A week or so ago I notices a small swelling at the back of my neck. Such things are rather common, even among the healthy population, but they tend to draw my attention more than they should. This was not as worrying, however, as a similar tiny swelling near my bottom, which had me see my GP several months ago (in vain of course).

I came to the conclusion that I am overly obsessed with my health, even if all that there is are puny swellings that quickly fade away. Recently I was more paranoid about that abnormality near my neck, which has just disappeared. After all, unlike the other occurrence, it resides next to my second most-valued organ! [pun]

Dear Windows users,

Please get your act together and always patch up your operating system, if not migrate to a less vulnerable operating system. The Macs, for example, are not so hard to use.

Your current machines are occasionally getting infected and then used as zombies in the midst of our network. Subsequently, under the control of evil hands, they commence a collateral onslaught on Web sites. Such sites, if not computers in your network, can be powered by Mac O/S, Linux or other UNIX variants. You must become responsible as you reside in a networked environment and can affect it tremendously without you being aware of it.

I am currently suffering from an international army of infected Windows machines. This is no laughing matter as I can confirm all zombies are Windows-driven and there are hundreds of them all over the world.

Windows out-of-the-box (i.e. unpatched) is somewhat of a weapon. It can easily drain bandwidth of other users and inject spam content. It can also lead to downtime of others in a global village that is the Internet. We are now hearing about a Dutch network of people who exploited vulnerable Windows machines world-wide. Be more cautious than ever before or else get disconnected by your ISP. Here at the University we already charge people if they continously get disconnected due to viruses in their Windows machines. Viruses (virii as the common slang) are causing a great deal of distress to network administrators, which is the reason for monetary penalty.

If the attacks on my site do not reach a halt or some solution is found, it might have to be isolated (READ: brought down), which is unacceptable. If not isolated, my site may take other sites down along with it in the future. I am not alone in the recent batch of attacks according to Tao of Mac.

Related items:

• Internet Explorer Breaks the Web
• MSNBot Fights Linux Servers
• Explorer 7 Against Web Standards

NDER the quiet exterior of schestowitz.com, which continues to serve pages reasonably fast, there are actually many problems. For the past two weeks, zombie attacks have been launched against the site. As more Windows machines get infected around the world, the number of attacks surges, approaching tens of thousands per day at the moment. This is much beyond the scale that I am used to or can afford. This gives us yet another reason to hate that unsecure, ‘hijackable’ O/S that is permitted to attack reliable and resilient Linux servers.

I have tried a variety of method to combat the scary scale of these attacks, which get worse by the hour. If anybody knows some good solutions, please send me your advice as soon as possible, before the server collapses. Here are a few valid tools apart from the ad-hoc methods I have been using thus far:

• Bad Behaviour
• SpamValve

The only glaring issue with the above are that they require ownership or power over the Web server. I have contacted my hosts last night as we might have to collaborate on this. It is not only my sites that get penalised, but also other eCommerce sites that depend on QoS for their income.

UPDATE (5:30AM): Can Apache be configured to block requests based on referring URL (with regex)? I could exclude .to fairly cleanly. Please reply by E-mail if you can assist.

UPDATE (10:50AM): I have been told about modsecurity.org, but I still need root access to my host’s machines.

UPDATE (11:30AM): I have also been told about Patch-o-Matic netfilter/iptables.

UPDATE (11:40AM): The following Apache rule might work, but it is yet untested:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .to/
RewriteRule .* - [F]

More details in a separate post to be published shortly.

am never too aure as to how E-mail should be counted (if it can be counted at all). There is a certain amount of traffic that can be quantified when it comes to E-mail, but not all E-mails should be equally treated. Points to ponder:

• Should spam be counted?
• Or spam that sank in a BoxTrapper and gets reviewed on occasions?
• Should mailing lists be counted?
• What about newsletters that anyone can sign up for?
• E-mails with multiple recipients?
• Uninvited E-mails that are not spam?
• Automated messages?
• E-mail one-liners?
• E-mails sent to deprecated accounts that are rarely checked, if ever?

I have reached the conclusion that if E-mail bulk is ever to be counted, there must be some weighting applied to the variety of E-mail ‘types’. I have never counted my mail, but I am somewhat fed up with people who brag about the quantity of mail (or spam) they get. I have recently read somewhere that there services that one can sign up for in order to increase the amount of incoming spam traffic. Amazing, is it not? More amazing is the fact that people may actually sign up and welcome the increase in junk. It’s a market niche, right?

T this moment I am delivering a series of 4 one-to-one demos to prospective Ph.D. students. This occupies my morning and afternoon and I must admit that I quite enjoy it. I still remember the day when it was me whose ‘role’ was a student awaiting interviews and seeing some astounding demos. Once you grow to fit the very same shoes that you admired, it all seems somewhat worthless nonetheless. That, I suppose, is simply the way of life as the nature of progression. Below is a presentation that I primarily use to reflect on work that I do at present. I re-use this internal talk from earlier this year:

Early 2005 Presentation – Ph.D. Students Talks

• HTML without videos
• HTML with videos

Presentation from April this year
UCL, London

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

HE O/S industry continues to worry me. As a recent item suggests, if not practically reveals, Microsoft makes Windows-powered Dell computers cheaper than blank hard-drive computers, probably by subsidising hardware under the table.

This leads me to recalling a progmatic Ballmer reference to a $100 PC, possibly relying on kick-backs, lock-ins, steering of users towards MSN filled with adverts, not to mention extortionate Microsoft Office licences. When costs for hardware are being covered, it can be perceived as illegal practice if not bribery, which led to anti-trust lawsuits in the past. Software suffers the most from such legal loopholes due to (1) ‘duplicability’ and (2) compatibility, which make software different from most physical world analogies. Rules must adapt immediately to prevent a closed-circuit whereby competition is denied access.

If you are using Windows, be aware that 9 more vulnerabilities have been discovered today (check your favourite newsletter’s headlines for more details). Additionally while on the subject, Microsoft may soon be able to cash in on its own critical bugs, which is by all means outrageous.

OR the sake of some short comical relief, use this neat on-line tool to generate cyborg-like images from your first name.

Shown below is the image that got bound to “Roy”.

Other fun tools worth mentioning:

• Polaroid Images
• Name Popularity