News archive May 2005 - Koos van den Hout

Interesting people in England: Three hurt in cheese rolling race Three people have been hurt chasing a giant cheese down a steep slope in Gloucestershire. .. interesting hobby (source: BBC news)

Some new pictures in my collection. Walking through park Frankendael in Amsterdam, cat oddness, more cat oddness, other cat (Tender) oddness) and interesting cloud formations and more interesting clouds.

A nice article (ok, it's ment to be in humor, but it makes valid points) on Windows is rapidly approaching desktop usability. There are points that sound like articles of windows users reviewing Linux (hardware support problems), but there is also the valid point of the ease of adding software through package management compared to the hoops the windows user has to jump through.

Een serieus probleem: lokale supermarkten hebben regelmatig geen Grolsch beugels in de winkel. Een zwaar tekort! Diverse supermarkten waar ik langskom getest.

Yes, Windows can be educated to accept the onboard clock in UTC. It's just not documented (duh). But Casper Dik has the answer: how to set solaris and windows to have the onboard rtc in UTC.

Go BBC! The BBC has made lots of RSS feeds available and encourages people to experiment with them and build new stuff in the backstage.bbc.co.uk project. Nice stuff happening like a display of the BBC travel feeds in a simple format. The Travel Feeds are especially nice as they are in tpeg DTD [xml] which is a dedicated xml for travel information, allowing lots of interesting processing.

Mentioning phpbb on my homepage makes for interesting logentries. A perl worm searching for vulnerable phpbb installs was trying to install an irc bot talking to eu.undernet.org

For fun, I tried the iRiver ifp-795 on a Solaris machine. It gets recognized, it mounts nicely and I can even see long filenames. That is very standard USB storage.

My wireless network was failing me this evening and I checked with kismet for other networks. Without getting up from my seat (is this warsitting?) I found 4 networks, and I reconfigured my access-point to pick a quiet channel.

The iRiver ifp-795 arrived. It has everything you would expect from an mp3 player and some more (including options like timed radio recordings). By default, it only supports its own protocol for filetransfer (but there are linux drivers for this ifp protocol). I installed the UMS (USB mass storage) version of the latest firmware. I can now mount it using the usb-storage driver, so I can rsync stuff to it. The user-interface takes a bit getting used to, but the basic functions (play music!) are simple. It can also record from line-in or built-in microphone, I will experiment with that. I filled it with nice podcasts, and I listen to them.

Gadgetry delayed: Ordered Tuesday, sent Tuesday, first delivery attempt Wednesday, second attempt will be Thursday, so I can pick it up (but not too early, and with very 1950s opening hours) at the post office Friday. So much for that 24 hour economy.

Mashup at the Ritz .. mashup (mix) that made me laugh. Walk this way by Aerosmith/Run DMC combined with some Slim Shady lyrics. Made me laugh. Do follow the terms of use.

Door de identificatie plicht in Nederland krijgen gemiddeld 177 mensen per dag een bekeuring. Bron: Bits Of Freedom nieuwsbrief nr 3.9 (als ze de nieuwsbrief on-line zetten ;)). Ook in dit verband: Meldpunt misbruik identificatieplicht.

Bad advertising ideas: You know how there are lots of cars driving around with no sign saying you can't put advertising banners on them? All missed advertising space, and with the daily traffic jams they will be seen. (The same kind of reasoning used by the people invading our e-mail box daily..)

BBC: Pictures of a sandstorm in Iraq.

Gadgetry: I ordered an iRiver ifp-795 at mp3man.nl.. now waiting for delivery, so I don't have to lug around my laptop as a big mp3 player. Link to iRiver ifp-795t at amazon.

At work, I get to read the helpdesk mail. The number one request today..

"I got this mail telling me I sent a mail with a virus! Help!"

Apparently, E-mail virus scanners still don't flag certain virus
types as "fakes From: addresses" and will send a reply on recieving
Outlook virusses telling a virus was found, to a From: address which
is an innocent third party.

Yes, I call them Outlook virusses because Outlook made e-mail virusses
possible.

It is August 2003. Outlook virusses have been widely known since April
2000 (the ILOVEYOU worm) and many of them fake the From: addresses using
addresses found on the infected system.

SysNet Mail Filter has this bug.
Norton AntiVirus For Microsoft Exhange has this bug.
Content Technologies SMTPRS has this bug.
TrendMicro AntiVirus has this bug.
ravmd has this bug.
"Scenarios" has this bug.
Symantec AntiVirus has this bug.
AMaViS has this bug.
ScanMail for Lotus Notes has this bug.
"AntiGen" has this bug.
ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange has this bug.
RAV AntiVirus for Linux has this bug.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus (KAV) for Linux Server has this bug.
Antiviral Toolkit Pro has this bug.
eSafe has this bug.
Brightmail Anti-Virus Technology has this bug.

MailScanner Email Virus Scanner has this bug in older versions. Update!

(more updates follow as I find more in my e-mail or get notified by others)

And the virusscanner that does know when not to reply via mail:

F-prot Aves

chromatic, technical editor of the O'Reilly Network proposes a
One Question Certification Tests for E-Mail Filter Authors
because he gets flooded with those same stupid responses.

A new Windows Outlook virus is doing the rounds and I get to enjoy the bounces (I ranted about before and ranted about McAfee specifically again) again. Brian Martin wrote a nice article - rant about it too. Symantec antivirus has fixed this problem.