Month: September 2003

Move Over FTP

FTP has long been a mainstay of transferring files, but it’s been plagued by problems due to its centralized nature, especially for popular files: if the site is down you can’t get it, central or popular sites are often slow, mirrors get out of sync, etc… File sharing a la KaZaA/Gnutella is an alternative, but then you have to search for what you want and hope it turns up, connections aren’t reliable, what you get might have a virus…

Fortunately, these concepts have been merged into newer programs like BitTorrent and eDonkey, where you download chunks of the file from other people who are also downloading it. The bandwidth requirements are thus scattered across a large number of systems, you don’t depend on a single site, and the result is checked against the original package description to ensure integrity.

As an example, the Slackware 9.1 ISO images were released last week, but it was almost impossible to get on the main site or any mirrors and download it at a decent rate. Using the BitTorrent links instead though, I was able to immediately download both ISOs at over 250kB/s. At the same time, my client exported about half of the ISO data, which in turn helped other people who were downloading the files.

They’re certainly not a complete replacement for FTP yet, but hopefully we’ll see the usage of these kinds of programs on the increase. A lot of large data files like movie trailers, game demos, etc. can certainly benefit from this kind of distribution. Otherwise you’re stuck with services like FilePlanet where you wait forever in ‘line’ to download a file at a way too slow rate…

Pain, Thy Name Is Spam

I’m still getting flooded with those stupid Swen virus e-mails, as is half the planet apparently, but now I have a new spam menace to contend with as well.

In an effort to bypass filters and pose as legitimate e-mail, spammers are sending out e-mails with legitimate From: addresses. If you were to connect to the MX record’s mail server for that person and verify the address you would find that it does in fact exist. Unfortunately, it’s not the person who actually sent the spam… The spammers have huge lists of e-mail addresses they can send to, and they can pose as people on that list as well.

My e-mail address appears to have gotten on one of these lists, so now some people are receiving spam messages that appear as though they are being sent by me. Not only that but it’s the address of my private mailbox, which I had set up separate from a public one specifically to avoid spam. It got leaked somewhere along the way, though it’s hard to tell where.

Not only do I get the blame for these spam messages, but the errors regarding full mailboxes (fairly common with this Swen virus filling peoples’ mailboxes), nonexistent users and domains, etc. all get bounced back to me. Now I’m constantly cleaning viruses out of my public mailbox and error messages out of my private one. I really need to set up those filters…

This ought to be illegal, if it isn’t already. At the very least it’s identity theft for them to send e-mail using my address.

Patch This

My e-mail had actually been relatively spam-free up to this point, but now over the last couple days I’ve been flooded with fake messages in one of two forms:

1) The Microsoft Security Patch

An obvious hoax if you look at the right spots (somehow I don’t think MS’s e-mail address is bqgkxiqisa@support.net), but unfortunately some people will believe it and get suckered into running it and infecting their systems.

2) The undeliverable message notice

These messages try to give you the impression that you sent a piece of e-mail with an attachment to someone and it bounced, hoping you’ll be confused enough that you’ll open it up to remind yourself what it was when, of course, it’s really just a virus in the attachment. The same one as the trojan above, in fact. There’s also a variation on this one where you get a legitimate bounce message from a mailer because it had anti-virus protection, except that you weren’t the person who sent it in the first place because the virus spoofed your address from someone else’s address book, and the anti-virus software has now oh-so-helpfully sent you a copy of the virus as well. :-P

Although they’re easy enough to spot and delete, they’re still getting annoying. I’m receiving about 30-40 a day now and at 110k or more each, they’re wasting a lot of space and risk filling my mailbox and preventing other e-mail from getting through. My private mailbox is fortunately untouched so far, but I do still need to check for the occasional potentially important stuff in the public mailbox, too.

I’m not sure what brought this flood on so suddenly, but now I really need to set up those filters…

(Update: Apparently this is the newly-released W32.Swen.A virus.)

Musical Madness

One of the stranger parts of civil law is the notion that a corporation is considered a ‘virtual person’ with all the rights and freedoms thereof. The analogy goes even further though; apparently companies and organizations and such can become sick and even mentally ill. Otherwise how can you explain the recent actions of the RIAA, such as:

I do sympathize with the artists and they don’t deserve to get ripped off (though with the way things are currently set up they don’t make an awful lot off of album sales anyway), but this is getting a little heavy-handed…

Geekier Than Thou

Speaking of geekiness…

I figured it was about time for my semi-annual haircut. I usually dread these since I really have no idea how to describe what I want done, if I’m even thinking of any particular style to begin with. I’d just mumble something about short/long and hope the end result isn’t too bad.

This time however, I came armed. I went through all the old photos of myself, found one with short hair, and….loaded it onto my PocketPC and popped it up in a picture viewer. A picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, after all.

I don’t know if the end result was really any better for it, but it was worth the peace of mind at least.

Invaders From The Planet Krispy

As I was leaving the Bow Valley Square building after finishing lunch, I saw something a bit on the strange side. A lot of people were walking around holding flat boxes. The exact same kind of box. *Everywhere* I looked — at least half of the people around must have been carrying them. Otherwise they looked just like the regular lunchtime crowd going around their business.

On the boxes was a logo I’d only seen or heard about from news sites and friends in the States before: the logo of Krispy Kreme. Strange, I thought, I don’t think we even have one of their shops here.

It must have been a promotion nearby of some kind, but I couldn’t tell exactly where they were all coming from. All too aware that their allegedly tasty temptations were a threat to my current diet, I fled the area and returned to the safety of my own doughnut-less office.

And then as I was typing this, my team manager leaned in my office door with a familiar-looking box and said “Hey, want one of these?”…

Password Hell

You wouldn’t think that changing your password would be a big deal. Enter your old password, enter the new password twice, that’s it. Except if you’re on a Windows domain…

The domain policy is set up to force us to change passwords every 90 days, as a standard security precaution. It never fails though — within hours of changing the password, the Weird Things start happening. Some shares remain accessible, some start giving me vague authentication errors, some claim they don’t exist anymore…

After a quick trip to the admin’s office, it’s discovered that my account is locked out because of too many failed password attempts. Of course there was no explicit warning of this at my own workstation as I had continued to be able to lock and unlock the console without trouble… I had however left myself logged in on my other development system under the previous password, and it was what was causing the failed password attempts.

Fine, I log out and back in on that system, unlock my account, and everything’s back to normal. Until a few hours later when the Weird Things start up again…

After roaming from office to office checking all of our test systems, I finally find one of our rarely-used systems that I had logged into two months ago to test something and forgotten to log out of. After logging out of that one and unlocking the account yet again, things are *finally* normal for good. Or at least until the next password change.

You’d think there would be a better way of handling this…