Just picked up on an article from The Register about AVG LinkScanner that comes with AVG Antivirus 8. Apparently, this crapware has been sending out fake traffic by scanning links on a page, such as Google or Yahoo! search results. Now I would not have any problem with that except when it fricken skews my website statistics package.

Granted that this crapware is pretty popular in the Philippines and my site gets 90% of its traffic from Philippine IP address ranges, I decided to check out my logs and see what was happening.

# cat abing.gotdns.com-access.log* |\
grep -E ‘MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;( SV1|1813))’ |\
grep -F ‘”-”‘|wc -l
1219

That’s about 4% of the total lines of my recent log files.

Following a discussion thread on proggit I found a quick and nasty solution for the nasty LinkScanner crap.

To the brilliant “software engineer” who is behind this LinkScanner crap, this is all I can say to you: FOADIAF!!!

Last Saturday, June 21st, Panay Island was hit with one of the worst tropical storms in recent memory. Living in Capiz in Northern Panay, has had its ups and downs and by far this is one of those times where life takes a sudden downturn. We just got power back to our village yesterday evening and so far all our basic services like clean water, telephone, and Internet are back in full operation.

It is quite fortunate that the storm picked up and reached its peak during the day time. This is what minimized casualties even in the hardest hit areas such as Kalibo and Iloilo. Had this storm peaked during night time, then it could have been much, much worse. What drove the death toll up was the sinking of the shipping vessel “Princess of the Stars” as well as the sinking of several small fishing vessels.

None the worse for wear and I have a lot to be thankful for. We had just finished fixing up the house a month ago. The renovations made were what kept our roof from blowing off in the strong winds that buffeted our house for more than 12 hours. Much of the damage was inside the house though.

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