After noticing that the majority of the .ICU spam campaigns were drying up, I headed over to Namecheap to find out which gTLD was the next likely target for abuse. Well, what do you know, Namecheap was throwing out .XYZ domains for 1$ a pop.

About half a year ago, I decided to turn off my old Gentoo instance and end my run with WordPress. My current cloud instance is running Ubuntu, and I’ve migrated (most of) my content from the old WordPress installation to Hugo.

This weekend I decided to extract the IP addresses belonging to hosts used in the ongoing .best and .icu spam campaigns. I’ve only got three weeks of logs to work with so the data set is small, but it still paints a somewhat interesting picture.

I’ve made the decision to go ahead and block another one of those pesky new gTLDs that are seemingly exclusively used by malicious actors. Email delivery from .best domains will no longer get past any spam filter under my control.

The Brave Browser is on a mission to fix the web and has been gathering a lot of praise and attention from tech and crypto enthusiasts alike. Brave will diligently protect your privacy by removing intrusive ads and trackers from websites while offering you to view ads delivered through their advertising platform instead.

As a managed service provider (MSP) we’re using an off the shelf remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform. Recently, and just for curiosity’s sake, I decided to take a closer look at the Linux agent offered by this platform. I’ll admit to being somewhat shell-shocked when I discovered that the installer had Slackware Linux on the list of supported distributions.

Yesterday, my Scaleway hosted VPS was scheduled for migration to another physical server. According to Scaleway, the expected downtime was only a few minutes. The maintenance was scheduled to begin at 10:00 UTC, so I was expecting the server to be available when I tried to connect over SSH at 11:30 UTC. Unfortunately, there was no sign of life to be found.

Over the last several months, I’ve seen a steady flow of spam emails containing only a single line of text encouraging recipients to visit a blogspot.com address. Should the recipient choose to follow the link, they would soon find themselves on a cryptocurrency scam site with amazing propositions.

ICANN’s decision to cash in and allow an unlimited number of new gTLDs has provided us with several new TLDs used predominantly for criminal purposes by malicious actors. My inbound mail servers have been flooded with spam from thousands of .icu domains for the better part of 2019.

Patrick Volkerding has finally confirmed the authenticity of the Slackware Linux Patreon page in a post over at LinuxQuestions.org.

After the Slackware Patreon page was initially discovered in mid-June 2019, it has been the source of quite a bit of debate regarding its authenticity. Anyhow, with that question out of the way, the bigger question now is whether there is still enough interest in Slackware Linux to make it a sustainable business for Mr. Volkerding.

In preparation for my move from WordPress to Hugo, I read a few blog posts on the subject to make sure I wouldn’t run into a brick wall. After all, Google had already indexed over 3000 posts covering the subject in detail so what could possibly go wrong?

I was spending an evening window shopping for a future BSD hosting provider when I came across ARP Networks and its list of VPS plans. What caught my attention was not the technical specifications, but rather the naming scheme that I found to be simply astounding.

Last week I noticed yet another ongoing brute-force attack against our managed WordPress hosting. The botnet is very low key and each bot connects on average only once per day. Up until now, I’ve collected in the ballpark of 3100 unique bots.

Your favorite privacy-aware domain registration service now supports DNSSEC with the click of a button. I’m not exactly sure when this got added, but DNSSEC is now available for selected TLDs.

I figured it was about time for this Gentoo powered blog to enjoy the security and performance enhancements provided by TLSv1.3. However, that meant leaving “Gentoo stable” behind and travel on a journey of discovery into the land of the unmasked and dangerous.