Order of the Bath

Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category

Typical Farmville scam

12 Nov 2009 12:14 by Rick

If you are not aware of it, Farmville is one of the many addictive games that are available in Facebook. It is not the only culprit in these deceptive marketing techniques but among the best known. What you also need to know is that the lure is the internal currency used in the game. There is a thriving market in this to rival some minor real world currencies. For those that refuse to part with actual cash to buy the stuff then they try these sub-games.

At the end it says “Farm Cash awarded after the submission of a valid mobile number and PIN confirmation.” What they don’t say anywhere obvious is that sending this PIN number back to them as “confirmation” subscribes you to a mobile service which will cost you $9.99 US per month (there may be different versions in the UK). This is only one variation that makes Farmville and its associates part of a multi-million dollar business and as a side effect, the advertising boots the profits of Facebook. They don’t have the muscle to stop it but, when there is this benefit, why should they bother.

Thanks to SunBelt for the lead and TechCrunch for the detail.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Security | Comments Off on Typical Farmville scam

Cold Call PC repair

10 Nov 2009 12:33 by Rick

I just had a “Help desk” call from a friend who relayed a phone call he had received earlier this morning. The caller knew his name and address (and obviously his phone number) and then went on to say that his PC was running slow and was having problems and they could fix it for him. To demonstrate they asked him to open Start==>Run and type “eventvwr” which would open a window, then click on “System” and he would see a lot of yellow triangle warnings and red cross errors which showed that there were problems. They then said that they could fix it remotely but the conversation never got far enough to say how as he became too suspicious.

On further questioning, during which he was passed between three different people, he discovered that the company was called SupportOnClick in India at www.supportonclick.com and could be reached at a UK number in Bradford 01274 900834. This looks like a legitimate web site for a PC support company which works in America, Britain, Australia and NZ and I suspect that the next stage of the call would be a connection via Remote Desktop and they would do something innocuous and then try to sell you a contract for three years.

I don’t suspect that this was a criminal scam, either obtaining personal bank details or infecting your PC with malware but the methods are certainly deceptive—the mechanism they used to “demonstrate” that there were problems will always show some errors. It is useful for diagnosing problems but not worrying of itself. I suspect that they are just working down an electoral roll or some other mailing list; the majority of people they call will have a PC these days. Doing a web search I find that some people are not so lenient and, as they seem to use other deceptions like passing themselves off as from Microsoft or your ISP then perhaps it is more sinister and they are trying to sell bogus AntiVirus software after all.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Security | Comments Off on Cold Call PC repair

Snow chains not needed

19 Oct 2009 10:06 by Rick

Five weeks after the package arrived I have installed Snow Leopard—and it was a bit of a non-event.

First I image-copied the boot disk using SuperDuper! This is a great little program that does exactly what it says on the tin and I had a convenient empty hard drive that came free when I bought my new NAS system. This took almost exactly one hour. I had previously verified that copies made this way were bootable A caution worth observing before you do this is to make sure nothing auto-starts at login that modifies data; for example your mail program which could download new mail. Otherwise you could lose things as you switch the boot from one drive to another.

Then insert the DVD and follow the instructions; it couldn’t be easier. It said it would take 55 minutes but was waiting for login in 35.

And then what? … Nothing really. It had forgotten my wallpaper preferences. It went away for five minute to install the first patch (10.6.1 announced a couple of weeks ago). Although it had remembered most of my preferences, some, like the Spaces assignments and the auto-start programs didn’t take affect immediately (I think the second reboot after the patch cleared most of that—Update: Skype seems to ignore its Spaces assignment). Otherwise everything looks and works just the same. I had read about some of the enhancements but wouldn’t have found them for quite a while without being told. I saved 8G of disk space, big deal! And I have so much spare capacity having overspec’d the machine that I can’t see any performance improvement. Never mind, it is a warm feeling being up to date.

Did anything not work? Well I had to re-install Popfile my anti-spam system as the proxy ports weren’t linking up. BBC iPlayer seemed to have a bit of a problem; it kept asking for permission to access my keychain and then proceeded to expire a program I had only downloaded a few days ago. I will have to keep an eye on that one. The Sonos desktop needed to re-register with the Firewall.

What haven’t I mentioned? I must confess to a bit of deception at the beginning. Before step 1, the backup, I had done quite a bit of research and upgraded every program in the box to the latest edition. That is why I am so late in making the move. It wasn’t until last week that all the programs I rely on had been fixed. There are a few others that I am still waiting on patches for e.g. Springy but I can live without that for a bit (the basic program works anyway). Crossover requires a paid for upgrade but a hack has been published for version 7. Update: blowed if I can get it to work. I may abandon that one rather than have to fork out every six months for the sake of a single application.

Update: Canon printing required the driver to be re-installed though the scanner side of the networked MFP was fine. As expected, CyberDuck FTP needed the beta test version installing. For reference Adobe Flash & Shockwave, Firefox, Thunderbird, SoundSource, SoundFlower, LineIn, KeyPassX, TextWrangler, NeoOffice, Adium, µTorrent, SoundApp Reborn, Lame, Silverlight, Max CD Ripper, Growl, The Gimp, Silverlight, Audacity (v2), XNJB MP3 sync and VMware Fusion (I am still on v2) gave no problems at all.

Canon Easy-PhotoPrint required Rosetta, I was expecting at least one package to require this though I hadn’t checked before hand. What is curious is that, when I now look at the System Profiler Software page, almost every program is mentioned twice, sometimes with identical information. I don’t know what is going on there. Update 2: Problem solved; it is using Spotlight and that was searching my SuperDuper copy of the previous system as well as the current one. A quick change to the preferences fixed it.

I still need to thoroughly test the Canon Camera stuff and so I will update this over the next week as I do that.

Posted in Mac, Technical | Comments Off on Snow chains not needed

The little slip reveals the fraud

12 Oct 2009 16:55 by Rick

Today I had an inbox full of messages apparently from HM Revenue and Customs, Following one link (not something I reccomend unless you know what you are doing) took me to a very realistic looking government site (click to enlarge)

Just one little slip – “federal taxes”! The link is a windows executable which probably installs some rubbish on your system.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Security | Comments Off on The little slip reveals the fraud

Facebook Spam

10 Oct 2009 08:01 by Rick

This is a new phenomena (at least for me). What the rogues are doing is getting into Facebook accounts, I don’t know whether by signing up or by hacking someone else’s. Then they go to Friends ==> Invite Friends and then paste in their spam email list. I know that this must be the case because I have had invitations on addresses that I haven’t used for years but are popular with spammers.

What you receive is a message with the title “Reminder: <some name> invited you to join Facebook” for someone you have never heard of and with a selection of “other people you may know” who you have also never heard of. The problem is that this is a legitimate Facebook email by the time it arrives so pollutes your spam trap system.

The motive? The only one I can think of is a rather elaborate scam involving Facebook reputation. By getting you as a friend they can see your friends. Now that they “know” you they can invite your friends to become their friend and so integrate themselves into your community. There is a chance that they may come across one who is less than careful with their private information and may manage to get into other accounts. Another tack is to use that reputation to send a “Help! I am stranded in Nigeria and my passport and wallet have been stolen, can you wire me some cash to get home?” type of message.

Posted in email, Security | Comments Off on Facebook Spam

What is a podcast

28 Sep 2009 13:31 by Rick

A podcast is a free (and usually legal) audio or other media file on the web—like a radio or TV show or a piece of music. It also requires an associated announcement system called a ‘feed’ otherwise it is just a file. Yes, you could still download it, but the key feature of a podcast is that you are informed when new ones are available and can be set to download them automatically. Note that not all feeds are podcasts; this is a much wider facility and many are just news items or weblog postings. You will come across the little orange symbol quite often, like the one under “Meta” in my sidebar. Podcast feeds often use the dedicated purple icon to distinguish them.

Optionally podcasts also have an entry in a directory system. This is how you can find them in the first place. It is optional because ordinary web sites and blogs can and do announce their podcasts but the directory functions a bit like a specialised search engine allowing you to find the ones of interest to you.

Podasts are usually in mp3 format but they don’t have to be. They could be in Apple, Real or Windows Audio formats, though that would limit their appeal and what they can be played on. They can also be video or even written and still picture formats like PDF files.

Podcasts are not continuous streaming media—the latter are not files but come down to your computer in real time and can’t be saved (at least, not easily). Examples would be live internet radio services, though the stations may also offer podcasts of previous shows.

How to find podcasts

Most of the directories have a heavy American bias but some have dedicated regional sections as well, though often not in each individual category.

The biggest one of all is iTunes but it is heavily slanted towards sales of music. Another catch is that it only works with the iTunes computer program or an iPod or iPhone. Other popular ones are Podshow, Podcast Alley, Podfinder and IndiePodder which all seem to have been taken over by Mevio but one that still seems to be independent is Podcast Blaster.

There are also specialist directories such as www.religious-podcasts.net which concentrate on particular categories.

What do I need to subscribe and listen

You don’t have to have an iPod or any portable player, though if you do you will enable to carry your shows around with you. If you do have a portable media player then I suggest you follow the guides from the manufacturer as they are all a bit different. They generally synchronise when they are plugged into a computer with podcasts downloaded using a particular program but some models connect to the internet directly.

On a computer you will need something that is called a ‘feed reader’ or ‘news aggregator’ and most methods are free once you have the necessary network connections. There are very many feed readers available but some are dedicated to the media files that podcasts provide. Again the biggest and best known is iTunes which is pre-installed on Apple Macs and can be downloaded from www.apple.com for Windows (but is not available for Linux). This hooks you straight into the directory (“the Store”) mentioned above but it only supports Apple’s own portable players. An alternative is Juice which is independent, runs on Mac, Windows and Linux and supports most portable players. All the time they are running the agregators regularly check each of your subscriptions for a new edition to be posted and when it is, it downloads it automatically ready for you to listen to.

Instead of software on your computer you could use a web based system such as Yahoo or Google. Both require you to sign up (for free) but are very easy to use, you just have to visit them regularly to keep up with your subscriptions.

Which method you choose is very much a personal preference as they often have very different features and ways of doing things.

A footnote: sometimes you will see a feed that starts itpc:// This is dedicated to the iTunes software and may not work if you use something different; however the feed is perfectly all right if you change the start to http:// The same is true for pcast:// but for different reasons.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Technical | Comments Off on What is a podcast

Customised RSS feeds from WordPress

23 Sep 2009 19:47 by Rick

Customising a WordPress installation is relatively straight forward—you pick a theme and then tweak it to your satisfaction—you can make that as easy or hard as you like depending on your skills and requirements and it is all fairly well documented. It uses a theme system so that any templates that you place in the theme directory override the default ones, This blog, for instance, has modified versions of the index, page and single templates which determine the content and appearance of the post stream, pages and single posts respectively.

Customising the feed contents and appearance is not so easy. The system includes three hooks which allow additional content to be included—In the case of RSS2 feed they are rss2_ns in the RSS header, rss2_head in the channel content and rss2_item in each item section. These are what podcast plugins use to add in the iTunes XML stuff that they need.

There is, however, no mechanism to remove or modify the existing standard content. What it needs is the ability to override the templates with ones of your own. The relevant template here is wp-includes/feed-rss2.php and it is loaded from the function do_feed_rss2 in wp-includes/functions.php. That default routine looks like this

function do_feed_rss2( $for_comments ) {
	if ($for_comments)
		load_template( ABSPATH . WPINC . '/feed-rss2-comments.php');
	else
		load_template( ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss2-atom.php' );
}

What is needed is this which can be put in your theme’s functions.php

function custom_feed_rss2( $for_comments ) {
	if ( $for_comments ) {
		if ( file_exists(STYLESHEETPATH . '/feed-rss2-comments.php'))
			load_template( STYLESHEETPATH . '/feed-rss2-comments.php' );
		else
			load_template( ABSPATH . WPINC . '/feed-rss2-comments.php' );
	}
	else {
		if ( file_exists(STYLESHEETPATH . '/feed-rss2.php'))
			load_template( STYLESHEETPATH . '/feed-rss2.php' );
		else
			load_template( ABSPATH . WPINC . '/feed-rss2.php' );
	}
}

Then replacing the default routine with the new one using

remove_action('do_feed_rss2', 'do_feed_rss2');
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'custom_feed_rss2');

then the copies of the templates in your theme directory will be picked up if they exist and defaults used if not. Similar things can be done for the rdf, rss and atom feeds but I don’t use them; note: however, that if you have removed things because you don’t want them revealed to the world then you need to do it on all available formats because they are all available whether you advertise them or not.

What do I use it for? well I want to put the event date into some posts rather than the posting date and also I have a need to suppress comment feeds altogether on one site.

Posted in Technical, WordPress | 4 Comments »

Crossover for Mac Pricing

11 Sep 2009 12:03 by Rick

Codeweavers, the makers of Crossover for Mac have the most peculiar pricing/support structure I have come across. This package allows you to run many Windows programs on a Mac; there is a version for Linux as well. It is especially useful for that odd application that you might have for which there is no suitable Mac replacement. In my case it is WaveCorrector which is by far the best vinyl clean-up tool available—but for Windows only.

I purchased and installed Crossover back when I first bought the Mac (April 2008) to enable me to run this one program, and it has been fine. I don’t need any more features from Crossover and have never had to call on their support. So when their support ended after six months it didn’t bother me too much at the time.

Now Snow Leopard has come out and for about £20 I have received my DVD. I have been checking all the software I need for compatibility and the majority have already upgraded or are in the process of doing so. All but one has at least a beta version available and that includes the freeware. There is no patch for my version of Crossover and, if there was, I could not download it because my support has expired. They do have a new version which does support Snow Leopard but to get it I have to re-purchase the product to bring my support up to date; That is $40—more than the MacOS upgrade itself!

Posted in Mac | Comments Off on Crossover for Mac Pricing

WPA/TKIP broken

2 Sep 2009 09:19 by Rick

For those of you with Wireless Internet systems at home who have just got around to not using WEP encryption because it was seriously broken, I’m afraid you can’t rest there. It has been announced in Japan that it is possible to break WPA/TKIP encryption in under a minute. Not in a way that can discover the key but enough to insert bogus messages into the stream and compromise your traffic.

So, if your hardware has the capability, and that is always the problem, switch over to WPA/AES or WPA2 as soon as possible.

Posted in Security, Technical | Comments Off on WPA/TKIP broken

Time Capsule Pricing

3 Aug 2009 09:40 by Rick

We know that accessories for the Mac (in fact all Apple things) are a little spendy but the pricing for the Time Capsule doesn’t make sense.

The Time Capsule is basically an Airport Extreme with a disk drive added (and support for Time Machine. Update: I am told you can do Time Machine to an Extreme as well so even that is not an addition). An Airport Extreme sets you back £139 ($179). For the Time Capsule 1TB disk you pay an additional £90 ($120) which, for Apple gear, is not bad; but for the 1TB more in the larger model you are stung for an extra £150 ($200). That is silly.

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