Category: Technology

Like most people, we’ve been fighting the latest Windows worm at work for the last few days. We never got the Blaster worm that seemed to cause most people so much trouble. Instead, we were hit by Welchia (aka Nachi), a variant that was actually designed to clean up after Blaster. Welchia was designed to infect vulnerable computers and automatically download the patch from Microsoft. Instead, it just killed our network.

We’ve been installing the patch and cleaning off the worm with a program from Network Associates called Stinger since last Wednesday. This has been pretty effective, but there were still a few infected computers on the network. We tried using the “process of elimination” to find the infected machines by unplugging different parts of the network and waiting for our connection to improve. That proved pretty much impossible since there were several infected computers in different locations.

After fighting it this way for most of the day, I finally decided to do something different. I had played with a packet analyzer called Ethereal in the past and decided to give it another try. After a few minutes of downloading and installing I had it going. Within the first minute of capturing traffic I recieved over 6000 ICMP queries from only two computers. These two obviously had the worm. Two phone calls later these were patched and cleaned.

After that our network connection was almost perfect. I sat around and surfed the Internet for a while longer waiting for the connection to go down again. When it did, I captured another minute’s worth of data and quickly found two more infected computers.

Tomorrow morning when everyone gets back to work, I should be able to easily track down any remaining infected computers. After that everything should be back to normal on our network. All thanks to an Open Source program.

In case anyone’s curious, I did the same thing with my home computer that I do everytime a new WIndows virus or worm comes around. I smiled and laughed, because I’m running Linux…

I just stumbled upon a nice new program called BloGTK. It’s just what I needed to easily update this page.

This post is pretty much just a test to see if it’s working…

Do you know why we get so much junk mail these days? It’s the same reason we get so many telemarketing calls – because it works. People are actually dumb enough to buy the things they see advertised in spam.

This article in Wired talks about a security flaw at a spammer’s website that made their log files available. According to these logs, this one site has received about 6,000 orders for their “magic” pills since July 4. Even worse, most people ordered 2 bottles at about $50 each.

According to the article, the site is owned by a 19-year-old high-school dropout. He buys the pills for $5 per bottle and pays other people about $10 per order to send out spam. So if each order was for only 2 bottles (some were for more), that means he made ($600,000 – $60,000 – $60,000) $480,000 in about the last 30 days. That’s nearly half a million dollars for doing nothing.

I’m definitely in the wrong line of work.

It looks like my forum is working so I added a link to it under navigation. Now if I ever find time to add any new material to the site, people will have a place to go and talk about it. I guess for now, people can just go talk about how lazy I am…

There’s one thing about the forum that I need to change, and then I’ll be uploading the source in case anybody else wants to use it. If you want to take a look at it, check back sometime after my Advanced Database final on Thursday.

The discussion forum that I started working on about a month ago is finally ready for a little testing. I haven’t put a link for it under navigation yet, but you can get to it by going to http://tonyandpaige.com/forum/.

It should be pretty simple to use. You don’t have to sign up, or enter a password to get in. Just click on a topic to view the posts or use the form to start a new topic. Once I’m sure that the system works pretty well, I’ll replace the current comments system with this forum.

In case you’re wondering why it’s so simple, it was inspired by the forums at . Joel is a really smart guy with some great ideas about running a small business and writing good code. This forum is based on the ideas in his article .

Try it out, and let me know if it breaks…

There was an interesting article posted the other day on Slashdot comparing programmers to sharecroppers. Here’s a quote:

If you’re developing software for … any platform that is owned and operated by a company. They own the ground you’re building on, and if they decide they don’t like you, or they can do something better with the ground, you’re toast. They can ship their own product and give it away till you go bust, then start charging for it; and use secret APIs you can’t see; and they can break the published APIs you use.

The full article is available here. This is just one more reason to avoid proprietary software.

Do you really know what all the latest technology buzz words mean? AMD has put a quiz where you can test your knowledge. They call it the Technology Terminology and Complexity Test.

All of these seemed pretty easy to me, but that’s probably because I read about and use words like these every day. Let me know how you do.

Today at work I discovered that our site is blocked by the school district’s web filter. I guess it’s because I talk about games a lot. We’ve been going through the same 8e6 Technologies filter for months now, but we just recently started filtering gaming sites.

I guess I’m really wasting my time typing this, since the only people affected by it can’t read it anyway. I’ll get it worked out as soon as possible. In the mean time, people will just have to catch up on my words of wisdom from home…

It looks like Google has finally started to really take note of our site. Google’s crawler has visited the site 113 times this month, and 23 people have found our site by searching on Google.

If you search for “lua tutorial”, we’re number 5 and 6 on the first page. This is pretty good considering those tutorials have only been up about a month. If you search for “Tony and Paige” we’re number 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and probably more.

The only thing that bothers me about this is if you search for “Tony and Paige Lewis”, we’re number three. There’s another Tony and Paige Lewis and their church page is ranked above our site.

I think part of the problem is I never use our last name on the site. No where on the home page does it say Tony Lewis or Paige Lewis. The really funny thing is I registered Anthony Lewis as a domain name and pointed it to this site, but I never use it anymore. I don’t even show up on the first page of hits at Google for Anthony Lewis.

Oh well, fame isn’t everything I guess.

I’ve been trying to explain to people for a long time that the “from” address on an e-mail is just like the return address on an envelope – you can put anything there you want. This comes up all the time with spam and viruses.

Now it seems this is being used as a new form of harassment. CNN has an article about how some people are using spoofed e-mail to harass Arab-Americans by sending fake hate mail with their address as the sender.

The article mentions PGP signatures as a way to verify the sender of a message. This is probably the most secure solution assuming that everyone you correspond with has installed PGP. I think the best solution is two-fold. First, educate people about how e-mail works. Once people understand the simplicity of the protocol, it should be obvious how it can be easily faked. Second, teach people to stop and think. This applies to life in general, not just e-mail. My advice to anyone who gets an e-mail they don’t like is the same as it’s always been – just delete it and go on with life.

One more interesting thing, note how the article goes back and forth between spelling it “e-mail” and “email”.