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Get me this Shirt

The moment all mac geeks have been waiting for has finally arrived…

INTEL MACS! Dual core nonetheless =) God im salivating at the thought of a new 1.87GHz Mac Book Pro... 1 Inch thick, Built in Camera, New Magnetic Charger and latch system… up to 4X faster than old Powerbook.. DVD-R +R /DL etc. etc.

Steve Jobs-San has also announced the new iMac... with dual core intel chips too…. Im so getting one to replace my PC…

Leave you with the Quote of Macworld SF…

“What is an Intel Chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it has ever done in a PC”

UPDATE! Microsoft has released an update to address the WMF Vunerability issue. PLEASE UPDATE your computers if you run Windows. A huge Windows vunerability has been found. Black blogs about it here. Can’t be arsed to write a td.com version up. Patch your system temporarily here (verified by Steve Gibson of the Gibson Research Corporation). Lucas you can shaddap coz you use a Mac. Bah!

Guess its no secret right now, but Wordpress 1.5 “Strayhorn” has just been released. With over 10k downloads (and the official announcement hasn’t even been made yet!) this is indeed good news for the WP community. Check out the review here and here.

While this might not mean much to the the average reader, it means quite alot for myself as it marks fantastic progress in the blogware that runs this site. People flocked to Wordpress after MovableType went 3.0 and SixApart changed their pricing policy – but what people neglect to remember that MT was never Open Source in the first place.

Why do I continue to choose WP? It’s Open-Source FREE, its EASY TO USE, its HEAVILY MODIFIABLE and runs on PHP + MySQL.

Td.com has stuck with Wordpress since its inception at version 0.7 or so after the fork in the original b2 code by Michel Valdrighi occurred. Its currently powered by WP 1.2.2, has a radio.blog 1.4 courtesy of RadioblogClub and runs a stripped-to-the-core version of OnlyShout as the ShoutBox. I’m pimping OnlyShout as THE shoutbox script for any site as the shouts are contained in a single txt flatfile storing at the most, 13 last posts ONLY. Any spam attempts and the textfile’s nuked. I’ll probably look into an IP tracking feature for more spammasination proofness. The layout for the site is a DIY, Kubrick-inspired skin done by yours truly. There are no other hacks of sorts in td.com except redirection via .htaccess for the author links on the side. Other than that, td.com is all kosher code.

I’ll update this entry as td.com begets more changes to itself. After all, it is my code playground.

Since my 9am has been cancelled, I thought i might do a bit of public service. As you know there has been a Worm going around MSN that makes you send files to everyone on your contact list after you accept a file from someone who has gotten the worm (hope you see the vicious cycle).

Firstly… DONT ACCEPT ANY FILE WITH A STRANGE ASS NAME. PERIOD. if you wanna get into specifics, Dont accept any file with extension *.pif, *.exe, *.bat . The Pif file extension is the oldest form of file a hacker has used to contain a program or trigger. I Guess if you want to list all the files that you shouldnt accept…. I can kinda pull out a few…

• Drunk_lol.pif
• Webcam_004.pif
• sexy_bedroom.pif
• naked_party.pif
• love_me.pif
• LOL.scr
• Webcam.pif
• bedroom-thongs.pif
• naked_drunk.pif
• LMAO.pif
• ROFL.pif
• underware.pif
• Hot.pif
• new_webcam.pif
• hahahaha.pif
• me_2005.pif
• sister.pif

Those are just a few of the files being passed around… Another one is the handcuffs.pif being passed thru a URL. Don’t click on it… for the love of God… if you are unsure IM the guy who is sending it and ask if its a real file! Aish. Here is an image of how the worm (called the Bropia worm) works.

Courtesy of Trend Micro.

Anyway… for quick removal… go to the Symantec Website

What if that doesnt work? Hopefully you will have an antivirus program on your PC…

UPDATE YOUR DEFINITIONS

Do a FULL SYSTEM SCAN and if that doesn’t bring anything up, try an online scan. If virus scanners dont pick it up, download a spyware cleaner if you dont have one already. Good ones include Adaware and Spybot search and destroy.

If all these newfangled scanners still do jack shit, we’ll just have to deal with it the old fashioned way.
If you are not too computer literate, at this point you should scream for help… The Next section is not advised unless you know what you are doing or unless you are talking to someone who does.

1. CTRL-ALT-DELETE
2. Check the tasks running under your Username.
3. Look for anything running that looks odd… Like something in your task manager with a *.pif extension maybe? Select and KILL!
4. Look for all instances of msn running. SELECT and KILL!
5. Look for anything looking strange with msmsg or msmsl or umsmsg or something like that… you see the pattern…. KILL!
6. Open The Run Dialog box (windows key – R) and ype MSCONFIG
7. Click the startup tab
8. Again uncheck all the things that you think shouldnt be there… Dont worry… theres always system restore if you kill the wrong one =)
9. Check your Root Folder (C:), Delete anything with the *.pif extension and the filenames i have previously mentioned.
10. Check the recieved files directory in My documents. Do the Same as 9
11. If anything goes wrong… Or it doesnt work…. Google is your friend. =p
12. Get Linux.

** Get a Mac… we all know Mac OS X is the bomb…. Not to mention Its coming to NON Mac Based machines soon!

If you have any questions… Just email me...

Luc
(Done on Fedora 2 Distro of Linux, GNOME Environment. I havent Crashed yet.)

Disclaimer : Downloading copyrighted material is illegal. I will not be held responsible for any shit you might get into as a result of using the aforementioned program.

Before suprnova died, work was started on Exeem, and from what I know, it is a decentralised version of BT. If you want the gory technical details you can try google or try file sharing sites like slyck or zeropaid.

Taken from Exeem.com privacy page
The odd thing is several websites mentioned that Exeem contain Cydoor, which is some sort of adware. I’ve tried using both Exeem 0.2 and Exeem Lite 0.18, and both seem to work fine(without ads). Anyway, here’s the review.

Installation : I obviously opted NOT to install the IE toolbar addon. Exeem requires a port to be open for remote connections, default is 6881. Also a good idea to limit your upload speed to 50% – 75% of your total upload bandwidth.

Usage: Both versions worked fine. Used the ‘new files’ tab to get a file, somehow it wasn’t surprising to find that more than half the files listed were porn. Downloaded a ~10MB file with very good speeds (>50 kBps). And the best thing is I did not have put up with any ads, which I found rather odd. There was this blank space beside the tabs, that is probably where the ads should have popped up, might be the HOSTS file I was using. I don’t have a personal firewall installed so I couldn’t really check. Anyway, did a full adaware scan and it didn’t turn up anything. So it’s all good.

The program lists only about 25,000 users on the network with about 6 TB shared. That is very small compared to other networks like edonkey or fasttrack. But the app is fairly new, and it’s still in beta, and it should be picking up steam in the coming weeks as word spreads. We’ll see how it does then.

So, the big question is, should you use it ? I say no, well… not yet anyway. The program is still in its infant stages, meaning they will have bugs to sort out, plus availibility of files is pretty bad, unless you’re looking for some random porn to satisfy yourself. For now it’s best to stick with whatever p2p app you’re using to get the files you want.