Individual Eleven – The World's Cyberbrain

Microsoft sent a bulletin to us at work, with some additional memos internally about this. In their bulletin, they mentioned a collective (Conficker Working Group) specifically created to combat this virus and a note about the $250,000 reward for the culprits. However, the main detail here is the possibility that 1st April will be the trigger date for the Conficker.D variant, to initiate contact with internet domains. Perhaps after contact, the instructions will be to redirect you to another URL that has the real payload. But I suppose we won’t know until it actually happens. Full blog entry by Microsoft can be read here.

As stated, this behaviour is the same as Conficker.B but introduces a wider scope in terms of which domains it will try to target. This will no doubt indicate that the virus writers want to spread this as widely as possible. If you were like me, then you would have been fully security patched by now across all affected platforms. The main thing here is to:

• Update your systems with MS08-067
• Keep your AV software up to date
• Monitor port 445 traffic if possible

Taking precautions is the main thing, and if you are sensible, you will not encounter this virus at all. Given how this worm is still causing problems, mainly in enterprise environments, all system administrators should be fully up to speed with this. Our company policy of banning USB devices is still in place, and we have resorted to burning files onto CD/DVD R/W. However, in certain cases we have permitted usage of USB drives.  We have separate “sheep-dip” machines, which are completely standalone, with McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.5 installed. It seems to do the trick, we scan the USB drives prior to usage, copy the files you need and then scan it again afterwards.

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Leading on from my last post, there’s more credit card tomfoolery and it’s not from the wall this time. We’ve all been there, you have a problem with a bank account/software product/bill/other and you call up the standard customer services number. The likelihood of this number going to an Indian call centre is fairly high, outsourcing is common practice as part of corporate cost cutting so a localised helpdesk is becoming rarer.

In this case, said Indian call centre working for Symantec was used to obtain and sell credit card details of customers who called them. It seems to be a slick operation, let’s say you want to purchase Norton Internet Security (god knows why) and you do it over the phone. These details are held in a database, and all it would take is an insider to siphon these details off and pass onto third parties to sell.

The article does raise a question on data protection, these call centres are overseas so do they have stringent guidelines to follow laws specified in other countries. Symantec may have declared this to be a rare case, but there shouldn’t be any cases, period. If there is an “isolated” incident, that could be the ones they are aware of. What about the ones that are completely unknown to them? Do they send auditors to India to check that best practices are adhered to? Not only does Symantec AV products use 99% of your system resources, it’s creator also unscrupulously breaks the Data Protection act with disregard for the customer. Let’s hope this doesn’t get brushed under the carpet.

Since we are on the topic of Symantec and my dislike for their anti-virus product, this is a rather amusing post about PIFTS.EXE which was rumoured to be a “call home” executable that is included with some of Symantec’s products. You have to chuckle at the subject headers of example troll posts. We will never know whether it does collect personal data and sends it back, but one thing they did admit to was that their uninstall process isn’t very clean.

“We received reports of PIFTS.EXE updates on systems where no Norton Internet Security or Norton AntiVirus 2006 or 2007 products were installed. We investigated the situation and now understand how this happened.”

Well no news there, I have worked with Symantec Enterprise and Norton Home products before and to say it leaves crap behind is an understatement. In situations like this, the best thing to use are removal tools, so you can completely eradicate your system of all Symantec/Norton components.

• CleanWipe (used to be called NoNAV) – For Symantec Anti-virus client/Symantec Enterprise products. You have to go through Symantec’s support site to get a copy of this.

• Norton Removal Tool – For Norton home products.

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Celebrations started over the weekend, with Paddy parades and all things green. It was fantastically glorious, weather wise, so it was nice to be able to enjoy the rays. Unfortunately, for me, I had many chores waiting for me and studying with new course materials so I was stuck indoors. However, during my tidy up, I found my old AMD FX55 CPU and ASUS motherboard.

A trusty chip, AMD really provided a viable alternative to Intel in those days. Now, well what can I say? They have started releasing their 45nm chip, but is it all too little too late? I got my Intel QX9650 quad core about a year ago, which uses the 45nm process, and AMD only just got round to theirs? What’s going on… I’m not going to incite fanboyism, because I did like AMD a lot since K6 and beyond. But, you can see why Intel is the strongest right now, less heat, more efficient, and with each iteration the processing power gets better and better. I just hope their little kerfuffle with Intel doesn’t derail their plans even further, but I suppose getting rid of one’s main competitor is an instinctual thing for a large corporation. So right now, unless AMD pull something spectacular out of their hat, I am sticking with Intel… and their latest i7 “Nehalem” chip is simply delicious.

Now here is a cool thing, someone decided to mod the Apple logo on a Macbook lid to make a fully functional LCD display. I don’t own any Apple products myself, but this is very impressive indeed and makes you wonder why they didn’t think of this before. The possibilities are out there. I particularly like the music visualisations and webcam function.

And finally… it was gadgets ahoy a couple of weeks ago at CeBIT 2009 held in Hanover, Germany. I have to say, I didn’t see much coverage about it but still I do like my gadgets so I was keen to see what they had in store for us this year. Over at CPU3D they did a nice coverage of it, the main draw for me was the ASUS booth. The graphics cards they had on show had “buy me” written all over it, I like my existing dual-card SLi setup but the cards they had was just wow. One card had Tri-Fansink for cooling, are the fans 80mm or dare I say 120mm in size?! I’m finding it hard to fathom how that is going to fit inside a normal ATX case. Also, being a hardware engineer junkie, the liquid cooling server rack by Supermicro was just jaw-droppingly desirable. Our cooling problems at work would be completely eradicated with that thing, one can only dream. There were also some nice mobile devices from Blackerry, Nokia et al. If I had my way, I would buy Alcatraz and have the entire island set up as a massive server farm for LAN gaming, with OC12 internet capability and all the CeBIT kit inside.

Now back to reality, I got to hit the books, sigh. But hope everyone has a happy St. Patrick’s Day! Don’t forget, drink sensibly (or try to).

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Or, would have if a twist of fate didn’t intervene. I read an interesting article on New Scientist, about how one person presented an opportunity for another to develop a technology we now take for granted. The internet we know and love today may have ended up on the proverbial scrap heap, if the now almost defunct Gopher web protocol took the reins.

I remember Gopher, this was during the early 90s when I was still studying computing at a local tech college. It was mainly text-based with some image viewing, not very aesthetically pleasing but it was very streamlined and simple. It’s almost like the Teletext system we have in the UK, which is a text-based information service on our TV sets. At the time, the streamlining was needed to minimise overhead. However, the entry of Moore’s Law pushed the boundaries of technological breakthrough, and encouraged Silicon Valley to invent powerful microprocessors to do the job. Gordon Moore, perhaps inadvertently, created a race in terms of CPU manufacture, and it is still going. The players may have changed over the years (although Intel is still in the forefront), but the urge to cram more transistors on a single silicon chip continues.

In turn, with these breakthroughs, Tim Berners-Lee was able to utilise this to turn his idea into reality. The “Father of the Internet” won out over Gopher and if it wasn’t for these historical events our online experience may have been radically different. In a way, WWW was for the people and Gopher wasn’t. The user friendliness was lacking in Gopher and the potential cost for server implementation would have limited it’s adoption even more.

Who knows what the future may bring, ultimately Moore’s Law may eventually come to a close. Currently Intel is using the 35nm manufacture process and they are already thinking of new materials to use. Possibilities include Graphene, which I read up on last year as a good candidate, if it can be used on a larger scale en masse. The search continues though, we have roughly a decade before the limitation of silicon is reached.

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Well this week has been catastrophic at work. Anything you could possibly imagine that could go wrong did go wrong. We’ve been given second hand server kit to build from, including the CPU which consequently gave up the ghost on first boot. My illustrious colleague had fun tackling that one and trying to convince Project Managers to source new kit, you know how that goes. The main source of cooling in the server room, the large AC at the back, spontaneously burst into flames. The smell of smoke and burning PCB was intoxicating; I had to make alternative routes to the kitchen so I could make tea. Also for the past two weeks, I have been trying to virtualise an Exchange cluster from physical boxes into ESX. The P2V worked fine, except I had no idea why this one particular server kept churning out Kerberos errors. I have tried everything, installed, uninstalled, netdom reset, went through the cluster installation documents over and over, perused over hundreds of knowledge base articles, checked Active Directory, evicted the node so many times to start afresh. System Attendant refused to start which means Exchange could be classed as dead. Suffice it to say, there was something fundamentally wrong that I had no time to troubleshoot… an executive decision was made and I am rebuilding the damn thing within ESX from OS up.  Not to mention the strange weather we are having, Chicago was getting tons of rain while we were getting the snow. Shouldn’t it be the other way round?!

But I digress, there has been some interesting news this week that I will just put into one big hat. So here we go…


Square Enix buys Eidos
Are we going to see Lara Croft standing alongside the likes of Cloud and Squall? Or maybe she can come on as a Summon using her pistols of death. Either way, Eidos’ last iteration of the Tomb Raider series did horribly, as dictated by the sales figures. It’s a shame that this franchise has gone downhill so rapidly, but I’m sure the gods at Square Enix can turn things around with the licenses they have now acquired.

1,234,567,890 – Almost like a birthday
When the clocks hit 23.31:30 UTC, it was exactly 1234567890 seconds since January 1st 1970 when the Unix clock started ticking. This event is almost like witnessing a full eclipse, and there are going to be some geeky parties going on I’m sure.

Facebook is $65 million poorer
Oh woe is me. This is probably pocket change for Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, whether he really did steal the idea from his ex Harvard pals or not remains to be seen. I’m sure that if Facebook was not was as successful as it is now, they wouldn’t be suing him. The problem is, just because you have an idea does not mean you can implement it into a viable business. So considering this, some credit is due to Mr Zuckerberg.

Microsoft issues bounty for Conficker culprits
It’s that old chestnut again, what seemed to be a rather harmless worm virus (after all, it doesn’t really do much if you take precautions and implement safeguards) has turned into something of a black plague in the enterprise world, including government institutions. The person or persons involved have been marked; watch out for wanted posters on a lamp post near you.

And finally…
It’s Valentine’s Day, so I hope you all have a wonderful time with your loved ones… perhaps you will get a surprise from an unexpected someone. However, if you feel all alone sobbing in a dark, damp corner somewhere then here is an ASCII heart just for you!


_________pork and____________pork and
______pork and bea_______pork and beansp
____pork and beanspor___pork and beanspork
___pork and beanspork and beanspo_______pork
__pork and beanspork and beanspo_________pork
_pork and beanspork and beanspork a_______pork
_pork and beanspork and beanspork and b______p
pork and beanspork and beanspork and bean__por
pork and beanspork and beanspork and beans_por
pork and beanspork and beanspork and beanspork
pork and beanspork and beanspork and beanspor
_pork and beanspork and beanspork and beansp
__pork and beanspork and beanspork and bean
____pork and beanspork and beanspork and b
______pork and beanspork and beanspork a
_________pork and beanspork and beans
____________pork and beanspork and
______________pork and beanspork
_________________pork and bean
___________________pork and
_____________________pork a
______________________pork
_______________________po

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Who killed JFK? Unfortunately, Google Earth may not be able to answer that one, but it may be able to tell us whether the Loch Ness monster exists or not. That’s because in version 5.0 of Google Earth, they have added underwater exploration. Imagine exploring The Great Barrier Reef and the plethora of sea life that inhabits our oceans.

Of course, there are probably some limitations. You won’t be seeing all marine wildlife captured in 3D, but this is a start. I have a feeling a lot of the source material will be taken from the highly acclaimed BBC production called Planet Earth. I have the box set myself and it’s fantastic, especially in HD. In addition, there will be some interesting facts from the experts at National Geographic, so overall a very good collaboration I think.

Perhaps we may also discover where Moby Dick hangs out, since they have included diving and travel hotspots. Now I wonder if I can find the best place to fish for cod. I fancy some fish and chips tonight

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