The Nigerian SCO Connection

As you probably already know, SCO is taking IBM to court in a suit that alleges that IBM has shared trade secrets regard Unix with members of the Linux community, which SCO says was done illegally. The backlash was strong, as SCO is now getting counter-sued by IBM, as well as getting sued by Red Hat.

I really see this as amusing myself, as SCO is going to get screwed by this. But I think the funniest thing I’ve seen circulating the net is a parody of the Nigerian scam that’s been circulating around the net. I copied it off Ars Technica’s site, as the version I have is riddled with the forward marks of death (“>>”). This is the SCO nigerian scam. (click continue to read the full version).

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August 18, 2003

Listing On Blogstreet

Don’t mind me. Just claiming my blog on . I’ll remove this one they find me. Saw that a pile of people were linking to this, so I’d figure I’d check it out. I even back-dated this thing so it wouldn’t be sitting on the top of my listings.

August 18, 2003

This is why I respect journalists

The power goes out for newsrooms all over the Northeast, but they still get the news out. Here’s a good list of stories from Romenesko talking about how newsrooms worked through the black out. What it came down to was this: Newspapers, power outage be damned, worked their asses off, even using the presses at the competitors. Nice job to all of you!

August 18, 2003

Yet another reason to ditch MSIE: The Notepad Pop-Up

In case you needed yet another reason to start using another browser, click here (only works if you’re running Internet Explorer). If you’re using MSIE, clicking on that link will get you a Notepad window, with a bit of text already there.

How does this work? First off, let me credit the site that I saw that described this. The view-source protocol is used by MSIE to view the source of files. So, for example, my link above linked to view-source:http://www.utterlyboring.com/images/msieisbad.txt in the href of the link. While that’s not really that evil, it can be used to do some nasty things. On his example page, he shows how it can be loaded upon the page’s loading. And the thing is that the protocol doesn’t know if it’s trying to view the source of an actual HTML file — you can send a graphic through it as well. And you can also link to local files. For example:

view-source:file:///c:\windows\win.ini

view-source:http://www.google.com

Or via an IMG SRC tag:

<img src=view-source:http://www.utterlyboring.com/images/oregon.gif>

It’s a scary little thing. To quote the site about its major problems:

* A Notepad window will pop up automatically in an HTML email message even when scripting is turned off.

* Most popup blocker software packages do not block Notepad popups.

* A simple email HTML message or Web page can easily open thousands of windows causing system stability problems. For example, a single <IMG> tag can tell Notepad to editted the system file c:\windows\system32\shell32.dll and 20 megabytes of virtual memory is consumed. A 100 <IMG> tags would consume 2 gigabytes of virtual memory.

* A Windows system could become corrupted if a user accidentally changes the contents of a system file which appears in Notepad popup window and then saves these changes because they don’t know any better.

Thanks, Microsoft, but I’m running Firebird, thank you, very much.

As a side note, I was going to post this over on Bits & Bytes, but it appears they changed the location of their mt.cgi script. Neil, if you’re reading this, are you still posting over there? Did I miss something? Did they kick a bunch of off or something?

August 18, 2003

DHTML Lemmings

This is one amazing feet of programming: A recreation of the classic Lemmings game, done entirely in DHTML. Don’t mind me while I play this until my eyes bleed. Link via MeFi.

Quick Update: I see Neil is linking to it, too, but I did see it before I went to Neil’s site, so I’m not just spending my entire day copying his links….really….I promise…;-) .

August 17, 2003

Want a huge pile of DSL Modems?

I was just checking on eBay to see what the going rate was for my favorite modem, and come across this auction: 10,000 Actiontec External DSL ADSL USB Modems. And it says he has three lots of these — for a total of 30,000 modems.

The opening bid for a lot is $21,500 — about $2.15 per modem.

I can’t help but wonder where the hell he got all these things.

August 17, 2003

One of these images is not like the other

Can you guess which one? Warning: A little bit NSFW. Link from NTK.

August 17, 2003

Moving from Outlook Express to Thunderbird

If you don’t know, Thunderbird is a stand-alone mail client, created as a redesign of the Mozilla mail component. I’m considering switching our office from using Outlook Express to Thunderbird, mostly because keeping up on the patches for OE is a pain in the butt, and OE doesn’t have built-in spam filtering .If you need more reasons, Neil has a pile of reasons why he thinks Thunderbird is superior, I still use Outlook 2002 myself, as I use its scheduling functions quite a bit, but if I didn’t need them, I’d be using Thunderbird.

But here’s the trick: Making the move from OE to Thunderbird as seamless as possible. For this, you just need to read this step-by-step guide, and a little motivation. As the article points out, if you’re using OE because you can check your Hotmail account from it (now there’s a compelling reason to keep OE — so you can download all your Hotmail spam as well as your normal spam), Hotmail Popper will allow you to access your Hotmail e-mail from any client.

August 17, 2003

So you have the perfect resume

This site asks: “Wouldn’t it be great if you could just turn in the most brutally honest version of yourself and your “duties and accomplishments” and still get a job?!” The entries on his parody resume are great! Link via BBspot.

August 14, 2003

Forget to flush? $263 fine!

A failure to flush public toilets in Malaysia’s southern Johor state will mean a 1,000 ringgit ($US263) fine under a drive for cleaner toilets. Full Story.

August 14, 2003