Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Full headers

This post is just part of a Twitter conversation, but wouldn't work as 50 tweets (exaggeration).

(scroll down for the rest)

Let me give an example. Go to Mapquest, and set up some driving directions. Then choose "send" and give an email address to send it to; make it yours.

When you receive the email, find the option to "View full headers". Different mail clients have it in different places, but almost all have it somewhere.

Look in the headers, and you will find something like this:

X-Originating-IP: [55.55.555.555]

Nearly every webform will have an originating IP header. These can be compared to emails sent before. I'll bet even emails from your webform have them. Give it a try- submit something from it to email yourself; check the full internet headers on the received email.

Edited to add: one reason for that header to almost always be there is so you can track back abusive users. If your webserver that processes your forms isn't passing that header, then you should get on whoever coded it to fix that. I bet it is there, though.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

"on a track to be the hottest year ever"

"2014 is on a track to be the hottest year ever" according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

That sounds familiar.

But what happened?

"the record of satellite measurements of global atmospheric temperatures now shows no warming for at least 17 years and 5 months, from September, 1996 to January, 2014, as shown on the accompanying graphic." Forbes

That time period includes 2013, 2012, 2010. All of which were reported to be on track to be the hottest year ever on record.

Maybe it's different this time.