News Items

Nov 17, 2005 11:46PM

I just wanted to post a link to the marvelous news item I just saw on slashdot.org today. It's from several days ago, but I somehow missed the original posting of "Alleged Adware Purveyor Indicted". I just wanted to share and post a big "heck yeah" at finally seeing one of these jerks busted. I'm not naive enough to think they'll all get caught and prosecuted, but hey, we all need dreams ;)

-Jay

Oct 24, 2005 04:55PM

It occurs to me after my previous post regarding page modified times that I never did put in code to make the new Python back end show the correct Last-Modified time on my site pages. I figured it would be a quick piece of code, but it turned out to be needlessly annoying and difficult to find out the proper syntax and code to do it. So, for posterity, here is how to send a http header for the last modified date of a requested file:

import time
from os.path import getmtime

#path to the real file to get mtime from
    content_file = '/path/to/file'

#instead of getmtime, you could also use an mtime from a database, etc.
    req.headers_out['Last-Modified'] = time.ctime(getmtime(content_file))

#this flushes headers to the client (not needed in all mod_python versions)
    req.send_http_header()

The key bits here are simply "req.headers_out['Last-Modified'] = THE_TIME", where "THE_TIME" is a date/time string representing the modified time you wish to send. The rest is sort of dependent on what you are working with in terms of a back end and how you retrieve the 'real' modified time. I figured I'd document this here since it took me almost an hour to figure out such a simple piece of code, since for whatever reason there just isn't useful information on it indexed anywhere.

-Jay

Oct 19, 2005 01:27PM

There are some new variant viruses out that are much less destructive than others. These pariticular variants are run from memory in the temporary internet files directory and do not set themselves up to run at startup. What this means in practical terms is that the problem will go away if you terminate the process or reboot the machine. AIMFix should theoretically also take care of these as well. Once the process is no longer running, all you need to do is empty the temporary files. As luck would have it, I've also created a spiffy temp file remover, BlasTemp, which should handle that aspect nicely. It's almost a relief to find such a simple virus/worm after some of the variants that are coming out lately :)

-Jay

Oct 14, 2005 01:20AM

There is a new version of the ETRemover from SimplyTech out, so if you're experiencing problems with EliteBar and/or PokaPoka I suggest you try that. I gave it a go on the most current pokapoka variant I could get (pokapoka76) and it didn't remove it at the time of writing. However, I will be sending the author of ETRemover a dump file of pokapoka76.exe and hopefully he will be able to update ETRemover.

The latest of these virus threats are really starting to get pretty bad, to the point where they seem impossible to remove even in Safe Mode. I just spent several hours screwing around with this pokapoka variant in a virtual Windows installation with very little success. Anyway, enough of that here, I'll leave that for the journal :)

-Jay

Oct 07, 2005 10:15PM

I've noticed that a lot of websites/forums are evidently scraping html from my website and/or checking the file dates on the html pages to try and track updates to AIMFix. I don't mean this in a mean fashion, but you're wasting your time ;)

All pages on this site are created dynamically using a Python back end (and PHP prior to that). The file dates only change when I actually change the content on the page. The "AIMFix last updated at" text is created dynamically based on the file mtime of AIMFix.exe, it's not changed in the raw page text. That means that the last time I updated http://jayloden.com/aimfix.htm was April 15th (which is therefore also what the last modified time is on aimfix.htm), despite the fact that the page text displays the last AIMFix update from Oct 7th.

If you would like to check the date of the last AIMFix update, please use http://jayloden.com/update.htm - I specifically created this page for that purpose. Not only does update.htm show the file time aimfix was updated, it is also the only file on the website that has a modified time that matches the most recent AIMFix.exe update.

-Jay