Category Archives: Geek Stuff

Geek, geek and more geek.

It Feels Good To Be 2

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After reading of Matt‘s success at getting to be the #3 Matt in the world, I thought I’d better check my ranking.

I’d not checked for a while (and it was Matt who made me check in the first place); when I first checked I gave up looking after page 20 of Google’s search results meaning I wasn’t in the top 200. A while ago I’d made it to number 14.

Today I am the number two ‘mike’ in all the world according to Google (that is the whole world isn’t it?). Number 2 out of about 20 million! Pretty impressive.

And just for fun when I upgrade to WordPress 1.0.1 I’ll be changing my URL! Only slightly, but it should be enough to completely break my Google standing!

Let’s hope the very comprehensive redirect script at the old location will help.

Update: I’m also number 1 ‘mike’ on MSN (out of 12 million)

Yet Another Internet Explorer Crash

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Yet another Internet Explorer crash has been discovered! This one is incredibly simple to reproduce, but doesn’t look (easily) exploitable because it’s a null pointer write.
To reproduce, simply load a page containing

<html>
<form>
<input type crash>
</form>
</html>

That’s it! I’ve set one up here. Don’t click it if you are using Internet Explorer!

It also affects Outlook, Frontpage, and a few others.

See the BugTraq Listing for details.

Blogshares Coming back!

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Wow, it looks like blogshares will be coming back after all.

A solid agreement has been reached between BlogShares founder Seyed Razavi and technologist Jay Campbell — the site is coming back!
Premium memberships will be extended one month to make up for this downtime. If you had 8 months left, now you have 9.
The reconstituted BlogShares team is doing cartwheels over the possibilities that 2004 brings.
Check back for more notices, and soon a working site.

Another IE security Issue

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Yet another Internet Explorer exploit has been discovered. This one is ripe for many of the phishing scams that have been going around.

Secunia have a good, detailed advisory.

The vulnerability is caused due to an input validation error, which can be exploited by including the “%01” URL encoded representation after the username and right before the “@” character in an URL.
Successful exploitation allows a malicious person to display an arbitrary FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) in the address bar, which is different from the actual location of the page.

Steve Minutillo has an example. Andy at absoblogginlutely has another example.

Remember, these only ‘work’ as intended in Internet Explorer.

BlogShares – Closed Down

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It looks like Seyed has finally thrown in the towel. BlogShares has officially closed down.

I am sorry to announce that BlogShares will not be reopening after the current technical difficulties are resolved. Currently, the database server is dead and looks to be for the next few days.

It was fun while it lasted. But as Seyed himself says there has been a decline of quality service, new features and ultimately income for the site in the last couple of months.

I’m glad to have been part of it from quite early on (I was member number 341, joined at the end of March).

Spam Spam Spam

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I read with interest Mark Pilgrim’s highly pessimistic, but well thought out, article on comment spam yesterday. Whilst I find that I cannot disagree in principal with most things Mark says, I somehow feel that things aren’t quite at the throwing in the towel stage. On the WordPress developer list we have been discussing tactics which Mark hasn’t touched upon but which could be employed to negate the value (increased page rank) of comment spamming. Dougal sums things up nicely in the article he wrote over at the WordPress Development Blog

Another Disastrous Government IT Project

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After I mentioned the MoD IT project disaster last week, there is another one in the news. This time the project hasn’t (yet) been canned, but the expected cost has risen from £184 million to £400 million according to a report over at silicon.com.

The £400m government project for a single magistrates courts case management system has been slammed as “disastrous” and among the worst seen by MPs.
The 10-year deal for the Libra system across 300 magistrates courts was initially signed with sole bidder ICL, now Fujitsu Services, back in 1998 for £184m under the private finance initiative (PFI) framework.

It is beyond my comprehension how a project can be allowed to get that much over budget, and how people can still keep their jobs!