Alexander Mikhailian

Internet trolls are using Tor nowadays to avoid bans by IP. However, banning Tor exit nodes is just slightly more complex. The Tor Project provides a regularly updated list of exit nodes that can access your IP here. As there may be many hundreds or even thousands of nodes, adding them to iptables can hurt your server's network performance. Enter ipset, a user-space hash table for iptables:

# create a new set for individual IP addresses
ipset -N tor iphash
# get a list of Tor exit nodes that can access $YOUR_IP, skip the comments and read line by line
wget -q https://check.torproject.org/cgi-bin/TorBulkExitList.py?ip=$YOUR_IP -O -|sed '/^#/d' |while read IP
do 
  # add each IP address to the new set, silencing the warnings for IPs that have already been added
  ipset -q -A tor $IP
done
# filter our new set in iptables
iptables -A INPUT -m set --match-set tor src -j DROP

I bought a Desire S smartphone a little more than 2 months ago, but did not have a chance to really use it, yet. It came with an elusive and odd bug. The touch screen stopped responding once in a while. This could occur any time, but seemed to happen less frequently after 5-10 minutes of active use.

The first time I sent the phone to repair, it came back with flashed ROM, but the problem stayed.

The second time I sent the phone for repair, it came back with a new touch screen, but the problem stayed.

The third time, the repair shop replaced the motherboard. The initial problem disappeared, but the phone gained a new one. Part of the screen was not reacting to touch. Or rather, every time you touched a certain area on screen to select an item, items around it were selected or nothing happened.

I filed a 4th support request today.

Overall, I took no less than an hour talking to the call center, wrote several emails and paper notes to HTC and to the repair shop, recorded a video to demonstrate the bug and uploaded it to HTC, filed two complaints online and took a good hour each time it returned from the repair shop to setting it up and find ways to reproduce the problem.

Three days ago, I got my hands on the HTC Trophy 7 running Windows Phone 7. Until now, I played occasionally with Android, but never used a smartphone.

Here's a list of things I'd like to do on the smartphone:

• Transfer the contacts from the old Nokia phone
• Listen to music and audio books from the local collection
• Read books from Flibusta

In the process, I'd rather not to reveal too much personal information to Microsoft. The wishlist looks simple, huh? Let's see what I managed to do.