Lee.org

Playland-Not-At-The-Beach is Closing on Labor Day. They had a good run! I went a couple times, took a few dates there and enjoyed the experience immensely!

http://www.playland-not-at-the-beach.org/

TL;DNR: I was getting 50,000 spam email bounces per day. I enabled SPF, DMARC, and DKIM. I made an email filter at Dreamhost to stop the email forwarding madness from Dreamhost to my Gmail account. Problem solved! (for now)

Tens of thousands of people have been getting spam claiming to be from Lee.org. (Update 8-4-18: HUNDREDS of thousands 🙁 ) First, I’m sorry about that! Second, it’s not actually coming from me. Third, I documented below how you too can stop spam from being spoofed from your domain.

I was alerted to this when I got 20,000 email bounces last week from a letter sent in my name. That one started:

From: Mr-Williams <lee@lee dat org>
Subject: Re: Your Outstanding Bill Payment notification
How are you doing today? I am Pleased to inform you that we have made arrangement with bank of America to release your payment sum of $10.3 Million dollars…

I realized that my (geekspeak alert!) SPF record was incomplete. So bad actors were able to pretend to be me and send zillions of spams in my name. I had incorrectly set my SPF record in my DNS to:
TXT v=spf1 include:netblocks.dreamhost.com
but it should have been set to:
TXT v=spf1 include:netblocks.dreamhost.com -all

Without the “-all”, SPF wasn’t working to stop spam in my name!

Here’s what one of the spam email headers looked like:

Authentication-Results: spf=neutral (sender IP is 201.162.82.32 (In Brazil, definitely not from my mail host!!!))
smtp.mailfrom=lee.org; hotmail.com; dkim=none (message not signed)
header.d=none;hotmail.com; dmarc=none action=none header.from=lee.org;
Received-SPF: Neutral (protection.outlook.com: 201.162.82.32 is neither
permitted nor denied by domain of lee.org)

MXToolbox is what keyed me in to what was going wrong. Thanks!

Other good tools are:
http://www.openspf.org/SPF_Record_Syntax
GSuite Toolbox Check MX
mxtoolbox.com
https://mxtoolbox.com/domain/lee.org/
And the whole mxtoolbox site

And thanks to Shehz for the helpful comment!

Update 8-3-18
I also added a DMARC record to my DNS
It’s a TXT record under lee.org that looks like so:
_dmarc TXT v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; ruf=mailto:[myDMARCemailaddress]@lee.org; rua=mailto:[myDMARCemailaddress]@lee.org; sp=n
one; ri=86400
So now email receivers know definitively what to do with spam coming to them from lee.org. And I get a report of when a bounce happens. I initially set p to “none” and got a few correct DMARC reports. Now it’s “quarantine” and in a little while I’ll set it to “reject”.

Update 8-3-18 #2
With DMARC enabled, I’m getting fifteen hundred reports a day telling me that spam “from” lee.org is being blocked. Ugh, sorry world! That tide is stopping now!

I got help with DMARC from these sites:

* https://dmarcian.com/
* https://dmarc.org/
* https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=dmarc%3alee.org&run=toolpage

Update 8-22-18
I averaged 700 DMARC spam reports per day for the last 7 days.

Update 10-19-19 I got rid of the mailto: fields in my DMARC entry. I’m tired of getting kinda-pointless DMARC messages.

Update 10-18-18

Dreamhost shut off my email temporarily twice recently because the quantity of spams being forwarded from my Dreamhost lee.org account to my Gmail account were getting the better of them. Ugh. Here was the suggestion from Toby at Dreamhost:

SPF and DKIM records only help if the receiving server checks them. I would advise not to forward to gmail as this causes server load issues for everyone else on the server if you do run into further problems with this. You can configure your Gmail client to retrieve your email directly from Dreamhost’s server using POP3, and discontinue the use of your forwarder.

You’ll get all the benefits of Google SPAM filter as well, and this will be functionally equivalent to your current configuration. For more information on how to set up the Google side of things, please refer to the following article:

https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/214870568-How-to-check-your-DreamHost-email-at-Google

Additionally you can setup filtering to filter out these spam message so
they don’t forward nor clog up your email box.

https://help.dreamhost.com/hc/en-us/articles/215030678-Custom-filters-How-to-enable-message-filters-on-an-email-address

I set up POP3 fetching and created some custom filters.  I noticed that Gmail fetches about 200 emails per grab and it runs every 5 minutes or so. That means if I’m getting a lot of spam, Gmail won’t be able to keep up with fetching the mail! I just tested this and… OMG I opened the floodgates and started getting 250 email bounced PER MINUTE! It is no freaking wonder why Dreamhost turned off my email forwarding for a while!! Here’s a snapshot of Gmail and Dreamhost failing to keep up with the full force of spam with the spam floodgates wide open.

I deleted my spam folder with 1,500 emails and closed the floodgates by putting some filters in place at Dreamhost. But even 15 minutes later, old spams were still slowly trickling into the spam folder… Looking at the headers, it’s hard to tell if Dreamhost started choking/rate limiting or Gmail was choking/rate limiting.

I turned off POP3 mail fetch and left the mail filters in place. All is well now!

It was as simple as setting Dreamhost Panel | Mail | Message Filters | to “First, delete emails with [bad actor] in the body and then stop.”

Can you help me find this very old movie that has been bouncing around my head for the last 45 years or so?

I remember a scene where a very classic “retro” shaped rocket (silver shiny metal, torpedo shaped, 3 or 4 nice tailfins) is flying around and it lands on a very stark, red ball-of-silly-putty looking planet. They think things are going to go well until someone gets out of the ship in their coolio shiny silver metal with red trim space suit. They realize the planet is actually alive and sucking the ship down into it’s gooey surface. They try to take off but it’s in vain, the ship gets sucked into the planet. Other ships get sucked down into the multiple planets that are bounding around.

There’s lots of silver and red rockets flying around and … something … something… I don’t recall since I was only half-watching it and I was like 8 years old! It had a look like it was a scary sci-fi movie. From the appearance of the sets and the color textures, I’d guess the movie was made in 1965-1968 or so but I could be wrong. It’s possible all the actors were Japanese.

I saw the movie on broadcast television at my neighbor Lisa’s house in the New York area sometime around 1975-1979. I’ve looked at the old TV series that were on then: Creature Feature, Fright Night, Chiller Thriller… but I haven’t come across my film yet!

Oooh. Could it possibly be the 1961 Battle of the Worlds?! Hmm, It aired on September 22nd 1979 on WOR-TV Channel 9 at 1AM, but it would be weird if I was over at my neighbor’s house on my birthday at 1 o’clock in the morning (the VCR hadn’t been invented yet!)… hmmm. I don’t think that’s the film.

I carefully reviewed the terrific Drive In Movie site with old horror movie series to no avail, but it may have slipped through my fingers. I’ve ambled through the encyclopedic DVD Drive In site but was overwhelmed with all the films there!

Do you remember this movie?

In August, I will start my second year as an OT as as a full time pediatric occupational therapist with West Contra Costa Unified School District!

I’ve been looking at the benefits package and OMG, there is a retirement plan. They’ll pay me money for just… being. Working in tech for so long, this is a completely foreign concept. And. I. Love. It!

What do you think is the best growth stock?

I’ve managed my own stock portfolio for many years and I’ve done pretty well but my portfolio needs some new blood. Since I’ve been in grad school for 3 years, I didn’t think much about investing. What do you think about cannabis-based companies? Canada just legalized recreational cannabis (!!). Maybe I should add Canopy Growth Corp, a Canadian cannabis company to my portfolio. What do you think? What is your hot stock pick?

My current investments are: Amazon, Google, Netflix, and Tesla. Netflix has done VERY well for me over the years but I definitely need to diversify!

Write your California Assemblyman to stop a bad flame effects bill from becoming law.

In brief: In response to Elon Musk selling a flame thrower (actually, not really, it’s more of a big propane torch), a California assemblyman wrote a bill to “stop all that nonsense”. But it doesn’t even do that. It just… well read my letter to my assemblymember! Then find your assemblymember at the link below, copy, paste, edit for yourself and send a letter! Personal grudges and headline grabbing are not valid reasons for enacting law!!!

Here is the text of the bill
AB-1949 Explosives: flamethrowing devices.(2017-2018)

Find your assemblyman and write to them!

http://assembly.ca.gov/assemblymembers
or here:
http://findyourrep.legislature.ca.gov/

To the Honorable Assembly Member Tony Thurmond, / To the Honorable Senator Nancy Skinner,

I would like to voice my opposition to AB-1949 “Explosives: Flamethrowing Devices”.

Flamethrowing device regulations exist to allow people to create safe flame devices for artistic and industrial purposes while limiting the potential danger to people due to poorly created or malicious purposes.

The existing laws and fire codes regarding flamethrowing devices are perfectly adequate and does their job well, being enforced by police and fire departments in the state.

AB-1949 aims to add a layer of complexity to how flamethrowing devices are regulated in the state of California. The purpose of the bill as explicitly stated by the author is to regulate how Elon Musk (Tesla, Space-X…) can market and sell his flame throwing devices. However, the actual text of the bill as originally written and as revised would not affect Mr. Musk’s operation except, literally, to add a one-part untrue, one-part redundant warning sticker to the devices he sells. (In the bill, Musk’s device is a “Tier II device”)

The other half of the bill (“Tier I flamethowing devices”) would make it much more difficult and expensive to create larger flame throwing devices without increasing safety in any way over the current laws and regulations.

We are already protected at the state level by Sections 12750, 12755, 12756, 12757, and 12761 of the Health and Safety Code. We are protected by fire codes NFPA-160 (National Fire Protection Association): Standard for Flame Effects Before an Audience, NFPA-58:LP gas code, and NFPA-54: National fuel gas code.

I have been teaching flame effects for 9 years at The Crucible in Oakland CA, a 501(c)(3) industrial arts education center. And I have an ongoing connection with flame effects experts in California, with the Nevada LP Gas Board, and the Burning Man organization.

I would be happy to answer any questions you have about this issue.

Thank you,
Lee Sonko OTR/L

Do you want another perspective? Here is a letter from Lucy Hosking to her assemblymember:

Dear Assemblyman Stone,

I am writing to urge you to withdraw your support for and fight against AB-1949.

This is a bad law, it was introduced as a vanity project, it actually fails to regulate the one device that provoked its creation. It will seriously harm the community of responsible Fire Art and Theatrical Flame Effect practitioners throughout the State.

The proposed law is redundant against long established codes, especially National Fire Prevention Association publication #160, “Flame Effects Before a Live Audience”, and in its wording, it appears to be unaware of the existence of these regulations.

All exhibitions and performances of this art are built and operated in strict accordance with NFPA-160, and are subject to the explicit inspection and approval of local Fire Marshals and CalFire personnel. These regulations are extensive and complete. Our safety record speaks for itself: in 20 years, I am unaware of any accident or incident where a person was injured or property was damaged by any practitioner or legitimate device.

The worst part of AB-1949 is that it attempts to conflate these theatrical and artistic devices with weapons of war. This indicates the complete failure of the authors to understand what they are regulating. As an active artist, I see the joy and wonder these things bring to society, especially to children.

I have worked, performed, and built effects in the Fire Art community for 20 years, and my work has a reputation for being some of the best in the field, so I can speak from experience in this. Mr. Santiago has no such experience and no such expertise and is not a reliable source of information on the subject.

Please contact me by email or telephone and I can answer any questions you may have.

Please come to the UnScruz event at Santa Cruz Co. Fairgrounds on May 4,5 & 6 to see it in real life. Bring your family, the kids will love it. I’ve put you on the guest list.

And please, vote this down!

Lucy Hosking

(Read my previous post “Megan’s Law Wouldn’t Have Saved Megan”).

My first year as an occupational therapist was quite a ride!

Thank you John Swett Unified School District!

The view from my desk, a snapshot in time…

I signed up for this meal replacement drink called Huel. In brief, it disagrees with my tummy just like LOTS of other people. I called them several times asking for help and got no response. I’m now in dispute resolution with Paypal. Don’t buy Huel. It might work for you but if it doesn’t, you’ll have to pull teeth to return it.

Try googling “huel farts” or “huel stomach ache”. Or don’t and just trust me that this is a problem.

In a fit of nostalgia, I’m going to leave this here… It’s a blog post I made around July 2005 that I had taken down for a long time.

————————————————–

Lee isn’t quite a software engineer, and he’s not quite a sysadmin. He’s what you’d call a computer handyman. He shows up with his bucket of cybertools, and fixes what ails you, whether it’s a cyber-garbage-disposal that’s jammed, or a Interweb-door with squeaky hinges, or anything else…

– A satisfied client

I currently telecommute to an office in New York City part-timefull time (as of 9-27-05). I am available to help you the rest of the time!

I’m currently based in San Francisco, CA. Of course, I can telecommute anywhere in the world.

From 2003 to early 2005, I operated a business called “The Computer Guy” in Hackettstown, NJ. My business statement was, “I go to people’s homes and small businesses, fix their computers and show them how they work.” I have over 150 satisfied customers, many with repeat business, from this venture.

A full listing of the computer services I can perform would be quite unweildy. Instead, here is a brief overview:

• Part time IT department – Your 5 person office doesn’t need a full time computer guy.
• Software Quality Assurance – I’ve held manyQA engineer positions
• Customer Support – I’ve been a representative and CS Department manager
• Windows, *nix and a bit of Mac. Servers, services, tools, graphic design & layout.
• Make your WordPress blog shine – spam-proofing, layout, back-end tools
• Networking – running wire, connecting computers
• Spam prevention – I hate spam, I know how to stop those vile people and I can help you.
• Virus/adware/spyware prevention and recovery
• Small jobs – “make my new digitial camera useful”, “show me how to sell stuff on eBay”, “let me get to my company’s network from home”, “help me buy a computer”, “put my record collection on CDs”, while I’m at it, I can even make that awful bundle of wires behind your desk not look like such such a fire hazard.

I charge $70/hour for general services, $40/hr if we schedule 3 or more training sessions. I charge 1/2 of my hourly rate for travel if my round-trip time is more than 1 hour. I am also willing to telecommute. I will, of course give you a free estimate for any services. I like what I do and it shows. I hold my work to the highest standards of integrity. Regardless of the task, I have fanatic attention to detail and completeness when such attention is called for.Feel free to contact me. You can browse my resume. I can give you many excellent references.

I designed Megan’s wedding ring. The jeweler who made the stone is holding a contest for the best jewelry. If you love Megan’s ring, please vote for it right now!

To vote for Megan’s ring, go here and click “Vote for this photo!”

To see all the contest entries go to the contest page

And to see the current offerings from the jeweler, Andrew from Gemfix.com, go to his site

Here’s a blog entry about designing and making her ring.

And PS, yes, I am VERY happy with this jeweler’s work! And the folks at  Edward’s Jewelry and Imports that helped me make the ring!