the 2014 end-of-year puzzle
The link should be on the main page by now :)
Apologies to those people who got the "spam" email with the direct link to the puzzle PDF: because
of my mistake, some of you from the US got the email 3 times
It is quite tricky to send email to more people these days: of course I should add the "opt-in" option with the account
(this will happen) and put an "unsubscribe" link in the mail (will happen also)(but I've been lazy because I send out
less than 1 email a year on average..).
Because the parent company ("Colocrossing") of my server provider ("ChicagoVPS") apparently hosts a lot of spam servers/networks,
the IP address of calcudoku.org was on a "block list" that is used all over the place (the "Spamhaus SBL")(the IP just happened to
be too similar to that of the spamming servers).
My IP was changed to one that is not on this list (which explains why the server was unreachable for 20 minutes or so this afternoon CET)
(some people/internet providers do lazy caching of these addresses, for them unfortunately the outage was/is longer).
The new IP apparently is on a Verizon blocklist (!). I requested for it to be removed, with full info, but all I got from Verizon
was that it was still blocked :-| From what I understand, they're a monopoly, so they couldn't care less anyway (?)
Add to that the need to set up reverse IP lookup properly, add an SPF record, sign messages with DKIM if at all possible, etc. etc.
all thanks to the spammers
So it'll be at least another year until the next email..