Digital Choke Daynotes |
What's a Daynote?"Daynotes" are daily (usually) journal entries of interesting happening and discussions. They are not 'blogs', which are often just a collection of links to other information (although we do include links occasionally). Daynotes are much more interesting (we hope). These "Digital Choke Daynotes" were inspired by the collection of daily journals of the "Daynotes Gang" (see sites at .com, .net), a collection of daily technical and personal observations from the famous and others. That group started on September 29, 1999, and has grown to an interesting collection of individuals. Readers are invited and encouraged to visit those sites for other interesting daily journals. If you have comments, send us an email. A bit more about me is here. You might also enjoy our little story about the death of the 'net. |
Reports
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Been busy -- as Jerry Pournelle often says, "short shrift" this time around.
Interesting links, which explain the "Sony Root Kit" issue (playing certain Sony music CD's on your computer will install a 'root kit'). (All links around here open up a new window.)
Here's the problem: if the root kit is installed, then any other process similarly named will be invisible to the user or system administrator. Great opportunity for the virus/worm writers. Or the "Rats" (the guys that install keystroke loggers via virus/worm/"drive-by attack" to gather your bank login keystrokes.
And it doesn't appear (yet) that the AV guys have a protection or detection against this.
Not a good thing. Which is why I don't use my $2000 computer as a CD player.
Got your TiVo warmed up? "Sweeps" month starts today in the US.
Sony has modified their "Root Kit" software so that the files aren't hidden. They are still there, though, and there's no apparent way to get the update -- how do you update software that you can't see?
Spent some time with Dan Seto (electronically) to get a time stamp on his web pages (like the one up there near the top of this page. It's just a small hunk of PHP code. I'd forgotten that the web page needed to have a file extension of PHP, so it took a couple of messages until I remembered that. Once he did that, his time stamp worked.
Here's the code, in case you are interested:
<?
putenv("TZ=US/Pacific");
$filemod = filemtime(basename($_SERVER[PHP_SELF]));
$filemodtime = date("F j, Y h:i A", $filemod);
Print("$filemodtime");
?>
That will do it for the current file. This will do it for a specific file (filename.txt) in the current directory:
$filemod = filemtime("filename.txt")
That's about it. For Pam and I, we're "Here today, gone to Maui".
... more later ...
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