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THE VIEW FROM CHAOS MANOR

View 163 July 23 - 29, 2001

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If you want to PAY FOR THIS there are problems, but I keep the latest HERE. I'm trying. MY THANKS to all of you who sent money.  Some of you went to a lot of trouble to send money from overseas. Thank you! There are also some new payment methods. I am preparing a special (electronic) mailing to all those who paid: there will be a couple of these. I am also toying with the notion of a subscriber section of the page. LET ME KNOW your thoughts.
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Monday  July 23, 2001

The big news is from Mojave.

I do not usually post press releases, much less give them a special page all their own, but this one is different:

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To see what is going on, see the report.

For those who want to see the latest grandchild pix, I put them up yesterday.

There is a great deal in MAIL about viruses including warnings for Linux users.

Recall the crisis about boys? Real Boys? A national emergency? A Harvard psychiatrist got rich off the crisis. His name was Pollock.

Following is extracted from a couple of places.

When Pollack's former subjects now realize how their answers have been used

by Dr. Pollack as a recipe for changing the boys all across America, they are

astonished.

"Our immature attempt at humor four years ago should not be the benchmark for

the 21st century," one told the Massachusetts News.

Pollack threatened to sue Massachusetts News (but never did) after it printed

a story in the November 2000 issue. A subsequent story was published in

January 2001 with the headline, "Harvard Professor Joins Feminist Plan to

Alter the Nature of Males." The subhead was, "Dr. William Pollack Became

Famous and Wealthy, Saying Single Mothers are Fine and Boys Are In Crisis,

Just Like Their Fathers."

This is what passes for serious social science now.

 

NOTICE OF BAD MAIL.

  I sent out a Chaos Manor Virus Alert regarding the SirCam virus. I am posting the bad mail returns at badmail. If you are a subscriber and did not receive the Virus Alert, check there. In some cases the message informed me that recipient mailbox was full; in most, though, it was "user unknown".

I'll continue to revise the badmail page as I get more returns. Interesting: one mail to a subscriber at kodak.com  can't get this warning because:

550 Banned Subject: text was found: 'virus alert'

Which is an interesting way of protecting yourself from a virus, or at least from one that tells you in the subject that it's a virus...

There are enough of these that I am going to remove them from the data base absent positive evidence of recent renewal. If you subscribe to this site and did not get the Virus Warning today, please let me know: when and HOW you subscribed/renewed, and your current email address.

Regarding that virus, I got this a moment ago:

Return-Path: <cashcarma@gmx.ch>

addressed to David Em at my domain. To the best I know, that is what the SirCam virus did. This is a typical exhortation for me to get rich by sending spam. Is there any way to blackhole that traffic?

 

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Tuesday, July 24, 2001

That Trojan Worm is still around, and Norton is detecting it nicely; I got five copies during the night. It looks like a long week. Why Norton decided to detect it now after it failed to do so yesterday is a bit of a mystery to me; I did not make any changes to the Norton configuration after I downloaded and installed the new definitions and ran the program. But now as the SirCam thing comes in Norton tells me. Each time, of course. What Norton needs is an instruction: ah, here is that thing again, do to it what I told you to do last time...

 

I have had a recommendation for Clipmate, which I recall once using and which vanished in one or another system change here. I decided to order it, and we'll see; sounds good. But dealing with DigiBuy requires patience and determination: you'd better WANT to buy something if you have to deal with them. Clipmate, I am told, will let me use FrontPage 2002 despite FP XP's broken paste special.  Thus does Microsoft help independent developers. Of course they've been trying to put Clipmate's functions into the operating system for some time now...

So far I can't figure out how to use it. Time to RTFM.

Note that the SirCam worm has its own SMTP e-mail program and does not depend on Outlook. It can infect systems in several ways, and once it does, it mails to every email address it can find on your system. It also attaches a random file taken from your system.

One wonders what the point of this thing is. It's very annoying and I get several an hour now.

 

 

 

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Wednesday, July 25, 2001

I will work on this tonight I hope. I am out of town for a couple of days.

 

 

 

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This week:

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Thursday, July 26, 2001

In Seattle. Spent the say at Microsoft campus, getting briefings from product managers on new stuff. With luck we will see the Front Page bugs FIXED.

New stuff for columns. Seattle weather gorgeous.

 

 

 

 

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Friday, July 27, 2001

Still in Seattle. Social things today. More another time. I have about 400 copies of that Sir Cam from law firms and PR firms, with at least two confidential files attached...  Fascinating.

 

 

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Saturday, July 28, 2001

More family and social matters. All well.

 

 

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This week:

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday

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Sunday, July 29, 2001

I will be home tomorrow. Some mail tonight. Spent the day with an old friend from the old days...

MONDAY: The Code Red Worm is coming. Pay attention.

If you know anyone who has not run an anti-virus program on their Internet-connected system, do them and yourself a favor: make sure they do. The Worm will wake up again Tuesday night on those machines still infected.

How seriously you take this is clearly debatable. Most of the thing's damage has been done and fixed with routers alerted to it. Some systems won't be.

I have an alert from Steve Gibson.

It says in part "

It has become *CLEAR* that at midnight of Tuesday, July 31st (UTC), when

the dates set into the clocks of the world's nearly 5 million IIS servers

< http://www.netcraft.com/survey/ > change the "Day Of Month" from 31 to 1, a

repetition of the exponential growth of the Code Red worm will IMMEDIATELY

commence. If you have not seen CAIDA's excellent write up on the previous

event, you must: < http://www.caida.org/analysis/security/code-red/ >.

 

 I also have this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/20719.html 

which takes a somewhat different view. And I am in Seattle, with no knobs to twist. See you tomorrow...

 

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