Infact, whatever the latest bandwagon is, Microsoft buys out the competition? Instant messaging becomes in vogue? Microsoft buys an instant messaging developer. Holes in file security? Microsoft buys a XDegrees, a security specialist. Worried that Mac's can emulate Windows? Microsoft buys Connetix, the makers of Virtual PC. Microsoft worried about viruses negative effects on OS sales? Don't worry, Microsoft have just bought GeCAD, an AV vendor...
I don't have anything to do with running the webserver or the Win2K machine - I'm just a developer who has to put up with the ridiclous situation. The reason, I'm told, that it's so unstable is to do with IIS and the way it handles.com objects, especially ones written in VisualBasic that aren't properly multi-threaded. I've seen it happen time and time again - dlls registered using Component Services just suddenly stop working for arbitary reasons, and you either have to shut them down and restart them, or restart the website they are running on. We host hundreds of sites and there are a lot of components running - we're not talking about a desktop machine (were Win2K is pretty stable). When you add in flakey AODB (where a runaway process CAN bring down the machine), downtime for applying frequenet security patches etc., the whole thing becomes exteremely difficult to run.
Now it could be the sys admins are incompetent, it could be 'dodgy' code, it could be a number of things. However, the fact stands that the Win2K machine is fundamentally a lot less robust than our *NIX machines running Apache/PHP/Perl/ProC CGIs. I, like most developers, have made f**k ups in my code, but on *NIX you just kill the process and you're done - it seems on 2K you often end up having to reboot the whole damn machine...
Where I work we've slowly migrated from extremely reliable but very expensive HP hardware (running HP-UX) to cheap LINUX boxes. However, we've also had to do some Windows web development, since certain clients insist on us using ASP,.NET, SQL Server etc. which necesitates using IIS on Windows 2000.
Would anyone be suprised to learn that we are in the farcical situation of haveing to schedule the Win2K server to be rebooted twice a day, because otherwise it dies so badly that major work is needed to restart the damn thing? By comparison some of are *NIX webservers have been up for literally years...
The logic that says, "you can't block pro-gun sites and not anti-gun sites", is the same logic that would dictate you have to block sites that are fighting child pornography just to be balance out blocking sites that apeal to paedophiles.
It's as ludicrous as as crying "freedom of speech" when you are talking about software whose whole purpose is to censor.
This relatively new phenomena isn't just confined to blogs - it's been happening to personal guestbooks for a while. I discussed this recently on the Mozzaline forums and it's apparent I'm not the only one to suffer from this automated spam. A brief summary of what I said :
Recently I've had 3 enteries in my guestbook that are blatant adverts for rather-dodgy commercial websites. I've deleted them, but wondered if anyone has had similair problems? One was an advert for 'bingo cards' and another for one of those dodgy 'casino' types. Now, what's interesting is that I log the user_agent that was used for all enteries, and all of these adverts stated the user_agent as
Snoopy 0.95. If you follow the link you'll see that Snoopy is, infact, a PHP class that emulates a web browser.
Obviously someone has been using it to automate the task of spidering the web and looking for guestbooks and then filling them in with this blatant spam. What suprises me, though, is that I custom wrote my own guestbook, so I'm a little suprised that what appears to be an automated process can work out how to fill in all the fields correctly. I guess my field names are fairly common, but it still managed to work out which was the 'sign' page and fill in the form, including checking radio boxes etc.
I have feeling that the reasoning behind this spam is that it automatically creates a link from my website to the spammer's website (since I have a field for guests to fill in their own website). My guess is that this is a way to generate lots of links back to the spammers' site and increase their Google page ranking. It just amazes me the lengths these people will go!
"
It was revealed today that a third of the code was stolen..."
Perhaps Valve should 'leak' the other two-thirds to the hackers, as well. Given these people are officially more l337 than Valve they could probably finish, compile and release it for Xmas:)
What's perhaps more suprising is that the Zeitgeist shows that 'buy drum covers' is a more popular entertainment query than 'britney nude with donkeys'.... I knew people liked beating their skins to a pulp, but wasn't expecting it to be quite so literal.
Faced with this problem I ended up writing my own email-address encoder that has proved quite popular with friends. Whilst not as sophisticated as some, it works pretty well and will generate both HTML and JavaScript links via simple web-form. Try it out at www.diplo.co.uk/encode/.
(Obviously, all email addresses' entered into this are sold on:p )
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft don't write software, they assimilate :)
Microsoft made their name through DOS - but did they write DOS? No, they bought Seattle Computer Products' 86-DOS operating system. Microsoft wrote Internet Explorer, right? Well, no, it was born out of code licensed from the Spyglass browser. Did they write SQL server? Nope - that was again developed with code licensed from Timeline.
Infact, whatever the latest bandwagon is, Microsoft buys out the competition? Instant messaging becomes in vogue? Microsoft buys an instant messaging developer. Holes in file security? Microsoft buys a XDegrees, a security specialist. Worried that Mac's can emulate Windows? Microsoft buys Connetix, the makers of Virtual PC. Microsoft worried about viruses negative effects on OS sales? Don't worry, Microsoft have just bought GeCAD, an AV vendor...
I don't have anything to do with running the webserver or the Win2K machine - I'm just a developer who has to put up with the ridiclous situation. The reason, I'm told, that it's so unstable is to do with IIS and the way it handles .com objects, especially ones written in VisualBasic that aren't properly multi-threaded. I've seen it happen time and time again - dlls registered using Component Services just suddenly stop working for arbitary reasons, and you either have to shut them down and restart them, or restart the website they are running on. We host hundreds of sites and there are a lot of components running - we're not talking about a desktop machine (were Win2K is pretty stable). When you add in flakey AODB (where a runaway process CAN bring down the machine), downtime for applying frequenet security patches etc., the whole thing becomes exteremely difficult to run.
Now it could be the sys admins are incompetent, it could be 'dodgy' code, it could be a number of things. However, the fact stands that the Win2K machine is fundamentally a lot less robust than our *NIX machines running Apache/PHP/Perl/ProC CGIs. I, like most developers, have made f**k ups in my code, but on *NIX you just kill the process and you're done - it seems on 2K you often end up having to reboot the whole damn machine...
Where I work we've slowly migrated from extremely reliable but very expensive HP hardware (running HP-UX) to cheap LINUX boxes. However, we've also had to do some Windows web development, since certain clients insist on us using ASP, .NET, SQL Server etc. which necesitates using IIS on Windows 2000.
Would anyone be suprised to learn that we are in the farcical situation of haveing to schedule the Win2K server to be rebooted twice a day, because otherwise it dies so badly that major work is needed to restart the damn thing? By comparison some of are *NIX webservers have been up for literally years...
The logic that says, "you can't block pro-gun sites and not anti-gun sites", is the same logic that would dictate you have to block sites that are fighting child pornography just to be balance out blocking sites that apeal to paedophiles. It's as ludicrous as as crying "freedom of speech" when you are talking about software whose whole purpose is to censor.
What's perhaps more suprising is that the Zeitgeist shows that 'buy drum covers' is a more popular entertainment query than 'britney nude with donkeys'.... I knew people liked beating their skins to a pulp, but wasn't expecting it to be quite so literal.
Faced with this problem I ended up writing my own email-address encoder that has proved quite popular with friends. Whilst not as sophisticated as some, it works pretty well and will generate both HTML and JavaScript links via simple web-form. Try it out at www.diplo.co.uk/encode/. (Obviously, all email addresses' entered into this are sold on :p )