Angus Thinks

Month: May 2005

  • Explanation of the previous email

    Well I feel stupid.

    I was notified today that marilac.malcolmhardie.com (ie this server) was apparently hosting paypal login spoof web pages. Somebody managed to crack one of the user accounts on the system and place a few files in the public_html directory.

    Fortunately the pages were only there for a few hours, but it shows how important it is to check the logs regularly.

    This is really unfortunate, although at least at the moment it doesn’t look as if the cracker got root access.

    What is particularly annoying is that, as far as I can see, I have all of my software patched to the latest versions.

    I spent much of the afternoon checking the server to ensure that nothing else has been compromised. It may be necessary (or advisable) for me to wipe the whole machine and reinstall.

    It does explain the previous email though. I just wish that I had understood what was happening earlier.

  • Strange email about spam?

    Today, one of the email accounts at malcolmhardie.com received a very strange email

    just a line to let you know I have passed on you details to paypal and the police regards your scam emails trying to access my paypal account with bogus emails.

    This was sent from what appears to be an AOL account. I won’t detail the sender for obvious reasons, but I was rather puzzled by it.

    As I see it there are several possibilities for this:

    1) Somebody has received spam email that appears to be from malcolmhardie.com and is thus trying (unsuccessfully) to report the culprit (which incorrectly appears to be someone at malcolmhardie.com)

    2) A machine that is permitted to send email via malcolmhardie.com has been compromised and is sending out such mail. (unlikely, but possible)

    3) The sender is actually some kind of spam harvester that is hoping legitmate recipients will send back letters complaining or, possibly, explaining the situation.

    At the moment I’m tending towards option 1, since it seems most likely.

    However I remain mystified by the whole thing.

  • Garbage Collection in Cocoa

    One of the interesting things that seems to be happening with Cocoa is the addition of garbage collection. A finalize method has appeared in the documentation for NSObject. There is a curious warning attached to it stating that it isn’t available in 10.4 or earlier releases. This suggests that it may be available in 10.5 or possibly even in notional 10.4.x releases.

    It may make Cocoa programming easier for people moving from Java. Although I do hope that Java support for cocoa apps continues (not least because SQLEditor needs it for JDBC interfacing)

  • May 5th – Election Day

    If you’re in the UK, then today is Election Day.

    Please vote if you haven’t already made a postal vote.

  • Almost 1kw psu!

    The inquirer has a preview of a new computer power supply that is rated at 850W with a peak of 950W. This is almost a whole kilowatt!

    Who needs heating? Just install a few computers and you can have all of the heat you need and play Half life 2 (or probably 3 by that point) instead.

    Technically the issue is the power draw from the graphics cards. This seems to be pushing upwards of 200W per card for high end products; and if you have more than one card in the machine the totals will be higher.

    The key issue of course is whether such a monster PSU can be cooled efficiently and quietly enough for the consumer market. You would probably need quite a large fan to cool a 1kw PSU adaquately and that isn’t likely to be quiet.