2006 July : technozid

Archive for July, 2006

I released my music tracks under CC

July 13th 2006 Posted at Music
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A couple of years ago I was first confronted with the task to create a small (educational/promotional) video. Since I am working with Adobe Premiere since version 4.2 the production of the video was not a big task. But since it was to be used for commercial purposes, the soundtrack was the real difficult part due to licenses and royalties. Finally I discovered Magix Music Maker – a tool aimed at amateurs which came together with huge libraries of soundbits and which allowed the easy creation of royalty free tracks. Over the years, a handful of songs have been created – and more will follow. I have released them under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License. Feel free to download and use them according to this license. The tunes can be found on a special page: http://www.technozid.de/music/

New Joomla vulnerabilities

July 13th 2006 Posted at Internet, Typo3
2 Comments

Will they ever get it right? Again there is a new vulnerability targeting Joomla (the CMS formerly known as Mambo) sites. Don’t these guys learn? Mambo/Joomla has a whole track record of vulnerabilities, and the story of the split-up doesn’t sound reassuring too – yet its becoming more and more popular even among professional webmasters! Admittedly, the learning curve is much smoother compared to Typo3 – but for Typo3 we only had one security issue so far and it was dealt with within a day. There’s no such thing as a free lunch – and if you want it easy and shiny, something has to give. In Joomlas case it seems that security is the tradeoff. Go figure.

GuitarFX hijacks your browser

July 11th 2006 Posted at Internet, Music
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I’m on vacation right now. So I began my long planned task of improving my guitar skills with dusting off my electric guitar and putting on new strings. I have not yet cleaned & repaired my amp so I plugged the guitar into the PC and abused it as a makeshift amplifier. This worked surprisingly well, and before long I discovered a few guitar-centric websites where I found dedicated amplifier and DSP-effect software. The most promising one was GuitarFX, and with it my PC worked as a better amplifier (in terms of available effects) than my real hardware amp & effects ever worked. For those of you who dare, here is a first example

That was mostly on Saturday. Since I recommended a few links to BoingBoing during the weekend, I checked the site a few times. Already then I had a rather odd feeling, which was confirmed today: both BoingBoing and Lifehacker show a statistically above-average amount of guitar-, guitar-amplifier and guitar-effect related ads:

I was pretty surprised to see such targeted ads. Actually I never saw targeted ads to such an extent before. But only after similar ads showed up on Yahoo as well I started to realize that someone has hijacked my browser. So I ran virus and spyware checkers – but they didn’t find anything special. I did a thorough run around the Windows startup options only to find nothing. So I had a closer look at the ads and finally clicked the “Remove these ads” button. This transferred me to a site which said:

Annoying ads in your internet browser? Don’t scream like a baby! You have ads in your TV, but you don’t panic even you can’t remove ads from your TV.

The site showed a few links – one redirects to a Google sponsored Firefox download promising FF does remove ALL banners, and another one to payable (sic!) banner removing software. OK, so where has this bugger embedded itself into my system? The ads are showing up in Firefox and Internet Explorer, so it must be pretty low level. One link dubbed “recommendations for stupid beginners” had something interesting to say:

Special notes for GuitarFX users: you must uninstall this software via Windows Control Panel. Sometime you must install it and then uninstall immediatly, this helps in 100%. Note: you was informed about ads in the licence.txt file of GuitarFX, if you run it, you agree to see ads. Uninstall it via Windows Control Panel and do not see ads.

A-ha! So it was GuitarFX! Unfortunetaly the mentioned licencse.txt file wasn’t there, but there was a readme.txt and it said:

The Demo version can change your default home page in Internet Explorer and can show banners or other ads and can visit some www pages that can content banners, other ads and standard internet counters wich can track info available via internet and internet explorer you use and, may be, some other tech info about GuitarFX itself and your PC hardware and software. [...] Use of this software indicates you agree to this.

My IE hompage is protected so this one could not have been changed. So I dug a bit deeper in the installed software and finally
found a small batch-file which had the timestamp of the installation of GuitarFX and which was manipulating my hosts-file:

copy C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.001 C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
copy C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hostsb C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

That was the culprit! I thought my hosts file was write protected – but maybe the software did clear that too. I gave Spybot S&D a run at it, filled it with its default entries and write protected it again – and now the ads are not showing anymore.

I’m pretty disappointed about this behaviour. The program looked good and was very versatile – I was even considering to buy the full version. But implanting spyware on my system is so out of bounds! I should have been warned though. The creaters of GuitarFX made such a pathetic approach at search engine spamming, distributing their program across various domains and Geocities accounts. It made me smile inwardly. But they caught me. They did. And that’s the part that really surprised me since I consider myself a Pro at spotting shady methods like that.

So, beware of GuitarFX (.net, .org, .info) – unless you want to get your browsers hijacked! Gladley there are alternatives who are playing fair. I’m currently evaluating Guitar FX Box and it looks good.

I've seen my first Google Box today

July 7th 2006 Posted at Internet
2 Comments

Today was the last day of Jona’s internship at my company. In order to make that last day a bit special we made a field-trip to our ISP. Their building is rather unspectacular and I think I saw a little disappointment on Jona’s face upon entering the slightly worn-out apartment-like building residing in a backyard off the main road. He brightened up a bit when our guide showed us the bunch of bundles of fibre cables – each several inches in thickness – entering the premises. Any doubt that this ISP is indeed a “real” ISP vanished when we entered the inner sanctum – the server hosting room. Multiple rows of 19″ racks – each equipped with an UPS and stuffed with server boxes and switches – produced together with the A/C a deafening noise.
Google Mini Only thanks to our decade-long business relationship we were allowed into this room, and we were specifically reminded not to look too closely at the owners name tags attached to the servers, and if we did, to forget them immediately. Two huge racks consisted solely of the servers of a well known TV station (that much I was allowed to disclose), and one had as the topmost device the azure blue Google Mini. It looked surprisingly normal. As a matter of fact it looked pretty much like our firewall, only in blue. Nevertheless I was quite surprised to actually see one “in the wild”. I wonder how many of those devices are out there. Anybody using one willing to give a report on how it works?

Bodenständig 2000 sound bites updated

July 7th 2006 Posted at Music
3 Comments

Due to the Warholian 15-minutes-fame moment of my Bodenständig 2000 iTunes post and its appearance on BoingBoing, the artists decided to put some more songs available for download onto their webpage. Everybody who thinks they are making neo-nazi rock can listen to it and hopefully see how wrong this assumption is.
I’m still trying to talk them into releasing some material to CC:Share Music or CC:Sampling. I’ll keep this blog updated on that matter.

Update: Youtube has a video of their 2004 concert in the Scala in London

Bodenständig 2000 are opting out of iTunes

July 6th 2006 Posted at Music
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Take this, Steve: iTunes now without Bodenstandig 2000

My friend Bernhard of the German bitpop group Bodenständig 2000 sent out an email blast the other day announcing that the band finally managed to opt out of iTunes.

Bodenstandig 2000 is not available via Apple’s itunes anymore. Some tracks where available there against our will, but we forced our label-like organisations “Pudel” and “Stora” to remove them.

Though Bernhard – technology geek since I first met him ~~some~~ almost 25 years ago – joins the tune of some major artists who blame MP3 for losses of profit – he nevertheless does not want to support Apples DRM technology:

We know that mp3 is part of our relative poverty, but Apples proprietary digital rights management is an extremely stupid answer.

Apple’s IPod? Yes, they look good any maybe they are the last bastion of classical brAun-like industrial design vs. chinese-turkish styling-trash for pimps and bitches, but still: They are crippled and i don’t buy one.

Bodenständig 2000 is offering a few sound bits (sic!) on their cool retro-homepage. I asked the band what they think of the CC movements and a platform like CChits but have no answer so far. I’m looking forward to see some Bodenständig 2000 songs released under CC soon. In the meantime, I hope that not only indie artists begin to opt out of iTunes.

Who is this "Celeb"?

July 4th 2006 Posted at Getting older
1 Comment

There are a few sites who managed to sneak around Firefox’ popup blocker. While checking out Yahoo Mail the other day, I got this popup:

I’m reluctant to admit that I have no clue. I heard of Shakira, but as far as I know she’s a Latina and the woman on the pic doesn’t look like one (let’s put aside Michael Jackson for deceiving looks on that matter..). Mariah is most likely Mariah Carey, but who is Britaney? Or is it a typo and they meant Britney? Not that I would recognize her any better – I always mistake her for that Hilton girl. And isn’t Mariah Carey something for older people like – erm – me? I guess if I would show this pic to my intern, she would immediately know who the woman is. And I was soooo looking forward to that free ringtone

Raumpatrouille Orion: 60ies German TV Sci-Fi revisited

July 3rd 2006 Posted at Getting older
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Thanks to Xeni of BoingBoing I spent a wonderful weekend walking down memory lane. On two recent postst Xeni told about her first time viewing of Raumpatrouille Orion episodes:

This is so awesome. I grew up the child of a trekkie, and have a genetically-ingrained fondness for scifi teevee of this era — but I’d never heard of “Raumpatroille” before this week.

Xeni was kind enough to publish two comments by myself to her articles. Inspired by the topic, I shuffled through those old VHS tapes and found one titled “Orion”. During this chokingly hot weekend this gave me a couple of hours of sweet memory entertainment. I’m supposed to have the vinyl disc with the soundtrack somewhere. Guess I need to make a trip to the attic.

Thanks, Xeni!

"Your cockie is OK" – A severe case of "Lost in translation"

July 2nd 2006 Posted at Internet
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I was browsing some Japanese sites with the help of the Google translation tool, when this rather reassuring message appeared on screen. I don’t like the way they belittle it, but otherwise they are right with the statement. I’m only wondering how they found out…

Hilarious Japanese auto-translation screenshot

All along the chilltower

July 1st 2006 Posted at Music
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The other day I’ve been to Dresden, or more exactly to Radebeuel, known as the birthplace of Karl May, the German writer of Wild West novels. I had to host a training in a depressingly hot room with lots of PC equipment and beamers and 11 attendees plus my colleague and myself. The schedule allowed us a quick visit to the city of Dresden shortly before our return flight started.
I have never been to Dresden before, but I had to admit it is a very beautiful town, set into the valley of the river Elbe very much like my own hometown on the river Mosel. Of course a visit to the freshly rebuilt Frauenkirche was mandatory – the chill down the spine however did not come, despite my knowledge of the churches past. It was impressing – yes – but less moving than I expected.
On the flight back I had time to listen into my freshly downloaded music from CC Hits – thanks to my noise cancelling headset. And when we broke the cloud ceiling, I just listened to “All along the chilltower” by the Hot Bitch Arsenal – and experienced a perfect moment with a spectacular view. Check out CC Hits – I assume there’s something for you as well.

technozid

A fun ride through the cyperspace