Here is the story… Or rather, the short version. I really don’t have the heart for it right now. I could probably turn this into a 5 page epic, but I just… Well, you will understand once I finish this. The gist is that a guy at work caught a virus of some sort. The standard operating procedure in these circumstances is apparently to:

1. Ignore it
2. Hope it will go away
3. Talk to the supervisor and tell them that your computer is slow that you need a new one
4. Never, ever, under any circumstances attempt to contact the IT department and tell them about this problem

I was pleasantly surprised when this dude violated this long standing tradition, and actually called me with the problem. The infection turned out to be relatively minor, considering that his Norton AV Suite was able to clean it out on the first scan. To be on the safe side, I had him run a scan with malwarebytes. If you have ever used this tool (it’s great BTW – I highly recommend it) you know that at the end of the scan it generates a log file and automatically opens it in notepad so you can review it. Sometimes it contains useful information – for example, files that were not possible to be cleaned and/or deleted during the scan.

I asked the guy to save this log file, and email it to me. This is what I got in my inbox:

You can click on that image to enlarge it. And yes, he took a screenshot of his whole desktop, pasted it into word and sent it to me. My reaction:

facepalm.jpg on flickr

Apparently, God hates me. It could be worse though… At least he managed to skip the wooden table step. I guess I should consider myself lucky…

Moral of this story is: regular users do not understand plain text. I should keep it in mind when I teach my class and talk about ASCII code. When I say “plain text” some students probably think “word doc with no formatting”. Lesson learned.

Also, if you didn’t get this, I am not going to explain it.

Dear Sirs,

We have terminally-incoherent.cn and found that the domain is pretty useful for you to explore China market. We can really consider selling it out by escrow.com secure transaction if you are interested in it. Please reply to us and discuss the domain tranfer matters. China is the bigger market in the world ！Dot.cn domains is a symbol of enterprises in China！10,000,000 .cn domains are been registered！Wish you happy every day, and welcome to our China to travelling. At last,Sorry for the disturb if any.

Best Regards.

Wong

Usefulname Technologies

Out of curiosity I decided whether or not that URL is actually used for anything. I was half expecting one of those generic parked domain pages full of advertising banners and or/links. There was also a chance the site could have been spreading mallware but since I was sitting at a Ubuntu machine this did not concern me that much. I really did not expect a hard core pr0n site to be there.

They are not really using the domain to identify the website though. It seems to be a simple domain redirect and the links on the website lead to another address. There are probably dozens of other dresses that redirect to the same place this way. They buy them in bulk, then send funny extortion letters in fractured English. I’m pretty sure that the price they would want for the domain would be much higher than what you usually pay for a .cn domain.

I also love the “company name” on the email. I wonder if they actually chose that name or if someone simply forgot to fill out one of the fields in their bulk mailer software and the emails are going out with the default company name placeholder. Sort of funny either way.

Someone asked me what am I going to do about this. I don’t think I need to do anything. If I was selling something or ran a respectable company, and I needed to watch for the corporate image I might have been concerned that my .cn address redirects to hard core pr0n. But since I use the Terminally Incoherent domain to host a private blog I don’t think this affects me in any way. It’s just sort of funny and I guess flattering in a way. It is still sort of bizarre that someone would want to cash in by using my long, hard to pronounce, and easy to forget domain name.

I really don’t know what I was thinking when I started this blog. I picked two long, easily misspelled words and to make matters worse put a hyphen in between them to make it even harder to recall pretty much guaranteeing that this website will never by passed around by word of mouth.

“So, what was that website you told me about?”
“It’s terminally-incoherent.com… With a hyphen in the middle.”
“Oh… You know, just email me the link then…”

Yeah, kids – that’s me. I think I committed every single cardinal sin of naming your domain when registering it. Hard to pronounce, hard to spell, over 20 characters long, has a hyphen in it, not very catchy and etc… I’ve been thinking about shortening it somehow for a while now but I can’t figure out how. I’d love to just use ti.com but the fuckers at Texas Instruments got that one first. Oh well…

To sort of gauge the magnitude of this phenomenon, I decided to search for “Free Public Wifi” on WiGLE. This is what I found:

via WiGLE – see the interactive version of this map here

Bizarre. I assume some of these hits are from genuine free public wifi networks. But I have a feeling that most are not. If you click on the link below the map, and zoom out a bit, you will be able to see that these things are also popping up all over Europe and in other places of the globe too. It seems to be a worldwide phenomenon.

So I decided to investigate. After some googling, I found out a really nice writeup of this issue written by y Zaib Kaleem at wlanbook.com:

The answer to why this SSID seems to be everywhere can be blamed on Microsoft, more specifically a Windows feature called Wireless Auto Configuration (aka Wireless Zero Configuration). Wireless Auto Configuration “provides automatic configuration for the 802.11 adapters”. In an attempt to make it extremely easy to connect to WiFi networks, Wireless Auto Configuration does the following when an 802.11 adapter is enabled and starts to scan for WiFi networks. (…)

If there are no successful connections and there is an ad hoc network in the list of preferred networks that is not available, Wireless Auto Configuration configures the wireless network adapter to act as the first node in the ad hoc network (…).

At one time or another somewhere out there someone connected to a real ad-hoc WiFi network that had the SSID “Free Public WiFi”. They added this network to their preferred network list. They then traveled to a location where this WiFi SSID didn’t exist (airport, airplane, and/or hotel). They powered on their laptop with the wireless card on and Wireless Auto Configuration took over and starting searching for WiFi networks. After trying [failing to connect to any viable network in range], Windows gave up and configured WiFi card to ad hoc mode with the SSID “Free Public WiFi” (since it was a preferred network).

A second person in close proximity to the user above also has a wireless enabled laptop and is looking to connect to a WiFi network. They scan to see what is available and notice an SSID called “Free Public WiFi”….they connect to it not knowing that it is an ad hoc network. After a few seconds of wondering why they can’t surf the web they disconnect from the SSID, shrug their shoulders and move on with life. Now they have the viral SSID in their preferred list too. The next time they power on their laptop it starts to look for the “Free Public WiFi” SSID. This process is repeated in many locations across the US and world again and again. Soon this SSID is in preferred wireless networks lists everywhere spreads like a virus.

Joshua Wright likened it to a zombie outbreak in the way it has likely started with a single ad-hoc network, and now took over most of the eastern seaboard and created hot spots on the west coast, and Europe. He posted about this weird issue over a year ago, and he also did that WiGLE mapping thing. Go check out his post and compare our maps. You can clearly see how this odd infection has spread since May 07 – the difference is huge. It’s growing!

Is this wifi zombie plague dangerous? Not in and of itself, but it does create certain risk. Whenever your laptop is broadcasting the “Free Public Wifi” SSID, it is essentially revealing itself to all potential attackers. Whether or not you are actually vulnerable to an attack depends on your system setup, and security software you are running. But you clearly become a more of a target due to increased visibility. And naturally any open public wifi hotspot is arguably a dangerous place to be to begin with. This goes double for public ad-hoc networks.

Few people really use the ad-hoc functionality on a regular basis, so it is probably a good idea to configure windows not to automatically connect to them anyway. This way you both immunize yourself to this non-malicious viral wifi worm, and protect yourself from accidentally stumbling into a trap network set up by someone with malicious intent.

[tags]free public wifi, wireless, hot spot, public wifi, wigle[/tags]

To this day we regret not wording that email a little bit better. We still have to explain to people how this conversion process really works.

For example one guy found out that we can convert PDF files to excel from a co-worker. It just happened that he had some large, tab delimited text files that he wanted to manipulate in excel. So he came up with a brilliant plan:

1. He printed out what came out to be close to a 60 pages of data
2. He then scanned them in as PDF files
3. Naturally he was scanning them one page at a time since he didn’t know better
4. The copy machine sent the ~60 scanned PDF’s to him, one page per email
5. He then took the time to download all these files, save them, rename and reorder them
6. Finally he zipped the 60 PDF files and emailed them to me asking if I could convert them to excel

I didn’t know this story. I’m recounting it to you now because it’s silly but at the time all I knew was that I got 60 PDF files all of which essentially contained scanned images. I really didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry. I decided to call him up and find out what the deal was. When he recounted this process to me I had to take a break to bang my head against the wall for 5 minutes. Afterwards I called him back and explained to him how to open the tab delimited file in Excel and then click next 2 or 3 times and watch the built-in import feature does the magic.

Sigh… At least he didn’t photograph the pages on a wooden table.

Another lady was doing test counts one day. She painstakingly recorded the values of the counts using the old fashioned pen and paper method. Normally she would have to re-enter all this data into some XML file but fortunately she remembered that email we sent out. So she scanned in all these hand written notes into a PDF file and then sent them to me for conversion. It took me a while to explain to her that I didn’t really have tools to do this type of OCR. She just kept saying “But they are PDF files!”.

I don’t think she ever got it, but she eventually gave up trying to convince me to convert them. She probably figured I was lazy or something. :P

There seems to be something about PDF files that makes the small minded people very confused. We had another guy who kept sending word documents to the office to be “scanned in as PDF”. The secretary would then print them out, walk across the hall to the copy room, scan the printout, type in her email on the copy machine’s touch screen, go back to her desk, wait for the email, and forward it back to this guy.

They were both floored when I introduced them to PDFCreator. They absolutely loved it but it introduced a brand new problem. The Word guy would now create a document, generate a PDF and then realize he had few typos and/or mistakes in it. Fortunately he remembered we had full version of Adobe Acrobat (the one that can do touch-ups on PDF files) in the office. So he would now send us his newly converted PDF file along with the list of corrections.

I called him up and our conversation basically went like this:

Him

“Can you remove the fourth and sixth sentence in the third paragraph? This should make the whole document fit on 2 pages.”.

Me:

“Well, you see… The Adobe tool is mostly for touching up text objects. It doesn’t really re-flow the paragraphs. Btw, how do you know it will cut down the size to 2 pages?”

Him

“Oh, I did it in my word document so I can see how it will look when you do these changes.”

Me:

“Um… Wouldn’t it be easier if you just used PDFCreator to generate another PDF file out of this updated Word document?”

[long pause]

Him

“Sigh… I just thought it would be easier with the adobe thing”

I don’t know what is it about the PDF files. These folks seem to be doing ok working with Word and Excel files. But PDF files seem to have some sort of extra magical properties that induce confusion in some people.

[tags]pdf files, conversion, excel, word, wtf, wtf stories[/tags]

1. FIXMBR + FIXBOOT did nothing. Fortunately it didn’t seem to hose my partition table so that’s good
2. Booting from the WinXP SP2 CD and choosing to repair the installation did nothing
3. Running the Windows Repair from the WinXP CD did nothing
4. Parallel install of windows on the same partition (without formating) did nothing
5. My backups seem to be ok – Captive NTFS actually works in Knoppix these days (yay)

I will try few other tips I got in the last thread but I guess I will need to format and reinstall Windows in the end. But will this work? The repair option should have theoretically fixed any corrupted files on windows side. FIXMBR and FIXBOOT should have fixed the boot entries. WTF else is there? What the hell is preventing windows from booting? Chances are that I might still have this issue after I reinstall. :(

In the meantime I wanted to share something very special that I have found while googling for potential solutions to my problem:

Best advice evar: “SHUT DOWN YOUR HOLE COMPUTER”. LOL! This, ladies and gentlemen is the collective wisdom of Yahoo Answers. I swear, I haven’t read a Yahoo answer thread that didn’t make me chuckle and weep for the downfall of humanity at the same time. And I’m not even talking about technology advice – any thread on that site is LULZ-worthy to some degree. :P

[tags]blinking dash, windows, windows xp, winxp, fixboot, fixmbr, windows repair[/tags]

So I reluctantly bought their cable box to get the digital service. I figured that having more channels probably won’t hurt, and they even thrown in few months of free Showtime a few other premium movie channels along with the deal. And there was their On Demand service which pretty much clinched the deal. For example, you could use the service to watch most of the original HBO shows and specials the next day after they aired for free.

So I was pretty happy with the switch. One thing has always bothered me though – entering a single or two digit channel number on the remote did absolutely nothing. Most normal cable boxes, and TV remotes will usually give you a short time window to enter the number so if you for example just enter 72, and then skip a beat it will automatically tune into channel 72. Not the Comcast cable box though. If you wanted to go to channel 72 you had two choices:

1. Enter it as a full 3 digit number: 072
2. Enter 72, then press OK

WTF? Why would they do this? What is this shit? Initially I was annoyed, and I wanted to hate Comcast more, but I quickly realized that I have no more hate. It’s true, I’m not a hateful person, and I don’t hold grudges. I can only intensely hate few things at the time. And there is oh, so much things I hate these days. I mean, I’m already pretty committed to hating Microsoft, MPAA, RIAA, the Jack Thompson, Senator Stevens and bunch of other politicians that piss me off, lolcats, whoever owns the 2girls1cup domain and of course Comcast for their shitty ISP service. It’s like, I already hate them with a passion so it’s not like I could hate them more.

So I got used to it. I mean, what are you going to do. I could switch to another cable service, but that’s a lot of work and I figured that funky channel switching was one thing I could live with. Many moons have passed, and I completely forgot about the issue, habitually pressing OK after 2 digit channel numbers.

Few weeks ago I was sitting in some waiting room. I don’t remember what it was, but it was one of those places that has a magazine rack so you can read stupid shit while you are waiting. Since I had no interest in celebrity gossip, cars, body building secrets or restaurant reviews and fine dining tips, I grabbed some old crumpled up computer magazine that was sitting lonely in the corner. In fact, I’m guessing that this particular magazine was probably abandoned there by one of the patrons because it was like a 2 year old issue and there was no other tech-related magazines on the rack. I flipped around it, and flipped to the editorial section where some guy was ranting about Comcast switching their digital service software from a Microsoft box top set, to the shitty software they are using right now overnight.

Now, I never saw that old system (which just tells you how old that magazine was) but from what this guy said it was pretty sweet, at least compared to the current setup. More intuitive, with many more features and with a non retarded channel switching. The guy actually mentioned that this issue could be fixed by switching on the “auto tune” feature in the box top setup menu. No wai, I thought. I made a mental note to check it out when I get home.

Unfortunately the way my brain works is that as soon as things leave my short term memory, they go through a rigorous sorting process. Stuff like internet memes, geeky news, video game related stuff, programming tips, hax and stupid crap get placed on the high priority, fast access long therm memory sections. All the unimportant stuff like remembering to buy toilet paper, picking up clothes from the cleaners and other mundane real life shit gets filed under “Misc & Sundry” section which is conveniently located in my brain’s equivalent of the /tmp folder.

Translation for normal people: I immediately forgot about it. Geez, how do you people read this blog if you can’t follow my analogies.

Anyway, I was watching TV the other day and this random memory just popped into my mind. So I pulled up the clunky on screen menu, and found the Main Menu and went into Setup. Now you would think that the “Auto Tune” feature would be in some logical place like “Cable Box Setup” but no. It’s hidden under “Program Guide Setup” but whatever. The entry itself is very non descriptive to – it looks something like this:

Channel entry behavior: No Auto Tune

Now, unless I read about it in that old magazine I would probably not know what this thing meant. But that is not the weirdest part. What really disturbs me is why is this feature set to off by default? Initially I thought that this was just a silly quirk of this cable box – that some weekend programmer or engineer just did a half assed job and decided that adding that timeout and auto tune logic was not worth the effort. But no. The feature is there. The problem is that someone decided that it is a good idea to have the box behave differently than EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TV RECEIVER EVER MADE by default.

I know, I know – I’m complaining about a single key stroke here but come on guys. This is like basic design stuff you want to release a product that behaves in a way that your customers expect, and are used to. Most usability experts will tell you that you should strive to reduce required number of key strokes and button presses, not increase it.

I mean, the only reason why I didn’t go hunting for this feature in the menu when I got the cable box was that I did not think that someone would actually implement this feature and then leave it off by default. But I guess you just have to leave it to Comcast to do the unthinkable. :P

[tags]comcast, comcast auto tune, auto tune, cable, cable service, channel switching[/tags]

I have absolutely no clue how Google connected the comment notification emails from the thread about the UK National Lottery scams to some Asian advertisers. Maybe they are running scams too? I have no idea. I just found it funny.

[tags]adsense, google, ads, advertising, uk lottery scam, funny[/tags]

Anyway here they are:

First up is the Sheppard’s Tone – it is a sound that seems to be continously rising or falling, but really doesn’t. Best description of it I heard was that it is the audio equivalent of a barbers pole – it seems to be moving, but it doesn’t. The sample I have here is really ominous and creepy:

[Sheppard’s Tone OGG Sample]

Second is actually a shortwave radio recording from a Numbers Station. I wrote about these mysterious spy stations in the past. The interesting thing about this stations is that they don’t always use a voice reading off words or numbers. Some use odd music like recordings. I previously linked to the creepy russian polytone sound [direct mp3 link]. This recording is even creepier – it is some music recording played backwards:

[Backwards Music MP3 Sample]

This one literally makes my skin crawl for some reason. Please feel free to link to your picks for ultra creepy and disturbing sounds in the comments. :)

[tags]creepy music, creepy sounds, disturbing sounds, Shepard’s tone, backwards music, russian polytone, number stations[/tags]

1. it seems to be organic in nature
2. it doesn’t match any known marine animal sounds/calls
3. an animal capable of making this kind of noise at that volume and frequency would have to be larger than a blue whale

Why am I writing about this? Well, the location of Lovercraft’s fabled City of R’lyeh is 47°9′S, 123°43′W which is disturbingly close to the location of the bloop sound:

View Larger Map

Apparently the distance between these points is well within the range of how far this sound has traveled before it was captured. In other words, the sound may have originated from 47°9′S, 123°43′W.

Is this just a weird coincidence, or perhaps something more? You decide. Personally I think that whatever this is, it is made out of WIN. :mrgreen:

In the meantime, if you ever wandered how Cthulhu sounds like you can check out the wiki page of the Bloop. They do have a recording available. ;)

[tags]the bloop, r’lyeh, cthulhu, weird, sounds, random[/tags]

youtube link

My reflections on the video:

1. Fox News needs to LURK MOAR
2. Even Fox obeys rules 1 and 2
3. Hackers on Steroids on my /b/? LOMAO!
4. The Lulz Killer guy did not say enough memes. I was waiting for barrel roll, bringing back snacks and bell air. Such a waste.
5. That exploding car “demonstration” was priceless.

You got to love the overblown media sensationalism, over-exaggeration and unnecessary fear mongering. This is the proverbial “making a mountain out of a mole hill”. But then again, what else would you expect from Fox.

[tags]hackers on steroids, lulz, lulz killer, /b/, fox, fox news, epic[/tags]