I have an old Win XP machine inherited from a neighbour. We use it to play videos on our TV. Microsoft issued a bug fix against the Wannacry ransomware attack, the one that encrypts your data, for Win XP SP3.
I downloaded the bug fix and only then found out that the Win XP Home edition, which I have, is excluded. I have Win XP SP3, just not the right Win XP SP3.
For the longest time my site has been tracked and spammed by 163data.com.cn. I, and others, have wondered about the story behind the number 163. Was it a Chinese Army unit number similar to 解放军 61398部隊? Alas, there seems to be nothing so exciting. There are only a few links about the history of 163.
It looks like in the ’90s when you had to dial a telephone number to a modem and reach the internet, 163 was appended to a local number. Thus 163 was commonly used and therefore memorable. After this time NetEase started 163.com and used 163 to start China’s largest free email service, the Chinese equivalent to gmail. 163.com remains very popular in China today.
This Bell Canada IP address is unusual and came up when I did a host command. It hosts 12 sites. I did not find anything else suspicious about it on X-Force Exchange.
City of Toronto internet scraper bot scrapes my site a couple of times per month. Why? Toronto, Canada
I live in the City of Toronto, and write about Toronto-related subjects. What is surprising is that the City of Toronto has an internet bot that randomly scrapes content from my site a couple of times each month. The bot started scraping me near the end of January 2017.
What is interesting was that I, concerned citizen, actually emailed them because I thought they had a Zombie PC taken over by a bot, or some other security issue. I sent the City a log of the relevant entries related to their IP address. Was I naive. Here is their reply (isg@toronto.ca):
I have an old dell desktop with Win XP on it that runs slowly. Though it is old I thought I’d try a different Linux distribution on it. The smaller ones were Puppy Linux Precise 5.7.1 2013, and Debian Dog Jesse. Here is how I put Chinese input on Puppy Linux Precise 5.7.1.
My old Dell is a Dimension 1100/B110, 2006, P4 Celeron, 2.66mhz, 778mb ram. It is old.
I don’t spend much time on my Windows 7 boot, and even if I did I would not have known. The Windows 7 Update program has been broken since October 2016. I did not receive any message to tell me to fix the error, so went without bug fixes for 6 months. For an automatic updating system that has been in existence for many years, this shows disrespect for Windows customers.
When I did try to do Windows Update, it would show me the old update options and allow me to submit update requests, but then wait indefinitely for updates to download. There was no error message whatsoever to tell me something else was wrong.
I have been doing Drupal sites since 2009. For specific sites, Drupal is really great. Obviously for other types of sites WordPress is really good. As an example I am writing this post in WordPress and not Drupal.
I created a new content type, Consumer Products, in D8, in order to track their sale price and location. This is so that I can more easily remember when, where and how much we bought a sale item. Retail has regular sale cycles, so if you can catch the product at right time in the cycle, it will be cheaper.
CIA hacker stopped by Windows popup box, in Chinese
CIA hackers may have been stopped by a Windows popup box in Chinese, according to a recent Wikileaks. For those of us that know Chinese, this is amusing.
A dialogue box in Chinese had kept popping up on screen as the agent tried to install a test program on a computer running the Windows operating system. Unable to understand what the box said, he tried everything from setting the system region to an English-speaking zone to forcing the program installer to use English.
This IP address came up on my usual log processing as unusual. Usually an IP address lookup returns a single host name and not multiples. All these host names are associated with the IP 193.42.159.25 United Computer Systems, Sweden. It is a busy IP, with 25 hostnames, so very unusual. It also tried to break my login security. Risk 1/10, known for bots
Want you do, to go to a concert, but just after the supposed start time for ticket sales, all the tickets are gone. You, again, have lucked out. Minutes later these tickets are all available on reseller sites for double the price. It really does sound like a scam. While the US just enacted a federal law, here in Ontario we are just starting the investigation phase. I hope that we can adopt something as strong as the US in order to keep an even keel with bot technology and online shopping safe.
