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spammers - can linking be disabled?

The truth may be out there, but not nearly as out there as the conspiracy nuts
 
Cagey said:
Interesting. In other coincidental news, the trees have dropped all their leaves :icon_biggrin:
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Whoa.....this goes way deeper than I thought....
 
Oh, you don't know the half of it. We're heading for a disaster of biblical proportions. Real wrath of God type stuff. The dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria! Why, just after the all the leaves fell off the trees, it snowed on them so I couldn't rake them up! In Michigan!  Dark times are coming, my friend.
 
Nightclub Dwight said:
How about just not clicking on a spam thread?
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For individual members, they, of course, could do that.

But sometimes it is not always obvious that it is a spam thread. Even if it is I will often report them so they can be dealt with. One of the latest ones the content that was linked to and visible in the thread was definitely NSFW etc.

The key point is how do we stop spam from getting onto the forum, and if new members are not able to post links etc without mod approval it would reduce the effect the spambots could have.
 
For those not seeing the harm... imagine instead of regular porn, that last one was kiddie porn. Your computer is now in any traffic analysis database, and you have the images cached on your device, possibly in some place non obvious to you. Now imagine that the same miscreants who hijacked the forum get raided, you show up in the logs, search warrant, bam. It might seem far fetched, but it's scarily very possible.
 
WiFi connections frighten me for the same reason. Who knows what kind of mental defective parks in front of the house or lives next door and decides to use your connection to collect, infest, or otherwise do malicious things, leaving you holding the bag when the authorities catch up?
 
Which is why you put the strongest possible authentication on your WiFi, limit the connection to known MAC addresses only, and if at all possible, try to set up your access points and/or antennae to have as much signal as possible inside your building and as little as possible outside.
 
ByteFrenzy said:
Which is why you put the strongest possible authentication on your WiFi, limit the connection to known MAC addresses only, and if at all possible, try to set up your access points and/or antennae to have as much signal as possible inside your building and as little as possible outside.
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Exactly. White list only currently active, known devices in your Wireless MAC Filter. Limit the strength of the signal emanating from your controlled space, use a strong, discrete password to access your router, require a strong WPA2 pass phrase, turn off Guest Access and disable SSID broadcast. 

Method is not foolproof. Someone could clone the MAC of an approved device, but most people looking for a quick access point for nefarious deeds, will probably look for an easier target. Can't absolutely keep them out, but you can make it not worth their while.
 
Boy, is my face red. I didn't even know you could do that. But, I looked through the router setup and sure enough, I can enter a list of authorized addresses only. Don't know how I missed that before.
 
It's not something that many people use, white listing can be a PITA. Especially at my house where it seems everyone changes devices all the time. I went so far as to keep a running list of everyone's devices and addresses. That way when my son shows up with an iPod he hasn't used in years, we can activate access without digging thru menus to find the MAC.
 
I don't generally have any strange addresses showing up here, but there are probably 10-12 permanent devices I'll have to look up. All the computers, TVs, phones, etc.
 
Cagey said:
I don't generally have any strange addresses showing up here, but there are probably 10-12 permanent devices I'll have to look up. All the computers, TVs, phones, etc.
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Remember, this only works with wireless devices. Anything hardwired has access regardless. Someone plugs in an ethernet cable, they're in, unless you have DHCP turned off. (Truly a PITA! I did that for a while, assigning static IPs to everything....) But you can limit the number of allowable DHCP clients to the exact number of devices you need.
 
Makes sense. Not my house, though, so I don't know if/when I'll get around to hardwiring things. Maybe next summer. Local ISP replaced all the copper with fiber this summer but we can't really take advantage of it due to wireless limitations.
 
Well, you actually do an awful lot including securing ports on a wired network. But not on the average home device. But certainly, in the enterprise all of this stuff and more is available. Sadly it is not always used.
 
When I'm not on my desktop, I disconnect my modem.... Yes, I still use a wire coming in the house from outside.
 
AirCap said:
When I'm not on my desktop, I disconnect my modem.... Yes, I still use a wire coming in the house from outside.
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Old school! Who'd a thought....  :headbang:
 
Not an option for me... When I'm not at my desk, or not even in the home, wheels still keep turning and want to share the fact with the outside world. There will probably be things from my IT setup talking to each other (not everything is in one house, or even in the same country...) several years after I'm gone.
 
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