Category Archives: Internet

New spam comment tactic

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I’m always intrigued by how the spammers try and get comments onto threads, the latest approach is to copy someone elses comment verbatim, but hoping that it gets posted so that their name-url link is published.

On huge blogs with a lot of comments it might actually succeed.  On a tiny blog like this with about 40 comments, it’s pretty easy to spot the dupes instantly.

Not much blogging goin’ on

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So my rate of blog posts has slowed over the last few months from the peak of 2008.  You may ask ‘is it the fault of Twitter’, have my astounding insights been dulled and diluted by a desire to spout 140 character chunks of wisdom?  Actually, it’s because I’m playing a lot of Lord of the Rings Online and various PS3 games really.  On top of that we had a June and July from hell madness where we had visitors left right and centre and went to weddings and generally were out having a life.

I think Twitter is to ‘blame’ certainly for a reduction in the 2 line blog posts I would sometimes make and perhaps Twitter is a better place for that kind of thought anyway.

But mainly it takes some minutes to sit down and write a blog post or a movie review (increasingly, for films which have been out for several years and no one wants to read reviews about) and those minutes are at the moment taken up with Lord of the Rings, the PS3, the garden, the house or life.

I’m sure as Autumn sets in and Winter gets a grip on our goolies, I’ll be here more often, shivering out a few words of painful insight that you didn’t want to read in the first place.

Using the ‘net, not being scared by it

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People who own the rights to music, film, tv, etc. should, in my humble opinion, learn to love the Internet, and not to be frightened of it.  That’s a nice glib statement from someone who never created anything useful in his life, but as someone who consumes a lot of created content surely I have some experience 😉

I was really struck by this thought when reading Felicia Day’s blog (again), after the release of the Guild song, Do you want to date my avatar.  Within a short time of it being released, there were fan-made movies on YouTube, using that music and animation from games such as Lord of the Rings online, World of Warcraft, Second Life, and others, to perform to the song.

Many content owners would immediately go to war with DMCA’s to have the music stripped from those videos, since it’s clearly not owned by the people who made them but by The Guild, or Felicia Day, or whatever organisation she has in place to own the rights.  Did she start processing take downs?

Nope, she found them on YouTube and listed them as favourites, which let’s them show up on her FriendFeed account.  I can only assume that this eventually increases the sales of the song (because god only knows once you’ve heard it you can’t stop humming the bloody thing) and doesn’t negatively impact it at all.  In the same way that seeing a cool fan video on YouTube with a song by Big Mega Band from the 80’s as the backing track is more likely to make you go and re-buy it on iTunes than it is to make you strip the audio from the vid and import the illegal, low quality version onto your mp3 player.

You either embrace the ‘take it and use it and make something with it’ nature of the ‘net, or you end up fighting it at every step of the way and losing none-the-less.

Felicia Day and creative content owners of her generation are going to make it work, because they accept, use and take part in the medium.

Felicia Day made me Cry!

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With laughter.

I posted ages ago about The Guild, I wasn’t really sure what it was but I’d seen a link to a humorous Christmas thing they did.  At the time, I didn’t know who Felicia Day was either.  Sue me.  I didn’t really *get* the Dr Horrible thing, I don’t really enjoy watching lengthy movies or episodes of anything on my PC.  I watch that stuff on my TV, in the comfort of my lounge.  While lounging.  So I don’t really do web TV stuff.

Anyway, time passed and I heard more about Felicia and realised who she was, and saw her in an episode of House, started stalking following her on twitter, etc.  She’s funny.  And cute.

I spotted that The Guild was available on DVD at Amazon (.com only, sadly) but I thought what the hell, people say it’s funny.  So I bought seasons 1 and 2 and Dr Horrible’s Sing-along-Blog as well.  Due to the superb small print, it actually cost me almost double the price to actually get them in the UK (due to Post Offices charges, not tax, I might add), but such is life.  Maybe the world isn’t that small after all.

The DVD’s have sat in the ‘must watch these soon’ pile for ages – and today fate intervened.  Our Sky+ box is on the blink, I think it’s the new viewing card, but the box crashes, hangs or won’t power on with the new card in (works fine with no card, but obviously, no Sky channels).  I needed something to watch and The Guild was at the top of the pile.

It’s hilarious.  It’s funny and entertaining in its own right – but if you’ve ever played any online game with a kin, guild, clan, alliance or any other collection of people, it’s on a whole different level of funny.  In the same way that it’s obvious to me Scott Adams works at the same place I do, it’s clear that Felicia Day was in my guild in EverQuest.  She probably even let my Warrior die one day while I was reviewing the finer points of tank aggro control and she was getting a drink or something.

Basically, Felicia Day let me die.  True story (maybe).

Myself and Grete watched both series straight through, and the gag reels and some of the commentary. The series revolves around members of an online gaming guild (for a roleplaying game), and their personal issues.  If you’ve been in a guild / kin / clan / whatever you will recognise these people.  You will recognise yourself (if you have any sense of irony), and if you can laugh a little at yourself you’ll laugh a lot at the show.  Marvel as the control-freak guild/raid leader organises this collection of sex-starved-stalker, perpetually-afk-mother-of-three, younger-than-you-all-dps-monkey, late-with-heals-because-of-life-healer and manipulative-sex-kitten.  Laugh as they have their first real-life meeting.  Shudder as you recognise the things they say and do and wonder when Felicia was watching you that closely.

So while I’m late to the party, I did eventually get here and drink my fill.  I strongly, strongly recommend you go watch this.  If you can cope with it online, start there, but if you’re like me, the DVD’s are a perfect choice.  And don’t forget to buy their new single (itunes link, youtube link).

Random ssh attacks

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Somewhere on the internet there’s a machine I have access to, which is running an ssh daemon.  That machine has a public internet address.  Between the 26th of April 2009 at 8:55am and the 19th of July 2009 at 1:37pm there have been 105,043 failed ssh login attempts.  That’s over 84 days (roughly).  So that works out at 1250’ish failed login attempts per day.  Which is about 52 per hour which isn’t a million miles away from 1 failed login attempt every minute on that server (it’s actually 0.86 attempts per minute).

The attempts come in batches, so every few hours there’ll be a few hundred from the same source.  Sometimes they try hundreds of passwords against root and othertimes they’ll try hundreds of different user ID’s.

In those 84 days there have been attacks from around 259 different source IP addresses.  As for usernames attacked, there are 17,532 different ones attempted in that period.

The most popular day was the 2nd July with 7387 attacks in one day, from 8 different sources.  Two specific IP addresses accounted for 3173 and 2826 of those attacks.  One source tried 728 user ID’s in 2826 attempts and the other 1615 different user ID’s in 3173 attempts.

The root user ID has been attacked 27,210 time throughout the whole period.  The most popular non-root user ID to be attacked is admin with 2392 attempts, then test with 1330 attempts and in the next slot is guest at 627 attempts.  Application based ID’s were popular with oracle (623), mysql (399), postgres (311), ftp (251) and teamspeak (165).  Amusingly, the most popular regular names attempted were paul (211) then john (201) and michael (180).

There doesn’t seem to be a preferred hour to attack servers, here’s the breakdown by hour,

  • 01 – 5696
  • 02 – 6249
  • 03 – 7387
  • 04 – 4127
  • 05 – 4388
  • 06 – 3457
  • 07 – 4809
  • 08 – 3920
  • 09 – 3481
  • 10 – 4708
  • 11 – 3894
  • 12 – 3062
  • 13 – 3542
  • 14 – 2805
  • 15 – 4481
  • 16 – 5823
  • 17 – 4198
  • 18 – 2160
  • 19 – 2496
  • 20 – 3949
  • 21 – 7980
  • 22 – 4823
  • 23 – 3418
  • 00 – 4187

I could do some analysis of the source addresses, but I’m not really sure how useful it would be, many of them are likely to be compromised workstations or forged address.

Firefox, progress

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So, I used procmon to see what Firefox was doing when it was taking 60 seconds to start up, and it was reading a lot of files from a lot of different locations.  The one that caught my eye was C:\Documents and Settings\me\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files, and a quick check revealed I had over 7000 files in there.  Not from Firefox, but from programmes which use the IE engine to display web pages and html content (like, XFire).  I removed them all, and the startup times for Firefox dropped to about 15-20 seconds.

Then a friend sent me this link from LifeHacker.

So, not only do I now know what is causing the slowdown, I know why, and I know it’s classed as a bug.