update Feb 14, 2012 – I am still getting friend’s update notifications, I already went through the list of notifications on that page, disabled all notifications I could think of. I found my Yahoo email has an option to block email addresses, it is under Advanced Options > Block Addresses, I block all facebook emails from facebookmail.com, that works.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=152564&highlight=pair

“This is what I’m looking for in a host. Server loads ALWAYS in the 0.00=0.x0
range. Never even hitting 1.”

updated Feb 10, 2012 – I signed up a new account with pair.com, really like their server, I run a cron job to record uptime every hour, in 24 hours uptime rarely hits over 1

updated Mar 12, 2012

I asked Bluehost support why their server uptime load hits over 1, their level 1 support engineer explains:

{{{

20 is insignificant in our environment, that is significantly under any
level that would cause concern for two reasons:

1. The load of 20 is across 24 cores, this means the actual load per core is
.83, which is under 1.

2. Our load reports very differently than other servers, due to our
proprietary throttling system.  Load is the number of processes waiting for
CPU time, and our system forces any account that is using more than 7% of a
core’s CPU to waitlist processes.  Again note: your server has 24 cores.

}}}

so that is not too bad, keep in mind Bluehost has couple of hosting plans, this is for pro account.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110624061353AAKnJ3i

without support from Hollywood advertisements Yahoo might be wiped out from earth, we have two Hollywood media, one is paper version People magazine, the other is online version – Yahoo : )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Messaging_Service

updated 12/26/2012

after reading API document from Routo, I found same result, there is no support for inbound binary message in USA.

Nexmo replied there are following restrictions made by US and Canada carriers,

-Numeric sender only
-No handset delivery receipts (if we don’t reject the message at submission time it means we were able to reach the network)
-Binary, Unicode and long SMS are not supported
-Multipart (concatenated) messages are not supported

this starts making sense to me why there is no SMS MMS service providers I can find in USA, with the restrictions above developers can only create a application software with very limited features, there is much less success rate for this kind of business in USA, it also makes sense to me why there is much less spams to cell phones in USA.

updated 12/31/2011

Routo Messaging replied, they don’t even have virtual numbers in USA, I will stay with Nexmo, and the software will support inbound message for text only without binary like pictures taken on cell phones.

1. upgrade WordPress to latest version
2. enforce referrer rules in Apache .htaccess
3. delete the “spam users” registered by spammers
4. reset users password
5. add CAPTCHA verification code on login page
6. add Login Logger plugin
7. change comment form to add security checks such as verification code
8. add a timer
9. add a log to track comment form
10. disable trackback and pingback in Discussion Setting
11. disable trackback and pingback for all existing posts and pages
12. disable Post via Email in WordPress

The step 7 listed above is an important step, if you identify the spams were posted via comment form, you can customize WordPress’s “loose” comment form to add security check, verification code is sufficient for most cases, there are other tricks to enforce security of comment form. I know most our spams were not from comment form, because I add a log to track comment form, it shows the remote computers’ IP address, even IP addresses were fake, that indicates they most likely were from trackback or pingback, need to disable them in step 10 and 11.

Before do step 11, back up database, and run two SQL commands to disable trackback and pingback for all existing posts and pages:
UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status=’closed’ WHERE post_status = ‘publish’ AND post_type = ‘post’;
UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status=’closed’ WHERE post_status = ‘publish’ AND post_type = ‘page’;

WordPress is a free open source software, there is not much protection for security, I could not believe that there are trackback, pingback, and Post via Email, and these features are enabled by default, trackback and pingback can be disable by check box in Discussion Setting, there is no check box to diable/uncheck Post via Email, I just blank out all the fields for Post via Email feature.

Enforce referrer rules from WordPress,
http://codex.wordpress.org/Combating_Comment_Spam/Denying_Access

Login Logger plugin is a good tool to track login activities, here is link to the plugin,
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/login-logger/

Link to CAPTCHA plugin,
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/si-captcha-for-wordpress/

Since we enforced WordPress security, we don’t have any spams on KeyPoints.com, Is manual data entry considered spam? hopefully spammers can find better fun things to do:)

http://fourblogger.com/how-to-see-login-and-failed-login-details-of-wordpress-admin/

wget -m -k -U “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; pl-PL; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/20121223 Ubuntu/9.25 (jaunty) Firefox/3.8″ “http://<domain or ip>” -e robots=off

above wget ends TCP connection with active close, tcpdump shows three closing packets, the first <F.> packet is sent by wget instead of sent by Apache web server. when IE or Firefox closes TCP connections, normally they use passive close, i.e. Apache web server sends first <F>, IE or Firefox sends <.> ack and <F>, at last Apache web server sends <.>ack.