It is 6:11 AM and I have not gotten any significant amount of sleep so far since last night. A neighbor's dog had wandered onto our property to bark at a racoon at about 1AM and barked constantly until about 5 am when I got sick of it and went out to investigate.

I only logged onto the internet this morning so that I could grab the complaint form from our county Animal Control web site. The form is now filled out and will be mailed today. Since I had my PC on already, I thought, "what the heck", and I checked the messages on the BBS. That's when I discovered the random spam messages from the new user "empegbot".

For those who haven't yet noticed this, this morning there were a handful of new messages on this BBS posted under the name "empegbot". These messages were generated by a computer program which logs onto the BBS without any user intervention and pulls random words from an internal list. Although this is very clever, it clearly crosses the line from being simply an annoyance, and now falls into the category of outright hacking.

Now, most days, I'd locate the user in question, and politely and privately request that he stop. But there were two things that made me do otherwise:

- The aforementioned lack of sleep and general irritation level.
- I saw that it was Yz33d.

So. The following users have now been permanently banned from the BBS:

- Yz33d
- empegbot
- all connections from the IP address range 216.78.183.***

And there was much rejoicing.

If anyone besides Yz33d has an IP address which falls into that range, contact me and we'll see what we can do. Of course, if your address falls into that range, you can't read this message so I have no idea how you'll know to contact me. Oh well, I'm tired and can't think clearly at the moment.

Oh, and by the way, Drakino: I recommend you do the same for riocar.org. I think he's under "Yz33b" on that site.