We Hate Spam, So Here’s A Fresh List of Spam Bots For Your Blocking Pleasure...

We main­tain a vari­ety of web­sites, blogs, con­tent por­tals, mail servers, and other online resources. We’re forced to deal with a daily task of Spam removal and pre­ven­tion. Be it spam-bots, human spam­mers, com­ment spam­mers, and on and on. The major­ity of the time its no more than a nui­sance, and a sim­ple admin­is­tra­tive task. The num­ber one goal of any admin­is­tra­tor is to pre­vent these spam­mers from ever accom­plish­ing their intended goal of com­ment hijack­ing or gain­ing some con­trol over web­site con­tent. But these days spam­mers are get­ting quite sneaky, in fact we’d even go as far as say­ing that some of them are quite good at what they do.

But since they bug us, we’re going to help you in the fight against them and their evil deeds. Below you’ll find a list of IP addresses we’ve per­son­ally com­piled. All the addresses below have recently spammed our servers, and have since been banned.

The first list is sim­ply a list of IP addresses that you can eas­ily load into you favorite anti-spam plu­gin. The sec­ond list is from a .htac­cess file we pro­vided to a client. Have fun, and happy com­put­ing.

Recently active spam­bot IP addresses...

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8.17.84.65
58.137.132.100
63.171.182.6
63.227.242.5
63.253.158.220
67.61.143.217
67.163.0.220
67.181.166.121
78.26.187.114
78.152.106.43
80.38.103.231
83.69.209.194
83.103.113.124
85.112.166.65
88.46.239.43
93.62.4.207
93.81.251.193
110.138.31.73
115.119.35.194
119.225.109.37
120.124.176.217
130.105.36.54
131.107.33.62
144.140.46.10
158.59.200.109
159.214.87.245
161.159.4.33
161.254.6.55
170.207.128.4
174.142.166.205
180.130.166.89
188.73.138.24
189.45.59.76
189.76.222.229
190.2.14.129
194.8.74.220
194.8.75.40 - 194.8.75.163
194.183.86.25
196.211.9.210
200.181.124.57
201.67.137.247
202.108.50.75
202.229.143.64
203.63.26.200
206.123.106.141
208.88.124.83
208.91.245.90
212.113.74.186
212.131.202.194
213.230.22.142
213.130.121.51
217.6.171.194
217.72.242.60
217.196.65.115
218.126.216.117
220.116.127.192

This list can be dropped right into your .htac­cess file...

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order allow,deny
deny from 8.17.84.65
deny from 58.137.132.100
deny from 63.171.182.6
deny from 63.227.242.5
deny from 63.253.158.220
deny from 67.61.143.217
deny from 67.163.0.220
deny from 67.181.166.121
deny from 78.26.187.114
deny from 78.152.106.43
deny from 80.38.103.231
deny from 83.69.209.194
deny from 83.103.113.124
deny from 85.112.166.65
deny from 88.46.239.43
deny from 93.62.4.207
deny from 93.81.251.193
deny from 110.138.31.73
deny from 115.119.35.194
deny from 119.225.109.37
deny from 120.124.176.217
deny from 130.105.36.54
deny from 131.107.33.62
deny from 144.140.46.10
deny from 158.59.200.109
deny from 159.214.87.245
deny from 161.159.4.33
deny from 161.254.6.55
deny from 170.207.128.4
deny from 174.142.166.205
deny from 180.130.166.89
deny from 188.73.138.24
deny from 189.45.59.76
deny from 189.76.222.229
deny from 190.2.14.129
deny from 194.8.74.220
deny from 194.8.75.40 - 194.8.75.163
deny from 194.183.86.25
deny from 196.211.9.210
deny from 200.181.124.57
deny from 201.67.137.247
deny from 202.108.50.75
deny from 202.229.143.64
deny from 203.63.26.200
deny from 206.123.106.141
deny from 208.88.124.83
deny from 208.91.245.90
deny from 212.113.74.186
deny from 212.131.202.194
deny from 213.230.22.142
deny from 213.130.121.51
deny from 217.6.171.194
deny from 217.72.242.60
deny from 217.196.65.115
deny from 218.126.216.117
deny from 220.116.127.192
allow from all

Jan 10, 2010 | Magento, Server 2003, Web Browsers, Web Design, Wordpress | Leave A Comment »

Disable Microsoft Software Wavetable Synthesizer, My Music’s Cutting Out...

We recently encoun­tered a sys­tem that had an inter­mit­tent sound prob­lem. After run­ning for a few days, any music played would fade and recover repeat­edly. After research­ing the prob­lem, we started with a typ­i­cal round of updates to the usual sus­pects. Those being sound card dri­vers, codec’s, any media player soft­ware being uti­lized for play­back. At first this seemed to resolve the issue, but after just a few days, the prob­lem returned.

Not only was this a prob­lem with our media play­ers, but it was also effect­ing stream­ing online music. Our cur­rent favorite online music ser­vice is Last.Fm. After Pandora’s recent deci­sion to limit users free lis­ten­ing to 40 hrs a month.

So at this point we were able to elim­i­nate our browsers and media play­ers, as these were both up to date. The next thing to rule out was our hard­ware. This was sim­ple enough as the hard­ware is a home the­ater sys­tem that’s uti­lized by other devices, all of which never have an issue. By process of elim­i­na­tion were left with dri­vers and media enhance­ment software’s.

As it turns out there’s an enhance­ment loaded by win­dows, our ver­sion being “Win­dows Vista Ulti­mate 64 Bit”. That par­tic­u­lar enhance­ment goes by the name of “Microsoft Soft­ware Wavetable Syn­the­sizer”. When open­ing your sound prop­er­ties from the con­trol panel, you’ll typ­i­cally see 3 tabs across the top of the win­dow. These are, Play­back, Record­ing, and Sounds. You’ll more than likely be on the Sounds tab by default. If win­dows sounds drive you nuts, as they do us, this is a good oppor­tu­nity to dis­able them. Sim­ply choose “No Sounds” from the drop down on the sounds tab. In Vista you also have the option to load the startup sound separately.

Now select the “Play­back” tab, and dou­ble click the upper device, usu­ally called “Speak­ers”. If you’re not sure which device is your default play­back device, play some music and look for the device with active lev­els. Dou­ble click that device and nav­i­gate to the “Advanced” tab. If selected, uns­e­lect both boxes under “Exclu­sive Mode”. Don’t be tempted to increase your sam­ple rate on this tab. Typ­i­cally the defaults are opti­mal, and increas­ing them could lead to an exag­ger­a­tion of what we’re here to fix.

Keep in mind sys­tems will vary in these areas depend­ing on dri­vers, sys­tem setup, and so forth. So you’re set­tings may look slightly dif­fer­ent. Next choose the “Enhance­ments” tab. Dis­able every­thing on this tab, if possible.

Now restart you com­puter, and the issue should be resolved. We men­tion ear­lier in the arti­cle that as part of our diag­no­sis, we updat­ing sys­tem dri­vers and codec’s. In the long run, reg­u­lar updates will lead to a much more pos­i­tive com­put­ing expe­ri­ence, and will dras­ti­cally reduce the num­ber of errors you encounter. Let us know if this was help­ful by leav­ing a reply below. Happy com­put­ing.

Jan 07, 2010 | Computer Repair and Networks, Recommended Software, Web Browsers, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave A Comment »

How Do I Specify a Class For IMG Inserted With Visual Editor...

The fol­low­ing is in response to a ques­tion on WordPress.org. We’ve become extremely pro­fi­cient with word­press in the past few years, and we’re always com­ing up with inno­v­a­tive ways of using this amaz­ing prod­uct. We try to post most all our fixes, hacks, and tricks, in the hopes that it will prove use­ful to some­one. Hope­fully this will be no different.

(more...)

Aug 24, 2009 | Web Browsers, Web Design, Wordpress | Leave A Comment »

I can’t Find My Firefox Bookmarks After a Recovery

Fire­fox has changed the default loca­tion of its book­mark store in Fire­fox 3. It used to be that you could find your book­marks located at

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Documents and Settings\ (name of the user) \Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ (name of the profile) bookmarks.html

This has now been changed to

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Documents and Settings\ (name of the user) \Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ (name of the profile) places.sqlite

Jul 06, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks, Web Browsers | Leave A Comment »