tend to like to have quite a lot of control over my own data I decided on this over the alternatives and I have been very impressed. Unfortunately you need a Windows Server with IIS and Microsoft SQL server so if you have a *nix hosting package you will be out of luck.

So my new aggregate site is now available at http://aggregator.sweetnam.eu if you fancy a look.

The next thing on my todo list for my summer holidays is to erect an antenna on the house for yet some more long range WiFi testing. Only thing is I’m terribly afraid of heights

There should now be a widget somewhere on the right of this post with my most recent ‘tweets’ and should you for some reason feel like following me on twitter you can do so by following “rgsweetnam“

Strange.

“I know my DNS server was down for maintenence but I definitely recreated my DNS Zone.”

Quick check,

“Bugger! I forgot to add an entry for blog.sweetnam.eu!”

Oh well, I’m back now.

Have a look at this:

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/02/bushfires_in_victoria_australi.html

They have an RSS feed for their Big Picture series and it is well worth subscribing to.

Time and time again the photos they pick are utterly incredible. Not least of all because they are of a decent resolution and of amazing quality but they are extremely thought provoking. They seem to provide the missing link for where the printed media meets the internet. (Despite that fact that  the images are often from the same sources) However their Big Picture series always takes the form of a photo essay, which I reckon is the feature’s strongest point: Pictures can speak more than words.

The series linked to above are of the recent bush fires in Australia and pictures really do speak more than words in this case. And certainly speak more than any 226px × 180px image that doesn’t link to a more detailed picture can. Or for that matter a 102px × 130px picture that links to nothing on a site that is optimised for a resolution of 640 x 480 ever can.

Once set up I will look after maintenence etc. while they can just blog away. Naturally WordPress was my initial choice for their blog but after a bit of investigation and testing I’m now considering using MovableType, more for a change than anything else but there does seem to be some significant benefits as Michele at Blacknight can testify having migrated to MovableType a couple of years ago.

The person that the new blog is for is reasonably tech savvy as a user and would have no problems with using either, however would anyone recommend one over the other? It has been some time since Michele migrated to MT so I’m wondering if there is any significant advantage any more in moving away from WordPress? Which would you recommend or indeed what would you recommend?