Daynotes.com
Weather (& Stuff)
Initial Post
Last Week
Next Week
Humor
The Better Half
TheTimeSink.ETP
Email Dan
The Time Sink |
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday
A short week here in the land of the Time Sink. Shelley and I are off to a Christian camp in a local National Forest on Friday for our church's Couples' Retreat. That means a lot to do to get things ready for Grandpa and Grandma. ...and Shelley and Dan!
There was a major story breaking last week about site cracking and credit card theft by organized crime. ...but here's what happens when someone is sloppy putting a server back up and one of the bunch that stashes audio and video files wherever they can steal space has a look around the system. I think this guy should be commended for pushing information out to the affected students.
Also on the tech front, there is evidently a 'disturbance in the force' once again. Several sites, including everything hosted on one EditThisPage server were hard to get to over the weekend. I haven't seen anything on the news channels; speculation has ranged from server problems (unlikely as non-ETP sites are affected), to DNS problems, to DDoS attacks slowing the net down.
No problem in this household; between sites hosted at pair, ETP and Weblogs, we'll usually be able to make our opinions known!<g>
I gave SuSe 7.1 a shot at the Linux box last night. I only have a partial report as we had company over and I had to pretend human ancestry. That took a lot out of me...
Short version: easy install, the first distro to find a legacy sound card, no network connection (likely an IRQ thing with the sound card), didn't find the ZIP drive, partitioned things quite nicely, nice job on the video, interesting interface, has the Mahjongg tile set Daniel and I like best, doesn't auto eject the CD as needed during installs, didn't find the burner, did want to configure a firewall...
All in all worth throwing a decent sound card in and re-installing tomorrow; for all the warnings, the kitchen sink went in rather quickly...
Can we all agree that Dave needs his medication adjusted? No? Darn; I was afraid of that... Then it looks as though this might be viral. ...and contagious: after reading that piece I started looking over the parts bins to see what I had. ...and which motherboard could take which RAM.<g>
If you're into this type of insanity, now is the time to play. You can waltz into your local Costco and find 256mb PC133 RAM from Simple Technology for $109US. That's in your hand right now; if you can wait a day or two, Global and Insight are offering Simple and Viking 256/133 for $80US or less... So, for under $200 you could run a compressed Win98 installation and still have plenty of space to play in. I just don't know...
On the Linux front, I didn't end up reinstalling SuSe; I replaced the sound card and told the system it didn't have a NIC. Then I said, "See this nice NIC here?", ditto with the sound card, and gave it a power down reboot. Both fired up fine.
...and it's time to read the manual; LiLo boots three kernel variations and I'd like to find out what the one called SuSe really is... There's some nice toys over here; I'll likely play a while. I'm at least to the point of wondering if I need to go back to Mandrake as soon as I anticipated...
How does this sound as the promo for a new piece of software?
“Version 2.2 of the software adds several new "features," including support for proxies, the ability to listen on any random port, a GUI-based packet sniffer and the ability to relay information about compromised machines to Web sites via CGI (common gateway interface)...”Wow, sounds cool, huh?
Not! It's a backdoor program designed to open your machine up for whatever the hackers would like to do. Like setting up a DDoS attack center, monitoring your keystrokes or...
...and this isn't a script kiddie toy; it has a developer base that will soon be releasing an SDK for the program.
Oh, and it even has skins available for download...
No, I'm not giving you the URI; if you need to find it, you already know how.
But if you'd like one of their T-shirts...
Yep, they have T-shirts available from CafePress.
Sheesh.
On the other side of the fence, Steve Gibson has released his counterattack on the ''Russian Mafia Exploit'' from the other week. His program will tell you if you're open for business and if someone's already set up shop on your server. Not bad for 30k of code...
Shelley and I are taking a few days of well-deserved break.
If there's anything to post, it'll likely be on my alternate site or Shelley's site. At the moment, I don't think the laptop is going along. Just a stack of books and magazines. ...and each other.
All content Copyright 1999->2001 Daniel C. Bowman. All rights reserved.