Looks like a new virus is set to be unleashed on February 3rd. This virus targets the following file formats.
As always, never open an email attachment from someone you don’t know, and even if you know the sender check the attachment type.
I have been a subscriber of Napster for awhile now. The new reorganized and legal Napster, that is.
The other day I tried to launch the Napster GUI and it kept freezing on me. I tried uninstalling the application and then reinstalling it, but that didn’t help. I wrote to Napster tech support but never received a response from them so I started searching for an answer. The problem is there is so much noise from the old illegal version of Napster that I couldn’t find an answer right away.
Finally, afer three or four hours I found out that the problem was actually with Windows Media Player. Something was corrupted with the folder where my licenses are held. These are the licenses that allow me to play protected content.
Here’s how I fixed the problem.
Restart Napster and I was good to go.
Microsoft is giving away free one year licenses for some of their best development software including:
Not a bad deal for a hobbyist, novice, and student developer.
Someone who has my email address in their address book was infected by a virus today and spewed out tons of emails to me with virus’s attached. Not really a big deal as my virus scanner scans all incoming email attachments, and if it detects a virus it deletes the attachment while allowing the email to be received.
But, it’s a pain to have to delete all the emails as they fill my inbox. If you are using a POP3 email address, have access to your cPanel and have SpamAssassin installed it’s pretty easy to stop the offending email at the server level.
First locate the offenders IP address from the headers in one of the emails. Next log into cPanel and go to MAIL and then E-mail Filtering. Add $message_headers contains “IPADDRESS”. Now all email from a particular IP address will be blocked before it ever gets to your inbox.
Opera Eliminates Ad Banner and Licensing Fee
Opera Software today permanently removed the ad banner and licensing fee from its award-winning Web browser. The ad-free, full-featured Opera browser is now available for download – completely free of charge – at http://www.opera.com.
“Today we invite the entire Internet community to use Opera and experience Web browsing as it should be,” said Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. “Removing the ad banner and licensing fee will encourage many new users to discover the speed, security and unmatched usability of the Opera browser.”
Apple released iTunes 5 for both MAC and Windows today. Some of the new features are:
For one day only, you can get an ad-free version of Opera. Simply click here to get a free registration code. This offer is valid from 12 a.m. Tuesday, August 30 to 12 a.m. Wednesday, August 31 2005 (PDT).
You’ll be asleep in your house, and your wireless entertainment device will wake you up. It’ll be voice-activated, so if you want some music -Â- Nelly or Eminem – you just say so. You’ll use the device to turn on your TV and change channels or to surf the Internet on your computer. Just tell it what you want to do and it’ll take you there.
When you go outside, you’ll plug it into your car and it will serve as a global positioning system and give you detailed directions to where you’re going. The device will tell the car stereo what tunes you have on your iPod and play them over the speakers. If someone else is driving, you can watch TV news or surf the Internet, answer e-mail, download music or read an electronic book. At work you can put the phone up to a special reader and pay for lunch or coffee. Perhaps you’ll hold a video conference. Or pay bills.
If you are in e-commerce mode, you can purchase music or movies, which will automatically be stored in your home entertainment system as well as in your wireless device.
The future of technology is absolutely awesome!
Two weeks ago my server was used to attempt break-ins of at least three other servers. Before this happened I was totally unaware of what was needed to secure a web server. I'm still not close to being a security expert but I have learned quite a bit in the past few days. In this post I hope to provide the uninformed or newby server administrator with information and tools to secure1 their server against hackers.
My experience began on a Friday evening when I checked my inbox and found several emails from other server administrators, suggesting that my server had been compromised and was being used to attempt break-ins of their systems.
The first thing I did was log into WHM2 and checked the Show Current CPU Usage link. I noticed that the CPU was pegged at 100% by several Nobody3 users. I should of taken the time to record exactly what processes were being used but I immediately killed all Nobody processes. This action brought the server back to normal operation.
I honestly did not know how to proceed. I was under the assumption that since I had been operating this server for several years without incident, that I had a fairly secure server. I started with Googling Apache security topics and visited the discussion forums hosted by the company where I lease my dedicated server.
The two applications that I consistently read about were APF (Advanced Policy Firewall) and BFD (Brute Force Detection). I've always used a firewall on my personal PC but it never occurred to me that I would need a firewall for my server.
I've never installed programs on the server before so this was a new learning process. Luckily I found a great website that took me step by step through the process.
Once I got AFP and BFD installed I began searching for the culprit. I learned that most rootkits are stored and run from /tmp folders, so I ran the following commands from SSH as a root user.
When I got to the /var/tmp/ directory I found what I was looking for, a suspicious directory called /bebe/4. In this directory were several files beginning with an IP subset.pscan.22. I'm assuming the IP subsets were the IP addresses my system was scanning and the port was 22.
I zipped up the files, downloaded a copy and then deleted the directory.
From what I have read, once a rootkit is uploaded to your system the hard drive should be formatted followed by a fresh install of the OS. I took several additional steps and I feel fairly confident that I'm now running a clean system. I'll follow up with another post on what additional steps I've taken, and tell you what my daily security routine involves.
The Enterprise Email Application Software Blog has created a list of the top 50 spam words based on the ratio of SPAM 1 to HAM 2. In other words this list contains words that are much more likely to appear in SPAM rather than in legitimate email. The list was created after analyzing findings from their companies Bayesian spam filter.
The top 10 SPAM words from the list are
Go here to see the complete list of the top 50 SPAM words.
I have an Epson Stylus CX5400 printer that I use for color printing and scanning in photos. The majority of my printing takes place on my HP LaserJet 6L. For several months I failed to get my ink cartridges for the Epson refilled and so it sat, with the power turned off.
Last week I purchased new cartridges but now I can't get the printer to print. It acts like the printer heads are clogged with dried ink. I have performed a ton of head cleaning jobs through the printer control panel, and now I can get some black ink on paper, but it's no where close to working properly.
Does anyone know how I can get the jets to open up? I read that if I left the printer on overnight and then try again with head cleaning it should loosen up, but so far...no good.
Ever want to see where the cell phone towers are located near you? Cell Phone Tower Search uses Google Maps to provide a graphical interface to see towers in your area.
McDonald's restaurants now offer WiFi by Wayport. You can search here for a McDonald's location near you and see if WiFi is available.
CEO Steve Jobs officially announced on Monday that Apple would gradually shift its Mac line to Intel-based chips over the next two years.
Wow, at some point in time I may be able to run OS X on my PC and Apple users may be able to run Windows on their MAC's.
My new hard drive is going to have as many open source or freeware programs as I can find. It's not that I don't mind paying for a good product, but I don't like paying for upgrades and it seems like I have been hit with a bunch lately.
My first victim was Microsoft Office. I am now using OpenOffice which is a semi open source office suite including Word and Excel compatible programs. It has taken me very little time to get used to OpenOffice and when I opened my existing Excel spreadsheets all formulas and computations worked perfectly. Open Office is a project of Sun Microsystems.
OpenOffice.org the product is a multi-platform office productivity suite. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. Sophisticated and flexible, OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office.
I replaced Remote Admin with TightVNC, a desktop remote control application allowing me to control other computers on my network. You can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer.
I have a new image editor too. I replaced Macromedia Fireworks with The Gimp. The Gimp is a photo retouching, image composition and image authoring program that is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
I have replaced a few more programs that I'll write about soon.
Welcome to johnhesch.com, a blog about my life, projects, and interests. I have been blogging for over 10 years in one form or another.