Posted by Doug Sun, 28 Sep 2003 18:45:00 GMT
This weekend marks a big change in Tiffany. For the first time she’s eaten an entire package of fruit snacks without spitting any of them back our or generally making a sticky, gooey mess. More than that, she’s very excited about it herself. Let the bribery begin!
Posted by Doug Sat, 27 Sep 2003 16:36:00 GMT
I don’t have virus protection. I run GNU/Linux. There hasn’t been a virus found in the wild yet that infects GNU/Linux. So, I never really know if I have received a virus via email or not. Just after the peak of the Sobig-F barrage, I setup simple filters to reject any mail with a list of known Subject lines; crude at best. However, I haven’t received any more of the SoBig?-F virus. Until today. I just recieved a mail message with the Subject “Re: Movie” and an attachment named “your_details.zip”. I’m wondering if this is just one of the Sobig-F viruses with a subject I’ve never seen or the first of the “next wave” of Sobig viruses. The infuriating thing is that the origins of Sobig are becoming known. One of the several articles on the subject is found over at The Register. It appears someone in the spamming business contracted the Sobig virus so that the spammer could setup a huge network of infected computers to use in an attack on anti-spam sites. If this is true then all the vile things said about spammers are true. They are the most selfish individuals I’ve ever heard of. Just ignoring the rudeness of spam for a moment; the Sobig virus has been the worst virus of all time. Calculating the cost to the International community for the amount of downtime, network slowdown, server overload, and PC disinfecting is impossible. Now add that to the cost for the effort people have to go through to get rid of all the spam in their mailboxes. Add to that the offensiveness of most of the spam. All this hardship on the entire world just so that a couple hundred individuals can make a buck. P.S. I used a service setup by Adreas Gietl to scan the attachment on-ine using ClamAV. It told me the virus I got was Worm.Sobig.E. I guess I need to go through the hoops of installing clamav on my mailserver.Posted by Doug Sat, 27 Sep 2003 16:25:00 GMT
Ok, it freaks me out to loose power at night. It’s not like I’m afraid of the dark. Quite the opposite. I enjoy being in the dark. I like to sleep in a really dark room. When I work in the office in the evenings I just use a desk lamp rather than the overhead lights. I think the difference is knowing I can’t turn the lights on if I want to. Last night I was working pretty late (like around 1:30am or so). I have the window open in my office because I like the fresh air; particularly when the temperature’s as comfortable as it has been lately. I hear this wild rushing noise and look out the window. The wind is blowing like I’ve never seen it blow before (this coming from a guy who’s lived in Oklahoma). I’m looking at my trees being bent over about 30 or 40 degrees. The out of the corner of my eye I see sparks. I look over to the West just in time to see a transformer blow up. It looked like a Star Wars explosion. It was streams of sparks blowing in all directions. Then I see more sparks. I turn my head the other way to see a second transformer blow a few doors down to the East. Of course, the power’s out. The first time I notice this is from the beeping of my UPS on my firewall/fileserver. My laptop is on battery power. So, I shutdown all the computers and call the power company. “I’ve just seen two transformers blow.” The woman on the other end of the phone is very pleasant for 1:30 in the morning, “Thank you for calling, we’ll get someone right on it.” At this point, there’s nothing really for me to do but go to bed. Of course, I wake up Carla. “I just saw two power transformers blow.” “Huh? What do you want me to do?” “Be freaked out with me.” One of the boys wakes up distressed their night-light isn’t on. I go lay down with him for a while. At least now I’m not freaked out alone. I go back to bed and fall asleep. Sometime this morning Josh comes in to complain the lights won’t come on. I don’t have any idea what time that was. By the time I finally got up there was power back on, but I can hear chain-saws working outside. I turned on the TV for the boys and saw a little bit of the news. It looks like a tornado came through our area. There wasn’t a tornado, but that’s what it looks like. The weather man is saying we had straight wind gust up to 100mph. I can attest the winds only lasted about a minute or two. West of here was hit harder than our area. I guess they broke the wind some before it got to us. I’m very thankful nothing worse happened to us. The pictures on TV are horrible. I guess if it really was a tornado the sirens would have sounded. I would like to hope that’s the case. It all happened so fast. I didn’t think to wake Carla and take the kids to the basement. We were all on the second floor. That could have ended much worse.Copyright 2001 - 2005 by Lathi.net and Doug Alcorn
