RIP Skype

Skype logo

The end of an era Microsoft officially shuts down Skype in favour of teams. Back in the naughtiest after the likes of ICQ AOL Messenger and MSN closed down Skype came along to fill the void. For a while it was the go to for video and voice calling. I even owned a Skype wifi phone which allowed me to call from any WiFi network. This was before FaceTime (in fact pre iPhone). 

Unfortunately like many technologies which were ahead of their time they were bought out by Microsoft and became a bit stagnant while others came along and overtook them. It’s sad to see it go especially as I am not the biggest fan of teams. 

My first intro to IRC

 

A long time ago (2004) I was working at a company in Accrington. I ran the IT systems for this company and they used an old version of Microsoft exchange (6 I think). One of the options which had been enabled was internet relay chat. Though mostly now used by career criminals. Back in the 90s and early 00s it was the a tool to communicate with other people. 

Microsoft produced at the time a client called Microsoft comic chat which in one mode rendered the conversations as a sort of comic strip. This was the first time I had seen Comic Sans in use!

Later I would try and start a venture which sold IRC bots which spectacularly crashed and burned after we were DOS attacked. The hosting provider not only took us offline but removed our server and sent it back to us. 

Craptops

I bought my dad a new laptop for Christmas, a little HP it was really cheap but surprisingly capable of running all the sorts of application he needs.

The only disappointing thing about it was the amount of junk software installed. Not just lots of useless apps put actually dodgy apps ready to hurt the unwary. For the first time I saw an uninstalled which on one of the steps actually installed more software! Basically relying on the social engineering that most people just keep hitting next then end up with yet more crap ware to remove. If I was head of HP I would not want this junk of my hardware, it just makes it look crumby, certainly the repetitional damage is not worth the few quid they advertisers are paying.

It not just hardware manufactures getting caught out though. I recently fixed my barbers laptop and like a lot of computers I see it had all sort of dodgy browser extensions installed. It displayed fake adverts for Adobe flash which installed yes you've guessed it more junk software. The laptop was so full of this junk as to be unusable. These programs are for some reason not recognised as viruses, in spite of their virus like behaviour, changing settings ruining the user experience and driving the user to specific pages for finance gain. I am unsure why this junk is allowed to exist.

Overall I have to hand it to Apple, every Mac which I have used comes with software that enhances the computer not just to sell advertising space. There is a hell of a lot less of this junk which affects Apple.

The game has changed

Virgin recently upgraded all their broadband services, and for existing customers this meant an upgrade to 30MB/s srevice for a one off cost of £30. This being a bargin I phoned up adn ordered my new device. This morning I recieved my new Virgin Media "Super Hub". Basically they have integrated the cable modem into a wireless router. Its escencially a netgear manufactured router with a Virgin branded firmware.
Annoyingly they seem to have removed the DDNS option. This is very annoying as Virgin don't do static ip addresses so getting remote access can be tricky.

I am pretty happy with the speed though, faster upload and and download

Try broadband speed test or test your speed and donate to charity at the same time.

First State

The Register has an article stating that Virgin Media are touting the idea of writing to customers found to be part of botnets. I think this is an excellent idea. One of my servers was attacked by a botnet and I reported it to 6 networks, all but one never even replied to my abuse reports. No wonder bot nets can get so huge if administrators do not do anything to halt the spread.

France 24 Mistake

France 24 Breaking news, actually Netherlands secured a spot in the 2010 World Cup final with a 3-2 victory over Uruguay not Spain, wonder what match the reporter was watching?

Rest my chemistry

I have worked on and looked after systems for over a decade, in that time I have seen many security breaches. They have ranged from serious taking out an entire school network for a couple of days, to defacement on a webpage. Each time different factors took their toll.

The most recent attack was against the lan party website. A vulnerability in the content management system E107 allowed an attacker to upload a script file to my site. A file "fwriteq.php" a modified version of a php example file. When a remote attack to request the page using a specific URL the page outputted a huge amount of junk traffic towards an IP address given in the request string.

The weird thing about it was that it created UDP datagrams. In response I cleaned up the site and altered the firewall to block outgoing traffic of type UDP on port 80 as this is invariably junk.

I went through the logs and found the command and control IP which were sending in the requests for traffic and then emailed the abuse contact. BT owned 2 of them and I received no response (another reason not to recommend them). One of them was a linode box, they replied and asked for more details which I sent on to them.

X-rayted pin-up calendar

Saw this on The Register quite amazing lengths to go for advertising I hope it wasn't all one model getting zapped.

Zero Punctuation - Sims 3

Starálfur

I just returned my digi box because I got tired pressing yellow to get rid of the message asking me to retune. Thanks to the digital switchover. The switchover in the Granada take place in two stages. The first on 04th November 2009 at which point BBC2 goes all digital, the second full switchover takes place on 2nd December 2009, at which point you will need to have a set top box, digital tv, sky digital or NTL connection to receive a television service in the Granada region. So plenty of time before I need to retune the box but unfortunately the BBC seem to have added an irritating popup reminded requiring me to press the yellow button to make it disappear. I rather reminded me of the most hated Microsoft update which prompted every 15 minute until you relented and restarted the computer.

The switchover means more channel space being freed up, indeed there are a new bunch of channels already, including a Russian News channel Russia Today. I looked them up on wikipeadia basically it is funded by the Russia State media company, I guess their attempt at the BBC world service.

While I was googling Russia Today I found that the Japanese state broadcaster NHK has an English language channel, and website complete with some free Japanese tutorials awesome!

Ironic

Like something from Final Destination after escaping from a lift a devout Catholic man is crushed to death by a church alter.

Airbag

According to this article in the Telegraph computer engineers are the most likely to make an insurance claim following a car crash, yikes!

Farmville

Seems like Zynga are taking over Facebook at the moment, my feed seems to be full of people wanting me to join the Mafia or to start a farm. According to the Zynga blog FarmVille surpassed 11 million daily active users. That is some pretty amazing usage statistics. I had dismissed these games as a fad but it seems some people take it really seriously, check out Pablo Paniagua' in depth analysis of the investment returns of different trees.

419 goes YouTube

The classic Nigerian email scams gets all web 2.0. The Register has full covereage.
This is pure comedy genius

He's A Pirate

One of my friends works for a security company, I think he should be driving one of these!

Options include, flag holders and gun case with compartments for 2 machine guns, awesome stuff.

iPhony

Saw this in Wired magazine, as ever US centric but most of the reasons have meritc nonethless

Robots

People who work on production lines have for a number of years had their jobs replaced by robots. Now even if you work in a resurant watch out!

The Register has a story about a Japanese resturant where the Miso Raimen is prepared by two industrial robots.

Cookie Sutra

My friend Kath found this

The loneliness of a tower crane driver

Saw two weird and wonderful stories while on lunch break which I thought I would share.

Reuters has a story about a German man who Man tries to fix airbed,and end up blowing up his apartment.

The Register has a tail of why it is not a good idea to sniff petrol then goad police.

Don't leave me

I have been amusing myself tonight coding and listening to songs from my youth thanks to Spotify. Just in case it has passed you by Spotify is a 100% legal way to listen to music on demand. It is advertising supported but at the moment sends out less than commercial Radio like say Key 103, and you get to be the DJ. Basically you search choose and album and listen, every couple of songs there is an advert its easy to use, and has pretty much every album I can thing of to search for including the Rex the Dog remix of The Knifes Heartbeats.

This evening I caught up with the Green Day early albums, then tuned into the Smashing Pumpkins. I forgot how angst ridden the early Green Day was, and its certainly been way too long since i heard Today, and Bullet with Butterfly Wings.