The ongoing struggle

Earlier this evening I received a marketing email from a company I had never heard of, for an event I wasn’t interested in, to an email address I had only ever given to a differently, seemingly-unrelated company that we shall call Company U.

When this sort of thing happens it may be an indication that Company U has leaked their customer address database or else decided to sell the contact details on, so I’d sometimes follow it up instead of just opting out and consigning the address to the bitbucket forever.

In this case as many times before, I decided to have a whinge on twitter about it first.

Anyway to cut a long story short they got in touch, and it turns out that this marketing email has been sent by Company S. Someone from Company S emailed me to apologise and to remove my address from their list.

I asked this person how they obtained my email address that had only been sent to Company U, and they admitted that they used to work for Company U and that their “rampant CRM system” had somehow “indexed all of my PERSONAL emails”.

Now, from my point of view, this would actually suggest that this person has likely taken a database of customers of Company U with him to his new employer.

So, Internauts, do I have a duty to shop this guy to his former employer Company U? Or am I just frothing in my nerdrage here at the terrible inconvenience of being sent a piece of email I don’t want? Is the man a menace, or should I just get over it?

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Update 2011-11-26:

The first attempt worked fairly well. It was not possible to remove the bottle from the ice without filling it with some warm water for a few seconds. I think this was probably because the bottle had a very slight bulge at the bottom.

It would be hard to find a perfectly cylindrical or even tapering plastic bottle, so I will next try the original plastic cup suggestion.

Today one of my rsync backups began failing with:

inflate (token) returned -5
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at token.c(604) [receiver=3.0.3]
rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 373 bytes [generator]: Broken pipe (32)
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(1544) [generator=3.0.3]

It was repeatable when trying to transfer the same file (a large gzipped SQL dump file).

It turned out to be a bug in that version of rsync.

rsync 3.0.3 comes with Debian lenny. In order to get a newer version I have had to use lenny-backports for this. That gets me rsync v3.0.7, which does not exhibit this bug.

(Yes, I am aware that squeeze has been released and this host should be upgraded to that. There is security support for lenny until at least February 2012.)

On November 2nd I received this spam:

(some headers removed; xxxxxxxxxxx@strugglers.net is my censored email address)

Received: from mail15.soatube.com ([184.105.143.66])
        by mail.bitfolk.com with esmtp (Exim 4.72)
        (envelope-from <bounce@soatube.com%gt;)
        id 1RLikr-00070I-6U
        for xxxxxxxxxxx@strugglers.net; Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:53:57 +0000
Received: from [64.62.145.53] (mail3.soatube.com [64.62.145.53])
        by mail15.soatube.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6B324181CFF
        for <xxxxxxxxxxx@strugglers.net>;
        Wed,  2 Nov 2011 14:46:01 -0700 (PDT)
To: xxxxxxxxxxx@strugglers.net
From: events@idevnews.com
Date: Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:00:40 -0700
Subject: BPM Panel Discussion: IBM, Oracle and Progress Software

-------------
BPM-CON: BPM Panel Discussion - IBM, Oracle and Progress Software
-------------
Online Conference

Expert Speakers:
IBM, Oracle, Progress Software
etc..

The email address it arrived at was an email address I created in November 2004 in order to take a web-based test on Red Hat’s web site prior to going on an RHCE course. It has only ever been provided to Red Hat, and has not received any email since 2007 (and all of that was from Red Hat). Until November 2nd.

The spam email contains no reference to Red Hat and is not related to any Red Hat product.

From my point of view, I can only think that one of the following things has happened:

1. Spammers guessed this email address out of the blue, first time, without trying any of the other possible variations of it all of which would still reach me.
2. One of my computers has been cracked into and the only apparent repercussion is that someone spammed an email address that appears only in an email archive from 2004/2005.
3. Red Hat knowingly gave/sold my email address to some spammers.
4. Red Hat or one of its agents have accidentally lost a database containing email addresses.

Possibility #4 seems far and away the most likely.

I contacted Red Hat to ask them if they knew what had happened, but they ignored all of my questions and simply sent me the following statement:

“Hello.

Thank you for contacting Red Hat.

we apologies for the inconvenience caused however we would like to inform you that we have not provided your email address to anyone.

Thank You.

Red Hat Training coordinator.”

That wasn’t really what I was asking. Let’s try again.

“Hi Red Hat Training coordinator,

Thanks for your reply, but I’m afraid I am not very reassured by your response. Do you have any suggestions as to how an email address created in 2004 and used only by yourselves for my RHCE exam managed to be used for unrelated marketing by a third party in 2011, unless Red Hat either provided my email address or leaked my email address?

For clarity we are talking about the email address “xxxxxxxxxxx@strugglers.net” which has never ever received any email except from Red Hat, until yesterday, when it got some unwanted
marketing email from a third party.”

“Hi Andy,

Please be assured that Red Hat does not circulate student’s e-mail address to any third party.

Thanks,
Red Hat Training Coordinator”

I’m not getting anywhere am I? I was only after some reassurance that they would actually look into it. Maybe they are looking into it, and for some reason decided that the best way to assure me of this was to show complete disinterest.

Oh well, I can send that email address to the bitbucket, but I can’t help thinking it’s not just my email address that has been leaked.

Anyone else received similar email? If so, was it to an address you gave to Red Hat?

Update 2011-11-10: Someone suggested I politely ask the marketer where they obtained my email address. It’s worth a try.

“Hi Integration Developer News,

May I ask where you obtained my email address
“xxxxxxxxxxx@strugglers.net”? I’m concerned that it may have been
given to you without my authority.

Thanks,
Andy”

Also I have now been contacted by someone from Red Hat’s Information Security team, who is looking into it. Thanks!

September 4th 2011

I cut my left index finger somehow. Slightly painful, but it was only a little cut so I thought no more.

Early hours of September 5th 2011

I noticed that my finger was swollen, and its knuckle also. It was slightly more painful to bend my finger.

Early morning of September 5th 2011

I noticed that there was a red line between my swollen knuckle and my wrist, following the line of the tendon. It was hot and tender to the touch.

Late morning of September 5th 2011

I noticed that the red line had now gone past my wrist and was snaking its way up my arm. It was very warm to the touch. I started to get a bit worried about it. It varied over time in how angry it looked; the picture on the right was taken when it wasn’t very visible.

We had a grocery order arriving between 1pm and 3pm and I hadn’t had any sleep, so I decided to get some sleep and see what it looked like after the order had arrived.

The order arrived near 3pm. The red line on my arm had faded to almost invisibility. Unless you were looking for it you probably wouldn’t have spotted it. My finger wasn’t so sore any more either. I decided there was no need to worry about it.

Evening of September 5th 2011

We had dinner and started to watch a movie. My arm got more and more uncomfortable, the red line was showing more than ever, and I noticed that it was now just starting to go above my elbow.

At this point I decided that I did actually want to see a medical professional. Having recently seen what happened with Maria’s foot I had a bit of the fear.

We made our way to Ashford Hospital NHS walk-in centre, which is a short bus ride away. It’s open until 10pm seven days a week, with last consult at 9.30pm. We arrived at about 8.20pm and I described my situation, only to be told that they were not seeing anyone else that evening. I was given the choice of out of hours GP or accident and emergency.

I called the out of hours GP number. A callcentre operative took my details and a doctor phoned me back within about 15 minutes. He said that I should have someone look at my arm, and arranged an appointment with a doctor based at West Middlesex hospital. It was the last available appointment, 9.30pm, and I wasn’t sure we could get there in time. I knew there was also an A&E at West Middlesex though, so I figured that if we missed the appointment then I would just go to the A&E there anyway.

One £20 cab journey to Isleworth later, we arrived at West Middlesex hospital at about 9.27pm and I was seen by a doctor.

She immediately said that I had an infection which was travelling under my skin, with the red line being cellulitis. She said that it was good that I hadn’t delayed seeking medical attention any further, because if the infection reached the lymph nodes in my arm pit then I would likely need intravenous antibiotics as opposed to the oral antibiotics she prescribed me (500mg flucloxacillin four times a day, 500mg penicillin four times a day).

Early hours of September 6th 2011

My hand was by now even more swollen and finger near the wound very painful to the touch. Even resting my hand on a pillow was painful. My whole arm was stiff and slightly painful to move, with some pains around half way between elbow and arm pit. I couldn’t sleep.

The red line of cellulitis seemed to have faded away, however. It was still too soon to tell if this was due to the antibiotics (of which I had only taken 500mg of each thus far) doing their stuff, or just a coincidence.

September 11th 2011

There’s only 24 hours of medication left now. Pretty much since the 7th things got better very quickly with only my finger remaining sore.

Right now the skin all around the area that was infected has flaked off and shiny new skin is underneath. Thanks modern medicine! I like not dying of septicaemia.

By default, a Linux host on an IPv6 network will listen for and solicit router advertisements in order to choose an IPv6 address for itself and to set up its default route. This is referred to as stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC).

If you don’t want a host to automatically configure an address and route then you could disable this behaviour by writing “0″ to /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/*/accept_ra.

Additionally, if the Linux host considers itself to be a router then it will ignore all router advertisements.

In this context, what makes the difference between router or not are the settings of the /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/*/forwarding files (or the net.ipv6.conf.*.forwarding sysctl). If you turn your host into a router by setting one of those to “1″, you may find that your host removes any IPv6 address and default route it learnt via SLAAC.

There is a valid argument that a router should not be autoconfiguring itself, and should have its addresses and routes configured statically. Linux has IP forwarding features for a reason though, and sometimes you want to forward packets with a Linux box while still enjoying autoconfiguration. In my case I have some hosts running virtual machines, with IPv6 prefixes routed to the virtual machines. I’d still like the hosts to learn their default route via SLAAC.

It’s taken me a long time to work out how to do this. It isn’t well-documented.

Firstly, if you have a kernel version of 2.6.37 or higher then your answer is to set accept_ra to “2″. From ip-sysctl.txt:

accept_ra – BOOLEAN

Accept Router Advertisements; autoconfigure using them.

Possible values are:

• 0 Do not accept Router Advertisements.
• 1 Accept Router Advertisements if forwarding is disabled.
• 2 Overrule forwarding behaviour. Accept Router Advertisements even if forwarding is enabled.

Functional default:

• enabled if local forwarding is disabled.
• disabled if local forwarding is enabled.

This appears to be a type of boolean that I wasn’t previously familiar with – one that has three different values.

If you don’t have kernel version 2.6.37 though, like say, everyone running the current Debian stable (2.6.32), this will not work. Helpfully, it also doesn’t give you any sort of error when you set accept_ra to “2″. It just sets it and continues silently ignoring router advertisements.

Fortunately Bjørn Mork posted about a workaround for earlier kernels which I would likely have never discovered otherwise. You just have to disable forwarding for the interface that your router advertisements will come in on, e.g.:

# echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/eth0/forwarding

Apparently as long as /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/forwarding is still set to “1″ then forwarding will still be enabled. Obviously.

Additionally there are some extremely unintuitive interactions between “default” and “all” settings you may set in /etc/sysctl.conf and pre-existing interfaces. So there is a race condition on boot between IPv6 interfaces coming up and sysctl configuration being parsed. martin f krafft posted about this, and on Debian recommends setting desired sysctls in pre-up headers of the relevant iface stanza in /etc/network/interfaces, e.g.:

iface eth0 inet6 static
    address 2001:0db8:10c0:d0c5::1
    netmask 64
# Enable forwarding
    pre-up echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/default/forwarding
    pre-up echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/forwarding
# But disable forwarding on THIS interface so we still get RAs
    pre-up echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/$IFACE/forwarding
    pre-up echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/$IFACE/accept_ra
    pre-up echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/accept_ra
    pre-up echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/default/accept_ra

You will now have forwarding and SLAAC.

When fiddling with CentOS 6.x in a chroot:

• If your host architecture is x86_64 but your chroot architecture is i686 then you’ll find that yum update will try to install lots of x86_64 packages, and then fail. That’s because the arch command still returns “x86_64″. You’ll want to use setarch:

  # arch
  x86_64
  # setarch i386 /bin/bash
  # arch
  i686
  #
  

• You’ll need to make sure you have a useful /proc as otherwise yum won’t be able to work out how much free disk space there is and will refuse to proceed. Bind mounting is probably easiest:

  $ sudo mount --bind /proc /srv/your/chroot/proc
  

• You might find that things you install aren’t labelled correctly for SELinux. If this is a virtual machine then you can force it to relabel on boot:

  $ sudo touch /srv/your/chroot/.autorelabel
  

  fixfiles may also work, but I haven’t tried that.

Thanks to Alex for the setarch tip which I had not come across before.

For ages I’ve been trying to work out how to programmatically add a watermark to an existing PDF using the Perl PDF::API2 module.

In case it’s useful for anyone else, here goes:

use warnings;
use strict;

use PDF::API2;

my $ifile = "/some/file.pdf";
my $ofile = "/some/newfile.pdf";
my $pdf   = PDF::API2->open($ifile);
my $fnt   = $pdf->ttfont('verdana.ttf', -encode => 'utf8');
# Only on the front page
my $page  = $pdf->openpage(1);
my $text  = $page->text;

$page->mediabox('A4');

# Create two extended graphic states; one for transparent content
# and one for normal content
my $eg_trans = $pdf->egstate();
my $eg_norm  = $pdf->egstate();

$eg_trans->transparency(0.7);
$eg_norm->transparency(0);

# Go transparent
$text->egstate($eg_trans);
# Black edges
$text->strokecolor('#000000');
# With light green fill
$text->fillcolor('#d3e6d2');
# Text render mode: fill text first then put the edges on top
$text->render(2);
# Diagonal transparent text
$text->textlabel(55, 235, $fnt, 56, "i'm in ur pdf", -rotate => 30);
# Back to non-transparent to do other stuff
$text->egstate($eg_norm);

# …

# Save
$pdf->saveas($ofile);
$pdf->end;

I think there may be better ways of doing this within Perl now, but I already had some code using PDF::API2.

The saga so far

I have a phone line from BT. I only use it for ADSL (which I get from Zen Internet). I gave my email address to BT because they offered to tell me useful things about my account via email. I now wish I had never done this.

I use extension addresses to identify what the email addresses are being used for. This is not a new idea and I didn’t invent it. For those who don’t know what an extension address is, it’s an email address like andy+foo@example.com. It ends up at the same place as andy@example.com. The point is that if I receive an email to andy+foo@example.com then I know that it’s either from whoever I gave that address to, or it’s from someone they gave/lost my address to. It’s handy for working out who’s sold their database to spammers, or had it stolen.

I used to prefer using “+” in the extension address just because it looks nicer to me than other popular alternatives like “-”. Unfortunately, some web developers are idiots and don’t believe that “+” is valid in an email address, so they try to help by refusing to accept the address. For that reason my email servers accept both “+” and “-” and I used to use “-” when “+” wasn’t accepted.

After I started doing that, I began to experience an even more annoying failure: web sites that accepted “+” in my email address when I signed up, but later got redeveloped by idiots who think that “+” is no longer valid. That means that I can no longer log in to those sites, and predictably customer service is not trained to deal with situations like that.

It seems that BT is an example of such a company, and I am having unbelievable difficulty finding anyone there that can understand this.

When I signed up with BT, the email address I gave them had a “+” in it. They accepted it at the time.

March 2011

I start to receive marketing emails from BT for extra BT services, as well as BT group companies such as Dabs and Plusnet.

29th March 2011

I receive another marketing email from BT, decide I don’t want to receive them any more, and follow the unsubscribe link. The unsubscribe page at http://bt.custhelp.com/app/contact/c/769,978 tells me that the email address (which BT is emailing me on) is invalid.

I contact BTCare on Twitter to ask them how to opt out and to opt me out on my behalf. Also sent a request via BT’s site for someone to call me back about it.

Am called back by a polite BT chap who totally failed to understand the problem, told me I was opted out (funny, I never opted in…) and advised that I sign up to a no commercial email scheme.

18th April 2011

Receive more marketing email from BT. Ask BTCare on Twitter why that is. Am told that it can take a month to take effect.

18th May 2011

Receive more marketing email from BT. Ask BTCare on Twitter why that is.

29th May 2011

BTCare tells me on twitter that they opted out the wrong address last time. Apologises and says it may take a further month.

25th July 2011

BT sends me a marketing email on behalf of Plusnet.

2nd August 2011

I (somewhat exasperatedly) ask BTCare if, since they can’t opt me out of the emails, we can come to a more formal arrangement for my proofreading services of £50 per future email.

BTCare replies that “We can’t opt you out of emails for other companies” and that “no compensation is available sorry.”

I point out that Plusnet is a BT company, that the emails are sent by BT on an email address given only to BT, and contain a BT unsubscribe link which does not work.

3rd August 2011

BTCare asks if the email was from BT, and advises the use of a US-based commercial email opt-out site.

4th August 2011

BTCare tells me that their unsubscribe link works now and that I should try it again. I try it again. It fails the same way. I tell BTCare.

5th August 2011

BTCare tells me that I need to contact Plusnet directly: “the link may be BT related but its seperate to us and we have no control over them”

PlusNet (on twitter and identica) disagrees with BTCare and says BT sends those emails and operates the unsubscribe facility. They give me an email address at Plusnet to forward the marketing to anyway.

I have forwarded the email there and have so far got nothing back except an out of office email bounce. Oh well, it’s not really their problem anyway.

What to do now?

I would quite like to send a snail mail letter to BT to complain about this cluelessness. Does anyone know the best postal address and entity within BT for that to be directed to? If nothing else perhaps I can start sending the £50 a time invoices there?

I’d also quite like to not be a BT customer after this. I’m not too aware of my choices on that front though. My DSL is currently through Zen Internet, who I’m fairly happy with. I’d like a bit faster but don’t want to become a Sky or Virgin Media customer.

I’m told I can get Zen to “take over the copper”. What does this mean? Would it cause me difficulty in switching to another ISP in future?

Finally I have a feeling that there’s some DPA consequences for failing to opt me out of marketing in 4 months of asking, and then saying that I can’t get them to opt me out of marketing from companies they have given my email address to. Worth dropping a line to ICO?

Just hit delete / block all email from BT

Yeah it’s not that annoying but hopefully you can agree that this run-around is ridiculous. While I remain a BT customer I would prefer not to bitbucket all email from them as they do sometimes send stuff related to the operation of my account.

On extension addresses

It’s a shame, but I now consider “+” as unusable in an extension address because of idiot web developers who turn sites that used to accept these completely valid addresses into sites that reject them.

Just use “-” instead. It doesn’t look as pretty but at least not even the most ill-informed developer can think that “-” is invalid. If your email address already contains “-” (perhaps because your name does?), shit, sucks to be you.

Dear Lazyweb,

I’ve had a “3″ USB 3G dongle for a few years. I bought it so that if I’m away from home and there’s some sort of work emergency, or if my home DSL should die, I can have tolerable broadband internet access on my laptop.

It’s been okay as far as the service goes. My main issue with it is that the PAYG top-up lasts for one month at £10 for 1GB data, and if I don’t use it then it disappears. Since I rarely need to use it, any time I do it will invariably have no credit on it and I’ll have to buy some. I know when I do that I’ll use hardly any of it before losing the rest.

This wouldn’t be so terrible, but the 3 web site is awful. Even by the very low standards of a mobile telco. It frequently just does not work. I once managed to register a credit card in order to top up online, but never managed again. That one has now expired so I can’t top up online any more. Customer service is hopeless and I’ve lost the will to fight it.

So, can anyone recommend a 3g USB dongle that:

• works “out of the box” in Ubuntu 10.04 onwards
• is on a network that has reasonable UK coverage
• is PAYG with credit that does not expire, or at least doesn’t expire in as short as one month
• can provide at least 1GB data for no more than £10

I’m not looking for a smartphone or netbook with built in 3g.

Thanks!