Firstly an apology for not posting a Friday image yesterday but there is a very good reason. Over this past week I have been hit by all sorts of broadband problems. I don’t know if it’s related to the snow and cold weather but I lost my connection on Thursday and have only just recovered it. During this time I have been reduced to trying to run things with my mobile phone but this has also been frustrated by the adverse weather.
Then today I received a spam email which appeared to come from my email account “robin@lenscraft.co.uk”. With a little investigation I could see this was a spoof email but it looked like it was me sending it.
This as you can imagine made me nervous. In fact it made me very nervous as earlier in the week I was receiving an increasing number of new subscribers coming from Hungary and Russia which were clear automated attacks from robots. To counter this I introduced a CAPTCHA code to the registration screen so that any registration would need to come from a person who is able to read and enter the CAPTCHA code. This reduced the number of fake registrations but a few are still coming in.
So, I have tightened up all the security on the Lenscraft website. I’m not going to list the steps here in case someone with malicious intent can use them but I will say that the entire site now uses SSL with 256bit encryption. If you now browse over to the Lenscraft site you will see in the address window of your browser that you are being served by https:// rather than the standard http:// server. There may be a few gremlins over the next 24 hours whilst the DNS changes propagate around the internet but then everything should be stable and secure.
If you haven’t understood all the technical mumbo jumbo I have spouted above a rough translation is that the Lenscraft site is now as secure as I can make it. Oh yes, I also made a few performance enhancements so everything should be even faster than before.
As for the image, this is another RX10 image which I captured on my walk last weekend. Everything somehow seemed much easier back then.
The Lightweight Photographer 
Keep up the good work Robin and don’t let the low-life grind you down.
Thanks. I will do my best.
Very sorry to hear the trouble you have encountered, hope all goes well for the future.
Thanks. I think this is just the way things are today. You can never be too careful,
Im surprised its taken this long for you to have had security issues, must have been lucky, nothing is safe these days. Its a sad necessity of life that SSL are required but hopefully all your hard work will pay off in the long run 🙂
I have had a few attacks in the past but they have been very amaturish and automated. This latest round seemed to be more sophisticated. Anyway, you can’t be too careful so I thought I would extend the SSL to the entire site and take a few more steps. It’s a nice bonus that I managed to boost the performance also.