GoDaddy.com's sub par phishing filter

GoDaddy has been a great service provider for me for many years now, no problem with them what so ever. Until this morning at 8:30 am.

One I received a VERY threatening voice mail; and two, right after an even more threatening email:

It has been brought to our attention that your domain name has been implicated in a phishing scheme. This action is a violation of Go Daddy's Universal Terms of Service and Domain Registration Agreement.

WHAT THE HELL? PHISHING SCHEME?

In short, your website is being used to commit crimes against innocent people.

INNOCENT PEOPLE? HAS ANYONE EVEN READ MY BLOG?

In your particular case, your site is actively being used to obtain login information from Goggle customers; a screenshot of the offending content has been attached. The offending content can be found at the URL provided in this screenshot.

The content located on your site must be removed immediately.

I HAVE? I DIDN'T REALIZE THE LACK OF A DATABASE, OR SUFFICIENT READ AND WRITE ACCESS COULD POSSIBLY ALLOW ME TO SAVE PASSWORDS.

It is possible that a third party was able to gain access to your website, without your knowledge, in order to upload these files and initiate this abusive action. This does not change that fact that it is your responsibility to ensure that your website is secure from this type of exploitation.

HOW IS THIS MY RESPONSIBILITY? THEY ARE THE ONES WHO ARE TO MAKE SURE THEY HAVE A SECURE SYSTEM THAT CAN'T BE TAKEN OVER... AFTER ALL, I'M NOT SOME GENIUS.

My rant is now over, but this seriously pissed me off.

Apache + PHP

So I have been having much trouble getting Apache + PHP + MySQL to run on my linux box. And finally the system died. Something I dislike about ubuntu, I CAN'T FORMAT MY DRIVE!!!! that is of no use to me anymore, but it was be for I watched the smoke rise from my HDD.

But I will try it again when I find a hard drive that has under 9999 cylinders and is over 2 gigs.

For now, though, I am sad.

Switching to the Blue

For years (close to 16 now), I have been in a REDmond, Washington state of mind. Just recently, I decided, I don't want to be dependent on Microsoft anymore. I have officially switched over to Kubuntu.

As of right now, only half over though. It is on a spare POS I have had laying around. Funny thing is, this computer now runs faster than my main one.

Specs:
451MHz P3
194MB PC100 Ram
12GB HDD


My main computer (not fast by any means, but it gets me along):
833MHz Athlon something hundred
1GB PC133 Ram
30 GB HDD

Now tell me this, why the FUCK is a computer so much smaller than mine running at such a faster speed. Linux couldn't possibly be that fast, but if it is. Damn!

Distance and speed of ulong i = 1000000000000

The number is 1 trillion. Not an unheard of number, but still a very long and hard to count number - hell, impossible for the human.

I wrote a code segment in C# to loop through a billion billions, and slowly realized that would take (at least to me) forever. It would take 228,000 years to count to the billionth billion.

for (ulong i = 0; i < 1000000000; i++)
{
for (ulong a = 0; a < 1000000000; a++)
{
}
}

This is based on it taking 2 hours (1hr 54mins) to get to the 1000th billion (1 trillion). This means 2000 hours to get to the millions; and 2,000,000 hours to get to the billionth billion.

Now to get back to where I was, the distance of a 1 trillion iteration loop:
This is based off the speculation that both variables of the loop are stored in the CPU's cache.



Then you must estimate that there is about an inch of travel between where the CPU processes the information and where it grabs the data from the cache and back. So if this is true (I'm pretty sure it is very close to true), you will have 1 trillion inches once you reach 1 the 1000th iteration of the first loop (i).

1,000,000,000,000 inches = 83333333333 feet
83333333333 feet = 15,783,000 miles

So our data traveled around 16 million miles in the 2 hours it was running in that loop! THAT is fast, 8,000,000 mph! Space shuttles in orbit travel at 18,000 mph (~450 times slower).

Now only imagine how far we could go if we could only transport our data :(. The future holds something magical for use humans, and let us hope it is traveling over electrical currents :p.

Like Shooting Phish in a Bucket

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror had a post today about Phishing. He cited J. D. Tygar's study on Why Phishing Works. The numbers scared me, because as an avid user, you really don't pay any attention to the address bar, and you will NEVER know whether or not you have been phished.

I have known a few people to employ phishing techniques to gain popularity on certain social networking sites.

I myself have a site that is a phish of google, first start by going here and looking at the original page http://www.google.com then go to the phishing site http://www.infinicastonline.com/GooglePhish/. Tell for yourself how easily mistaken you can get by the way they look.

Fun with Forums

A very basic bulletin board system. No credential checks or anything, you have to set the main categories up in the database. Uses SQL Express and C#/Asp.Net.

Very basic design, with the start of a user system, but was never implemented. Shouldn't be hard to modify as the code is probably not more than 50 lines.

Play with it.

File: Forums.rar

Is Geniocity a Word, or a Byte?

Through a moderate sense of geniocity (the amount of geniusnes), I noticed that I am what they call a genius. But seriously, I have been thinking about starting this one up again, and what better way than to show off a project that is SUPER fun?

It is called "Imagine Music" - It makes old time music like a c64 or dos machine based on images. It works best with png (as that has the alpha channel).

How it works:

1) You load an image (preferably a PNG)

2) You type in your equation using the R G and B variables - "(R+B+G)/R"

3) Click Play

The program then steps through the image pixel by pixel, creates a beep based on your equation, and then times it based on the alpha channel.

ISN'T THAT EXCITING?

Now for a download:

http://www.infinicastonline.com/iMusic.zip