Drive-by downloads

I consider myself a fairly computer savvy user. I block ads via my hosts-file, I don't click on untrusted links, i don't run flash except by whitelist, I don't click on punch the monkey. I've never had any viruses, never been infected with any trojans. Until today. Today, I got the "AntiVirus 2010" virus. It's a variation of the other similar viruses that circulated in 2009 and 2008. It basically shows fake virus alerts, prompting you to buy the full version to clean all the fake viruses off your system. Obviously, the only virus, is "AntiVirus 2010".

I was very surprised to get this virus, as I'm a firefox user. I always keep both my windows installation and my firefox installation up to date. I thought I was immune to this crap. I was wrong. I got it by means of a drive-by download. I was visiting fairly innocuous sites, looking at some pictures, and them BAM, out of nowhere, this thing is already downloaded and installed on my machine. There are .exe files everywhere, and it lives in my system tray. I never saw a dialog box or anything.

Perhaps it's my own fault, for not running any anti-virus, but quite frankly, most anti-virus solutions are total fucking resource hogs, and since they are only actually useful in extremely rare cases, they are a total waste of money and cpu cycles (hey, run-on sentence, what the hell, man?).

So I ask you now, what can I do to prevent this shit? Obviously the bad guys are getting smarter and the good guys have their hands full. Clearly being up-to-date is not sufficient anymore. I've installed no-script, but last time I did, I got so frustrated with how bad the internet worked, that I simply disabled it. I guess we'll see how long it lasts this time.

Firefox 3 revisited

I'm back to Firefox 2 again. Firefox 3 had such different behavior and look compared to Firefox 2, none of which was customizable, that I just couldn't stand it. Also, the fact that Firefox 3 was a HUGE memory hog didn't go over particularly well with me either. It's not unheard of to see FF3 use 2-3 times as much memory as FF2 for the same set of tabs. They also added their own custom widgets, because there were some behavior problems with Mac, that this is where the slippery slope to hell begins. it is VERY rare that you have to make your own widgets. The scrollbars and buttons that come with the OS are excellent, work great, and in the vast majority of cases do exactly what you want them to do. Apparently that wasn't good enough for the FF3 team, so decided to roll their own, to the detriment of all their users. While I did find a plug-in that would let me use Windows native scroll-bars, it just wasn't the same. It felt like they were fucking me over, simply because they could. FF2 is crisp, clear, fast, and doesn't cause my mouse to freeze up when I play wow. FF3 is none of these things.

All in all, FF3 is an absolute horror and a mess, and I really hope I see a 4.0 soon that takes care of all the fucking garbage they put in to FF3. I'd stick with FF2, but they stop support in mid-december 2008, which is mere months away. Most companies continue supporting their old products for a lot more than 6 months (Windows XP will be supported with security patches to 2014, if I'm not mistaken), but apparently not the Firefox team. What with the 8 million downloads on release day, maybe they don't give two shits about people still running older version. Then again, I did run Netscape 7.2 for ages until I finally switched. I think I can do the same thing with FF2.

I'm a Switcher

Those of you who are somewhat tech savvy might have heard that expression before in connection to something else. You can rest assured, I'm not switching to Apple (although I had two delicious granny smith apples yesterday, with only a mild allergic reaction).
What I'm switching is my internet platform. As I have mentioned before, I have always been a staunch supported of Netscape. It was my first browser (there might have been some mosaic before, I don't remember), and for the rest of my life it has been my only browser. I have sometimes been forced to use Internet Explorer, and I have tried on my own accord to use Opera, but the conclusion has always been that Netscape is the king of the hill.
Unfortunately, Netscape hasn't come out with a good browser since Netscape 7.2, which was several of years ago. That, coupled with the fact that Netscape has now kicked the bucket has left me little choice. While I could keep the Netscape I know and love, I have run across Thunderbird here at work, and I've also gone over to using Firefox here, and I must say that my previous reservations about Firefox have all but disappeared. Thunderbird is even, dare I say it, a better email client than the one built-in to Netscape 7.2.
As a result, I have decided to switch my internet platform at home to a combination of Firefox for browsing and Thunderbird for email. It is with a heavy heart that I lay the legacy of Netscape to rest. We have had some good times. We've shared laughter, we've shared sorrow. Netscape has been my companion as I have explored the internet from its relative infancy in the early 90ies all the way up to today.

So good bye Netscape! You have served me well. You will always have a special place in my heart, and I will never forget you.

It Has a Name

I have long been interested in the way computers reason about things. I've wanted to make computers make better and more informed decisions about things to make them easier to use and more robust against unexpected events.
This has been an interest of mine for many years. I've been interested in artificial intelligence for as long as I can remember, and I've always had a soft spot in my heart for multi-agent systems.
It turns out, that all these things that I like are now being lumped together under the umbrella of Autonomic Computing. The concept was outlined by Paul Horn, Senior VP of IBM Research in a paper a couple of years ago.
It calls for systems to be self-configuring, self-healing, self-optimizing and self-protecting, and it explains why systems should have these properties, and talks about why autonomic computing is needed. I completely agree on every point in the paper.
It is interesting that my master's thesis project, which I didn't really think would involve this kind of stuff, has brought me to a point where I can combine my interests, put a name on the amalgamation, and actually get to work with them.
All in all, very cool stuff.
This post sounded much better in my head before writing it down, but feh, it's out there anyway, and it is time for me to leave the office.

Another absolutely amazing thing that my research has brought me is this. It's a short story by Cory Doctorow (author and co-editor of Boing Boing)about hacking the human body with technology. I remember reading it a couple of years back and absolutely loving it. Unfortunately, I lost the link to it some how, and I've been searching for it ever since, but with no results. Until today.
If you like sci-fi and technology, this is a must read. It is awesome!

Digital Content Delivery

What if I believe in digital online content delivery?
What if I think that it's the best idea I've heard in a long time?
What if I'm psyched that there's finally an acceptable payment model for music?
What if I want to buy a bunch of songs, just to find that the online stores don't have any of the music I want, what then?
What if I was to tell you that, while digital content delivery is an excellent idea, it won't work until you can purchase the right to have something digital, regardless of the source.

I want to be able to pay some record company for, say, 100 of their songs, and they are to not care how I got them. Maybe I copied them from friends, maybe I downloaded them (illegally), maybe I found them on a USB stick at school. It wouldn't matter, because I still have this license to own so many of their songs. This would work, because then I could get the kind of music that I want in digital format and not have to have these horrible CDs that take up so much space.
Of course, DRM would be out of the question, but it seems that DRM is going the way of the dodo anyway, so that would be less of a problem.
iTunes and its ilk works great for mainstream music, but as soon as you want music from a record label that isn't one of the enormous ones, you're shit out of luck.


(What if I think that, for once, the blogger spell checker would work? Would that be too much to ask?)

Pornostar

While it's possible for me to write several posts with that delicious title, I'm giving it to this one (so far my titles are unique, I think).
I was listening to c.o.p project - pornostar and I decided I wanted the lyrics, for a quote or two, so I went to google.
Lyrics are normally a breeze to find, and they are generally correct. This time only the former was true. Google gives me about 3200 hits, but it's apparently been the parade of retards on the lyrics scene, or it's just been automatically transcribed by some bad voice recognition software.
After about 5 hits, it's painfully apparent that all the lyrics sites on the internet just blatantly copy each other, because the errors are exactly the same ones, and there are errors aplenty.
I know that lyrics don't always follow the grammatical norms, but this is ridiculus.
Listening to the lyrics it is painfully clear that the voice coming out of my speakers is not saying the same things that this epileptic monkey has scribbed on the webpage (nothing against epileptics, they fight a tough fight, but this looks like transcription in mid-seizure).
Whomever it was who said that an infinite amount of monkeys on typewriters would produce the complete works of Shakespere was only partially right. What they seem to have produces is the content on the internet.

So ends an era

I have the gravest news. AOL announcer earlier that they are discontinuing the Netscape browser.
This is sad for many reasons. One reason is that the browser poised to take the crown from Netscape, the spin-off Firefox truely and utterly sucks (at least in its current 2.0 state). The primary reason that this is sad, however, is that it ends an internet era for me. I have been using Netscape since 1994, version 1.0 (with the throbbing N, you might have seen it in the first Mission Impossible movie). I remember sitting on some crappy modem and using, which was at the time, virtually the only browser around.
Recently (since 2004) I've been using version 7.2 of Netscape's browser. The last version to truely be the Netscape that some of us know and love. Netscape 8 was a joke, and Netscape 9 is basically firefox with a theme.
I tried using Opera, but slow startup times and no added value keeps leading me back to my beloved Netscape 7.2. I believe that I will keep on using Netscape 7.2 for as long as it will run. I realize that HTML5 is in the works, but I think it's a bad idea. XHTML is the way of the future.

If Netscape stops working due to funky web design, I really have no clue where I will turn. Hopefully, by then, there will be something around that is actually usable.

For those of you who are interested, my User-Agent string is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (ax)


Edited to add: apparently I was wrong on the year. This article points out that netscape was founded in 1994, not 1993. I wonder what I was using before that then...

Skype Crypto Unbreakable by German Police

Slashdot is running this article today. It's about how the German police is having difficulty breaking the cryptography used by the popular voice communication software Skype.

Germany's top police officer, Joerg Ziercke, said. "The encryption with Skype telephone software ... creates grave difficulties for us... We can't decipher it. That's why we're talking about source telecommunication surveillance — that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it's been decrypted."

My first reaction to this was "so, any and all other forms of encryption are easily breakable to you then?". This is, hopefully, not true, but it was phrased in such a way.
There was an especially good comment, with a really good finisher, and it was this one by hanssprudel:

This is a good thing. Having to install monitoring at the source or destination means an operation that requires effort and, hopefully, a court order. This means that their is judicial oversight, and that to catch criminals police have to do, you know, police work rather than just sitting around spying on us.

Ubiquitous encryption does not make law enforcement impossible. It just makes indiscriminate law enforcement impossible.

The bold face is mine. (If hanssprudel doesn't like me reprinting this, he's welcome to talk to me about it, and I'll fix it).
I think it's a good thing that the police should have to earn their keep. Sure, the beat cops are out there getting shot at, and they earn their paycheck, but in the age of digital surveillance, it has become to easy for organizations (governmental or otherwise) with clandestine agendas to spy on what other people do.
Granted, it has become easier to hide what we do as well (we as in normal people, not clandestine organizations), but that doesn't mean that the intelligence community should get carte blanche for spying on us.
Regardless of what technology you use, there should be checks and balances in place to make sure that the rights of the individual are not being violated. We should not regulate technology. That is useless, because it changes faster than the laws do. We need to regulate what can be done to people rather than how.

Browser Wars

Another casualty.
I use Netscape 7.2 as my browser. It's great, it's fast, it's got a wonderful email client, and it uses an old gecko rendering engine (the same that was in firefox circa 2004) that does virtually anything you ask of it.
I say virtually, because one application (that I don't particularly like) has fallen off the wagon and now prohibits me from clicking buttons.
This application is facebook.com.
Whenever I go to respond to a message or accepting a friend request anything that involves any kind of submission, it just does not play ball. It doesn't give me an error message either, so I can't know it has actually failed. It just sits there as if the action I just took was lost somewhere between my mouse and my browser.
It used to work well up until a couple of weeks ago. Did my rendering engine deteriorate all of a sudden, or are the writers of facebook total asshats that will change a working solution to a non-working one without adding any other benefits?
I would have been more willing to accept it if they had some explanation like "as part of an upgrade, clicking a button will not dispense candy from your cd-rom drive, but as a result clicking buttons in Netscape 7.2 will not work".
I would have even settled for something less extravagant, but they have given me nothing, and yet taken a core feature away from me.
Now, I really hate to have an account on that glorified address book, but since "everybody is doing it", I figure I have to throw mine in with the rest.
At least until now.

From now on, please, those of you who read this. Don't contact me on facebook. I don't want to have to fire up another browser just to answer some message that could be sent to me via a plethora of other services (email being one).
People who don't have any other means of contacting me than via facebook, fine, you do that, but the rest of you. Please choose another proven means of communication where I don't have to suffer needlessly.
I would change browsers, if it wasn't for the fact that they all suck. I guess Opera is ok, but it still can't stand up to the awesome performance my Netscape 7.2.

Also, for hitherto unknown reasons, I get a "500 internal Server Error" when I try to use the blogger spell check.

Strange ways of reaching me

I was going over my statistics just now (of course I track who visits. I get so happy when I see that people have seen, even if they might not have read, what I have written), and I saw that I had a visitor from Korea. (Wow, that was a horribly incorrect sentence, but you all get it).
They were looking for "ioftpd cubnc", which is a fair search string (via google, btw).
It is true that I am the author of cubnc, but this is not the best way to seek support (but you are still welcome to leave a comment to that end).
Normally, the #cubnc channel on EFNet would be a better place to look.
If I can't answer myself, then I'm sure someone else can.
Right now I've got a lot of exam stuff to take care of, but after that I should be on irc with more frequency.

EDITED TO ADD: Since the search engines are indexing this thing, I might as well be a link whore and link to cubnc and say that cubnc was primarily designed with glftpd in mind, but that it also works perfectly with ioftpd. Ok, that's enough of that.

Internet Speed

As I wrote about last time, our internet performance has been abysmally bad.
I felt like 300 baud would have been a step up.
We finally solved the problem though. It turns out that my room mate was running eMule full force with a massive amount of simultaneous streams. I disconnected his cable and saw my speed soar.
It was like getting out of prison. They joy I felt was boundless.
I haven't talked to him about it yet, though. It didn't come up in conversation, and now the internet performance seems to be ok.
Maybe he has limited the number of threads or bandwidth or something.

Too hot?

The people who know me will undoubtedly have heard me saying something like "there is no such thing as 'too hot'".
While that is still true (even though it is over 30 degrees here and the air pressure is really high), there is something to be said for being too sick for the heat.
Now, had I been in healthy and had my allergy medicine actually worked, 30 degrees wouldn't have been a problem at all.
However, this is not the case. My head hurts, my nose is running, and my bones and muscles are sore and ache like you wouldn't believe. All this (which is basically heavy allergy problems, combined with the cold from hell) is making the situation a very unpleasant one for me.
I can't get any work done, I can't think, I can't focus, and my deadlines are a couple of days away.
If we could at least get some rain and thunder to clear the air (like the weather service has prognosticated for the last couple of days) things would be better.

I guess I just need to get healthier, but that still doesn't solve the problem of my allergy medicine not being even close to efficient enough.

Life sucks right now. It had better get better really quickly, otherwise I might have to kill some people...

Also, on another note, our internet is working terribly slow again. Over 15 seconds to load the google homepage on a good day. I don't know if my roommates have some p2p service running in the background, thinking our 4/1 (or whatever it is we have) cable tv connection can take it.
I'm pretty sure that this is not the case though, as we have a godawful isp. You'd think that utwente.nl, "the fastest campus in the world" would provide proper internet service to the people living off campus, but this is a fucking joke. I'd be better off with some GPRS plan for my phone and surfing through that.