internet – Page 7

More Geeky Fun – Hack Security Cameras

This was one of my most-popular articles in 2005. If you enjoyed it, you might also enjoy:

The Ten Weirdest Sex Toys I’ve ever seen (2009)!
A dirty-looking calendar I found at work (2011).
My beliefs about why it’s wrong to lie to children about Santa (2009), complete with pictures of naughty elves.
An argument I had (2011) with the Office of National Statistics about nonmonogamy and the census.
Open Source Shaving (2009).

Here’s a giggle – somebody’s found a cleverly crafted Google search string that will reveal the (unprotected) web interfaces of a particular kind of Panasonic web-capable security camera. Just point a web browser at http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=inurl%3A%22ViewerFrame%3FMode%3D%22, then select one of the cameras (you might have to try a few before you get a working one). If you get a motorised one, you can even remotely control it! Here’s some I found earlier:

Update 17th August 2011: fixed broken link to Panasonic website!

LiveJournal Sells

Following up yesterday’s rumours, it can now be seen that, officially, LiveJournal has been sold to SixApart. The details look pretty good – the service will remain much as-it-is, nobody will be ‘migrated’ to TypePad or MoveableType, and – better yet – LiveJournal might actually (finally) get some much-needed new features, such as trackback (which can be seen in effect right here, on my post yesterday – this post will be linked as a ‘trackback’ comment, because this post follows it up – with trackback, this kind of thing can be posted cross-journal, too).

Internet Explorer Exploit Of The Day

There’s yet another killer Internet Explorer bug out there, which is manifesting itself in the form of a new trojan, Phel.A. This one only affects Windows PCs updated with SP2 (the supposedly ‘safe’ people) and works by confusing the ‘trusted’ and ‘untrusted’ zones.

I always find reports like this interesting, so I’ve written an exploit of my own. If you’re still using Microsoft Internet Explorer, and you’d like to see why you shouldn’t be:

Click here to look at a web page I’ve set up [update: link long-dead]. It looks kinda boring, I know, but – if you’re using Internet Explorer, it will slyly put a tiny application in your Startup group.
Next time you log into Windows, the tiny application will download and install a bigger application.
Next time after this that you log into Windows, the bigger application will run, and tell you why you shouldn’t be using Internet Explorer.

The information on how to use this exploit is easily available on the web. Before long, we’ll be seeing another wave of web sites that can install software on ant Internet Explorer users’ computer.

If you’re still using Internet Explorer, take a look at BrowseHappy.

Google Of The Future

Google Suggest is the newest crazy invention from the guys at Google Labs… and it’s actually pretty cool! Go give it a go…

ATOM Feed Of Your GMail Inbox?

Checking my GMail account this morning, I noticed an unusual icon in the lower-right corner of the browser window:

It turns out that Google‘s GMail service seems to be testing an ATOM feed – a kind of syndication feed (similar to those used by weblogs and news sites – see Scatmania’s ATOM feed) that can be ‘subscribed’ to from your desktop computer.

Right now, the GMail feed looks pretty bare:

Nonetheless, this is an interesting turn of events – didn’t Google recently say that no other automated mail checking tools were to be used except for their own GMail Notifier (sorry, can’t find a news story to link)? But now it looks like they’re working on developing a format by which anybody can ‘subscribe’ to their own inbox (although probably only using a web browser – the non-browser-based XML readers seem to have difficulty with cookies, which are likely to be required.

It’s all interesting.

Windows XP SP1 Honeypot Breached In 200 Seconds

The internet is becoming a scarier and scarier place.

In a recent “honeypot” study, a Windows XP computer with Service Pack 1 was infiltrated in just 200 seconds, without even opening a web browser.

For the less techie-minded, a “honeypot” study involves setting up a new PC with a new operating system (in this case, a Windows XP SP1 machine) and connecting it directly to the internet to see how it is attacked and to what end. In this case, all they did was connect said computer to the internet… and less than four minutes later, it had been compromised by an attacker. Within half an hour, it was receiving instructions to act as a bridge to attack other computers.

Four minutes isn’t long enough to download and install ZoneAlarm. It certainly isn’t long enough to install Service Pack 2. And all across the globe, newbie PC users are buying off-the-shelf computers with no firewall, taking them home, and connecting them to the internet, basically ‘volunteering’ their computers and their bandwidth to be zombies and attack others around the world, relay spam, or share their files with anybody, anywhere.

If anybody needs help securing their system, just give me a shout.

Blogspam A Problem… No More

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been getting more than my fair share of blogspam of late. I’ve been spending about twenty minutes every three or so days clearing out the ‘moderation’ queue and updating my keyword lists. Worse still, some spam has been getting through nonetheless (hopefully I’ve always been quick to remove it, and so none of you – my readers – have had to see any of it).

So: I’ve implemented a new anti-blogspam solution: whenever you post a comment to my weblog from now on you’ll be asked a simple question. The answer is usually obvious… to a human… but very difficult to automate a computer to answer. I appreciate any feedback on this (why not leave a comment to this post), and I’ll let you know whether it fixes the problem. And, of course, if it does, I’ll offer my code snippet back to the WordPress development team in order to include it, perhaps, with a future version: or, at least, offer it to friends of mine who use similar blog engines and are troubled by spam.

I need sleep.

In other (almost equally geeky) news, I’ve been spending a good deal of time working on my new RockMonkey WikiGame – TromaNightAdventure. If I can keep up a reasonable development rate on it this weekend (which could be tough – I’ve lots to do, and Gareth is visiting and keeps distracting me with cool technology like GPS devices and VoIP telephones), it’ll be ready on Tuesday evening. Watch this space.

Popularity Of The Welsh Language

<ROFLMAO>

Want a giggle? Go to Google and type “old dead language” into the search box (with or without the quotes… either way), and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky!”.

This is the follow-up to my experimental googlebomb the other week. I’ve had my fun, now, and I actually believe it’s possible (I was skeptical when I first read about it, but it turns out that Google really is that easy to manipulate) to pull off a googlebomb of this scale with my limited resources.

In other (equally geeky) news, I’m starting to have trouble with blogspam, and my usual keyword/IP/link-count filters aren’t catching it all… might need a reprogram.

My Very Own Googlebomb

Partially out of curiosity, partially to point out a flaw in the #aber multipass system, I’ve made my own little googlebomb. For those of you who don’t like reading, a googlebomb is where you manipulate the way that popular search engine Google into falsely linking with great priority a page that it probably should not. I’m sure you all remember “French military victories” and “Weapons of mass destruction”?

Go to Google, type in “Stuii should fix this”, and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky”. You’ll be taken to the #aber multipass page of a user who has never existed, a user called “Stuii Should Fix This”.

It’s a pain that when people search for ‘AvaPoet’, the first result is what should be my multipass (but it expired long ago). However, there’s obviously still a lot of places linking to it, so people keep getting that page whenever they look for me. Grr.

In any case; the theory’s been demonstrated plenty of times before… I just wanted to do it for myself. Yay.

Fantasy Terrorist League

You know what’s become quite popular among the masses since the take-off of the Internet? Fantasy leagues. Yes; that’s right – those things previously reserved for pub regulars and geeky play-by-mail types. Now, the internet is full of Fantasy Sports Leagues, Fantasy Share Trading, and so on.

For those of you not in the know; when playing in a fantasy league you are allocated a number of points (frequently represented by pseudo-currency). These points can be spent on, for example, famous football players, or companies, or whatever, and as the perceieved values of these commodities change (e.g. the footballer scores more goals, or particpates in more winning matches… or the companies share value changes), the value of your team/portfolio adjusts accordingly. You can then sell the successful players or shares (ideally at their “market peak”) in order to finance the purchase of others, plus a small profit for yourself. Some fantasy leagues take this to it’s logical extreme, and actually play gambling for real money (with the values of the commodities scaled down by a factor to accomodate the wallets of the participants, of course – few people carry around enough spare cash to finance a premier league football team).

So; here’s my idea: Fantasy Terrorist League. It’s a web site where, once you’ve signed up an account, you’re given a number of ‘points’ which you can invest in the many terrorist organisations that are active the world over. The value of these terrorist groups decreases gradually over time, unless they get media attention. Value of groups goes up as they are featured in the news. Value of groups rises dramatically as they perform other acts: for example, taking a hostage might be worth 5 points per hostage taken (2 bonus points for a successful execution); detonating a car or truck bomb might be worth 10 points (with bonus points available for damaging foreign embassies); a toxic gas attack or biological terror might get a group’s value up by 15 points; a plane hijacking could increase a group’s value by 20 or 30 points. The points weightings will be variable, too, based on difficulty (it’s a lot more difficult now to hijack a plane than it used to be, apparently) and popularity (“Oh great; HAMAS did another suicide bombing… by the time the PLO get around to detonating one it’ll be worth nothing! I knew I should have invested in those Chechen rebels…”). Of course, I wouldn’t run such a site as a real gambling site (last thing I’d want is somebody with, how shall we put this – insider information – using it to gain a profit to support their activities), but I think it’d be a fascinating social experiment to run as a true “fantasy league”.

If you think this is in bad taste: fuck off. o_|/ It amused me for awhile when I thought of it.

Our Web Developer’s “Line Of The Day”

Yet again my concern for the value of an Internet Computer Science degree from UWA is raised, as a dippy co-worker with two years of such a degree behind her asks me for help:

“Dan,” she begins, “How do I make a table in PHP?”

For those of you that don’t know quite as much about web design as she should, PHP is a programming language used, amongst other things, for developing dynamic, flexible web sites which integrate with other data sources. This weblog, for example, is powered by PHP. It is most frequently used to output HTML, the language of the web.

“I think you mean HTML,” I reply, seeing what she’s trying to achieve – the alignment of two text fields with their corresponding labels. She’ll need a simple two-by-two table. The code for this is as follows:

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>
      Top-Left Text
    </td>
    <td>
      Top-Right Text
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>
      Bottom-Left Text
    </td>
    <td>
      Bottom-Right Text
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

What are they teaching them these days? I remember learning this at about age 14, using Netscape’s examples. This young woman has been studying Internet-fucking-Computing at degree level for two years and hasn’t been shown this?

Don’t even get me started on the fact that she shouldn’t be using a table for the purpose she was trying to use it for.

Update 2023-12-07: In hindsight, I made a knee-jerk reaction in writing this blog post. I should have treated this junior developer as what I’d now call “one of the lucky 10,000” and been more-supportive and a better teacher. We’re all learning, and back in 2004 I clearly had a lot of learning still to do.

A.I. Nuts, Again

Do you remember a week or two ago I wrote about a guy who patented the “Ethical Rules Of Artificial Intelligence”? Well – it looks like he’s read my article and placed his own comments. I’m quite surprised and impressed that he took the time (away from his heavy schedule of philosophising or book-signing or whatever) to come and read my counter-arguments to his ideas, and placed comments of his own (albeit mostly pre-fabricated stuff).

Here’s to you, John LaMuth.

The Internet As An Art Form – The Infinite Cat Project

Just came across the Infinite Cat Project. The premise is simple: take a picture of your cat looking at the current picture on the web site, and send it in, and it will become the current picture. The first cat is Frankie: just click Next Cat to get to the next one.

I think this is a great use of the high-speed communication that the internet gives us in order to produce something truly artistic. Cool.

Troma Night Website Integrates With Abnib

Woo and indeed hoo! I’m really starting to enjoy programming RSS feeds into my web sites now. I’ve just done a little bit of recoding of the Troma Night website to allow the newly-relaunched Aberystwyth weblog aggregator, Abnib, to syndicate it. Now, Abnib will show the details of the next upcoming Troma Night… and not a moment too soon – if you’re viewing this post on Abnib, you’ll see the announcement of tonight’s Troma Night just below it. Yay!

Abnib’s Back!

(much thanks due to Gareth)

Abnib, the Aberystwyth Weblog Aggregator (bringing you niblets of the best of Aber’s weblogs) is back online, after months of absence. Take a look and see who you recognise.

Haven’t quite gotten around to putting everybody’s ‘mugshots’ in there (as I’m having some difficulty with semitransparent PNGs), but Gareth’s made a good few to get us going. Yay! Hooray for Gareth! And Aberystwyth! And Abnib! And RSS!