Computer Tips -Tech Info

Category: Computers

  • The Blackworm, Nyxem, KamaSutra Worm…

    Lot’s of news following up on the Nyxem worm in the last few days. It’s currently going under a number of names, the Kama Sutra Worm, Blackworm are some of the more common names. Sans has a page for information on the worm here. Microsoft has detailed manual removal instructions. The counter that logs the worms infections, is close to 2 million. That last note might be taken with a grain of salt, as the counter is tracking all visits to the page, even curious security researchers. Why all the big fuss?

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  • A Deeper look at Nyxem

    First I should raise an alarm of warning on this one, this virus is supposed to overwrite all accessible document files (network shares too) on the 3rd of the month, so February 3rd we may be seeing some problems. Don’t wait until then to make sure you have current antivirus definitions. The Nyxem virus though does something else interesting.

    According to incidents.org

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  • Your own wikipedia….

    I’ve made quite a bit of use out of the wikipedia in recent years. I know it has it’s flaws (I’ve run across some first hand), but I’ve found typos in textbooks as well. However that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a very useful reference. In fact, in some of my browsing I’ve gone through the spanish language version of the wikipedia putting some of my spanish reading skills to the test. Anyway, in the last couple days I became curious for various reasons about actually downloading a copy and installing the wikipedia locally. Now, I know one of the benefits of the wikipedia is that it’s collaborative and this way I’ll miss out on current and changing/improving/updating articles. But I can see some reasons to want to have a “snapshot”.

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  • Using ssh to protect web browsing over wireless or other hostile networks

    This really could be used to encyrpt web traffic over any “hostile” network. Here’s what I’m talking about. Laptop using wireless. Within our internal network we would LIKE all our web traffic to be encrypted at least from the laptop to a wired host. (From there to the outside world it will be open.) At the minimum we would like to have the traffic encrypted over the wireless leg of the journey. Here’s the most straightforward approaches uing ssh.

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  • Nyxem.E virus delete files payload

    F-secure has some details on a dangerous payload for the Nyxem.E virus. (The Nyxem.E virus is very similar to the Email-Worm.Win32.VB.bi that was talked about earlier in the week.) In fact, this virus seems to be spreading fairly well (not the blockbuster spread of older email viruses, but it is spreading.) Anyway, according to f-secure it will on the 3rd of the month, delete all files matching the following patterns. *.doc *.xls *.mdb *.mde *.ppt *.pps *.zip *.rar *.pdf *.psd *.dmp *(on all accessible drives.)

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  • Enabling keyboard hotkeys under KDE

    I’ve just been sitting down with the laptop for a while (Dell Inspiron 8000) it’s an older laptop by current standards I guess, but it does well for me. The inspiron 8000 has some “hotkeys” for volume up and down, mute and controlling the cd player (play, stop, next and previous tracks.) It’s pretty standard these days to have hot keys of some sort on the keyboard for at least the volume. I realized though that I had never setup those hotkeys under KDE (Frequent visitors will remember that I use linux as the primary desktop.) Now, I guess some would have tried the hotkeys and, on seeing no response, conclude “hotkeys don’t work under linux.” That, of course, would be wrong….

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  • F-Secure patches security vulnerabilities

    I’ve seen several reports on F-Secure’s security bulletin about a code execution vulnerability. The announcement on the f-secure blog mentions that it affects several versions of their products on Windows and Linux.

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  • Several ways to launch the task manager in Windows

    I was doing a remote connect to a machine today and the “send ctrl-alt-del” for some reason didn’t work to bring up the task manager, so I had to get to it another way. For those that never noticed (or don’t recall), if you right click on the taskbar, you should see an option to launch the task manager. (I was looking to kill off a program that was being uncooperative.) Another way to get it is to press ctrl-shift-esc and it will popup.

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  • “rm -f *” undelete

    I really ought to find a way to alias “rm -f *” to “rm -i” IF the time is between 1 AM and 7 AM…. Last night I was working late (2:30AM or so when this happened). I had just made a few “refinements” to some of my audio streaming scripts (kept in a “Foreign News Sources” folder). I was curious to see if I had any scripts that were still using realplayer, so I had done a “grep realplay *” and saw a lot of results… but most were in temporary files (left over from a text editor ending in ~)… so there’s radiopragueenglish and radiopragueenglish~ …………..

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  • Recording online streams (real / wma) to mp3 format (or ogg) with mplayer

    So, I’ve been looking back over my list of “scripts” that are pulling in audio from various news sources online for the onlineradiotv.com site. It’s also got me doing a bit more spanish language listening than I had been. In the car, I usually use an mp3 player (the nexia) with a small FM transmitter to listen. One of the problems is that I only have a very short list of sources that I can actually download an mp3 from. The rest are streams only. Some are mms (Windows media) streams, others are (rtsp) real server streams… yet others are “playlist” style asf, or ram files that point to other files (rm or asx/wma)…

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