Category: Geekdom

I glanced through the MT Support Forums and didn’t see anything in regards to this, but I didn’t have a whole lot of time to look.

Here’s what’s happening: Every couple weeks, I’ll get a few comments that do this type of thing:

In the author field: “[email protected]: [email protected]: [email protected]: kvlP(C87BA01E,author)ZOl”

In the e-mail address field: “[email protected]: [email protected]: [email protected]:”

In the URL Field: “http:// [email protected]: [email protected]: aw(C87BA01E,url)OY4QK1FA2lmq5DIVMRq28RS0KB Ed WPJEfnH3l7M06xz9.”

In the comment field: “body”

Herein lies the problem: When I get my e-mail notification for comments, I notice that the “To:” field not only has my e-mail address, but “[email protected]”. They come out looking like this:

A new comment has been posted on your blog UtterlyBoring.com, on entry

#1602 (Want a really long e-mail address?).

http://utterlyboring.com/[snip]#2531

IP Address: 137.164.143.111

Name: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: kvlP(C87BA01E,author)ZOlL2KUa

bebrrG5sr6xaIp3ejB Ik

So I don’t know what else they could be using this for, but I could see this getting exploited.

Anybody else run into this? I’ve posted this on the MT forums, but feel free to comment here as well.

A fascinating read on Google’s 100,000 servers, why they always work, how they’re creating the world’s largest Web-scale platform, and why they can afford to keep GMail free. Thanks to Neil for the link.

Yes, you read that right. They’ve released the Windows Installer XML (Wix) Toolset as open source. Here’s the SourceForge project page. Link via b-links.

But there’s a catch to get all that space: Google’s automated bots read your e-mail and place contextual ads in the e-mail. So you get free, large-storage e-mail in turn for a ton of space. Full story.

(Yes, I know today’s April 1st, so take all of this with a grain of salt — but I heard it on CBS News this morning, as well as noticed a few sites running stories about it so maybe it is legit? Or they fooled a lot of people. The folks at SlashDot don’t think it’s legit, and I’m tending to agree, considering Google’s past tricks.)

If you designed Web pages at all in the 90s, you’ll remember these atrocities, and probably pulled a few yourself. Hell, I know if you look around at old sites I did a LONG time ago (which I’m certainly not going to link to here — if you want to make fun of me, do the legwork yourself ;-]), I’m just as guilty as anybody. Thankfully I’ve come to my senses and while I may not be the best designer on the planet, I don’t do anything too stupid.

It’s not really via e-mail, but it’s a temporary storage of sorts. Using YouSendIt.com, you can temporarily store up to a 1-gig file on their servers, and send an e-mail via their system. Dropload has a similar service.

I really wish my firewall supported this: A way of doing a “secret knock” on a firewall to get access to closed ports. I know I don’t like to keep ports open all the time, but there are times where I wish certain ones were open. So for example, if I wanted to get access to the closed SSH port (22), I could make connection attempts to closed ports 1026, 1027, 1029, 1034, 1026, 1044, and 1035 (in that order) within 5 seconds, it would then open up port 22 for a connection for 10 seconds, then shut it down if the port wasn’t accessed. Link via BB.

They usually run for $500, but if you do a little hardware hacking, you can get one for about $200.

On March 13th, unmanned robots have 10 hours to get from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. First robot there gets a million bucks from the U.S. Government. Official race site. The Raw Feed has provided several news links about it, including some entries surviving qualifying trials as well as a link to some entries.

DARPA is the same U.S. government defense agency that we can thank for the Internet, as well as Vietnam war-era mechanical elephants.

Has anybody tried this and had it work? Using the methods on that page, the folks there claim the following drive size increases, with no data loss:

Western Digital 200GB SATA

Yield after recovery: 510GB of space

IBM Deskstar 80GB EIDE

Yield after recovery: 150GB of space

Maxtor 40GB EIDE

Yield after recovery: 80GB

Seagate 20GB EIDE

Yield after recovery: 30GB

Unknown laptop 80GB HDD

Yield: 120GB

I’d be interested to see if this works, but damn, I don’t know if it’s worth the risk. Anybody tried it?