Wibbles

Jack Thompson is a fucking idiot

2 Comments

Jack Thompson, the muppet who made money-grabbing attempts to sue game producers for producing adult games has now decided to attempt to sue Facebook as he’s unhappy they haven’t immediately defended him from gamers speaking their mind on his stupid, money-grabbing antics.

Facebook groups he objects to include ones like:

Jack Thompson should be smacked across the face with an Atari 2600

Muppet.

Edit: I should add that this guy was permanently disbarred by the Florida Supreme Court after it ruled he “abused the legal system by submitting numerous, frivolous and inappropriate filings.”

Perl, Programming

Configure CPAN.pm to use sudo to install

I prefer to run CPAN.pm as a normal user and have it use sudo just for the actual installation, rather than running tests etc as root.

I have an annoying habit of forgetting the option names , so I’m posting this here for my reference, but might be useful for other people too.

To do that, do the following from a CPAN shell:


o conf make_install_make_command 'sudo make'
o conf mbuild_install_build_command 'sudo ./Build'
o conf commit

Also, whilst documenting that, to set your preferred CPAN mirror:


o conf urllist unshift ftp://mirrors.uk2.net/pub/CPAN/
o conf commit

Uncategorized

New Jabber/XMPP account

4 Comments

I’ve been meaning to do it for ages, but Google’s (admittedly brief) downtime yesterday pushed me enough to actually do it – I’ve set up my own Jabber server, so my new Jabber ID is davidp@preshweb.co.uk – feel free to add me. I won’t be monitoring my old Google Talk account as much.

Now I just need a decent, capable Jabber/XMPP client for my Blackberry!

Information Security, Wibbles

Texas Instruments DMCA abuse over signing keys

Paul Dixon, owner of pastebin.com, received a DMCA takedown order from Texas Instruments, relating to a pastebin post that a user had submitted to pastebin.com, "containing the signing keys for a range of Texas Instruments calculators which, if I understand correctly, allow you to digitally sign a replacement operating system so that the hardware will accept it"

They seem to overlook the fact that Paul is in the UK, and pastebin.com is hosted in the UK, so throwing DMCA notices around is a little pointless, acheiving nothing more than making themselves look bad.

In fact, the Streisand Effect pretty much guarantees that such attempts backfire, and result in nothing more than causing the material they desire to censor to be more widely distributed.

In fact, with information leaked to wikileaks, it’s a lost cause already.

When will companies learn that attempting to artificially control what people can do with their devices which they bought and legally own needs to stop, and that the Internet routes around censorship attempts?

Linux, System Administration

SSH key for Subversion but nothing else

I needed to create an account with an SSH key which could be used for Subversion, but nothing else.

The solution – forced commands with the SSH key – on the host machine, make ~/.ssh/authorized_keys look like:


command="/usr/bin/svnserve -t",from=""

Dumping this here mostly for my future reference, and for anyone who might find it useful.

This means the SSH private key on the client can be used by Subversion to check code in/out, but cannot be used for anything else (as SSH’ing to the host machine with that key simply starts ‘svnserve’, regardless of what the client asked for).

Wibbles

Suspicious Vodafone bonus text message

3 Comments

I got a text message on my old mobile phone (which I’ve moved to PAYG, to keep the number active), purporting to be from Vodafone, received 15-Sep-2009, and stating:


Thanks, for being a Vodafone customer, we'd like to give you £1 free credit. Just text REWARD to 97888 for free by 24Sep09. To stop texts send STOP to 9774

This made me immediately suspicious, as it’s trivial to fake the sender of a text message to appear to have come from “Vodafone” or whatever name/number you like, and it sounded like a reverse-billing SMS scam.

However, I recognised 9774 as the number Vodafone really use to stop receiving texts, so if it was a scam, they’d at least done their homework.

Googling reveals that the shortcode 97888 is indeed a Vodafone number, used, among other things, to request their “Vodafone Passport” deal, and turns up a forum thread on the subject.

(Amusingly, the forum thread includes a nice little rant:

I GOT NOTHING and its annoying i cannot believe voda sending these messages then again , yes i can..
its like the annoying canvassing phone calls.
can we do anything to stop them ? from voda.
one annoyed voda customer.

Um, what? The clear, simple “To stop texts send STOP to 9774” at the end of the message too hard to understand, perhaps?)

Linux, System Administration

Mounting a Linux software RAID partition directly

1 Comment

I needed to mount a Linux software RAID partition directly to copy the data from it; it wasn’t being recognised as a RAID device (it didn’t appear in /proc/mdstat, only my newly-created array did), and attempting to mount it gave me:

[davidp@supernova:~]$ sudo mount /dev/sdc4 /mnt/tmp
mount: unknown filesystem type 'mdraid'

To get round that, I had to tell mount the filesystem type that was actually in use:

sudo mount -t xfs -o ro /dev/sdc4 /mnt/tmp

(I mounted it read-only just in case this approach wasn’t going to work; I don’t want to write to it anyway.)

Might be useful for anyone Googling (it’s pretty obvious, but it made me think for a few minutes… it’s getting late!)

The partition type appeared as ‘Linux raid autodetect’:

Disk /dev/sdc: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x7bf29ced

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1   *           1         871     6996276   fd  Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdc2             872         995      996030   fd  Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdc3             996        1119      996030   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdc4            1120       24321   186370065   fd  Linux raid autodetect
Wibbles

Guinness World Records PR Fail

9 Comments

And the Guinness World Record for failing at Internet PR goes to… Guinness World Records Ltd.

Recently, FAIL Blog posted a story with a screenshot of the Guinness World Records website, showing the record for “Most Individuals Killed In A Terrorist Attack”. Underneath details of the record, was a link cheerily inviting the reader to “Break this record!”.

It’s clearly a standard part of their site template, but was amusingly unfortunate appearing on that particular record.

However, in a show of complete lack of humour and PR, Guinness World Records Ltd decided to send the owners of FAIL Blog a legal bluster email stating that the GWRL logo is trademarked and demanding that it be removed from the page in question.

I’d like to think that use of a company’s logo when talking about them would be covered by fair use, but fair usage is increasingly murky and hard-to-define legally.

FAIL Blog have decided to comply by blurring out the GWLR logo, but I can’t help thinking GWRL have really shot themselves in the foot by bullying FAIL Blog into removing the logo (even if the GWRL name wasn’t mentioned, you’d easily guess).

This is how *not* to do PR in the Internet age, folks.

David Precious – professional Perl developer, motorcyclist and beer drinker