10 - 12 Software Development Jobs Available !

Posting this as a public service.  Finding 10 - 12 software development jobs in one place is unheard of in this day and age.

Online URL for this job: http://jobs.perl.org/job/489

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Posted: October 10, 2002

Job title:
Software Developer -- Herndon, VA -- Perl, JavaScript, CGI

Company name: Kam Enterprises

Internal ID: 1010

Location: United States, VA, Herndon

Pay rate: $60K+

Travel: 0-25%

Terms of employment: Salaried employee

Length of employment: Indefinite

Hours: Full time

Onsite: yes

Description:
10 to 12 software development positions available. Developers must  be able to work as a team. Project will concentrate on  web development using the following technologies: JavaScript, Perl, HTML, web servers (such as Apache), SQL, CGI, DBD/DBI. Candidates with experience in DHTML will be a plus.  Positions will be based out of the Herndon, VA area.  Perdicted travel will be 1 week per 3 months to North Carolina, although we have no problems with developers who would like to travel more often.  Security  clearance needed at the Secret to Top Secret level.  However, exceptional developers with no clearance should apply also.  If interested, please send your resume in text or Word format to Irene Kam at ilkrecruit@cox.net.

Required skills:
* Perl, JavaScript, HTML, web servers (such as Apache), SQL, CGI,    DBD/DBI.  * Candidates with experience in DHTML will be a plus. * Secret/TS clearance (exceptional developers with no clearance    should also apply) * Travel 1 week per 3 months * Submit resumes to Irene Kam at ilkrecruit@cox.net

Contact information: Irene Kam (ilkrecruit@cox.net)

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ISP Horror Stories from Hell

If you think that title is redundant then read Russell's Rant.  Ouch.  In another post he states how he likes register.com as a Name Registrar.  I'd caution him against that.  Register.com is hugely expensive compared to competitors like 000Domains and if you need to transfer a domain to another registrar?  Good luck.  I tried all summer long without success (that's why I own fuzzygroup.net and fuzzygroup.com).  I'd strongly recommend 000Domains.  They seem to be rock solid and they just plain rock.  Also like Register.com you don't need a name server.  That's pretty damn cool.

And to throw in a plug for the boys over at RackSpace, they aren't perfect but they're damn good.  I often get asked why I pay for a premium priced server and now I'll just point them to Russell's rant.  It says it all.  It really says it all.  As a general comment, hosting companies with options at the $10 per month or lower (even if they have higher priced options) seem to always end up with problems because the customers you attract drain the lifeblood from your support techs.  And then service suffers.  And then you get Russell.

As this google search shows he's not the only one with problems with CWI.  The "Condompower" result near the end also shows why if you host Adult sites you don't want to intermix them with your non-adult sites.  Searching for CWI juxtaposes the text interestingly.  There are apparently postive ways to use the word "sucks".

12:28:40 PM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

If You Take Prescription Drugs Visit RxNorth

Here's one of those success stories you love to hear.  A little Canadian company decides to sell prescription drugs over the Internet significantly cheaper than Americans are used to paying.  2 years later they have 170 employees.  Here's an example of the savings: 2 months of Novaldex for $220 in the U.S. costs just $42.78 (that's a different pharmacy than RxNorth but their savings are very similar; I just didn't have the right example to use RxNorth).  Given the obvious issues with health care and insurance in the states anything that makes things cheaper is a rich and forthy goodness.  Kudos to RxNorth, well done!

[ Go to RxNorth ]

[Facts from the Wall Street Journal but written by me]

11:13:10 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Your Past Returns or The Largest Email You've Ever Seen

If you are any kind of developer then something you may know or may not know is that your past returns.  And while it's sometimes good, the way in which it returns is sometimes odd at best, bizarre in the middle and just plain freaking ass weird.  From 1987 to 1996 I ran a hypertext tools company named NTERGAID that made a product named HyperWriter (among others).  Yes that was pre-web.   And, yes Virginia, hypertext existed long before the web.  The product and company were ultimately acquired and our award winning products were utterly and completely shelved.  So shelved in fact that when this company's technology assets were sold off, our tools weren't even listed on the due diligence forms meaning that the acquirer didn't actually buy them.

Anyway yesterday I get a random email over the transom looking to convert our document databases into HTML.  I can't legally provide the tools (I could do it but that could get me into legal issues since this stuff is very unclear and just finding out the answer could take months).  So I offered to look at it as a consulting project.  And I very foolishly said a fatal statement "Zip it up and email it to me".  One thing that I didn't tell you is that towards the end our products were mostly used for building CD-ROM titles.  And she did zip it up 250+ megs and send it to me as a 73 meg zip file.  That's right.  A 73 meg email.  Oh dear god.

So Outlook got just plain weird and refused to pick up my mail.  Finally looking thru the QMail directory structure, my buddy Apokalyptik realized the problem and said (approximately) "Dude.  You got a 73 meg email !!!" (and then laughter ensued).  His second comment was "That's the largest email I've ever seen". 

Emails by outlook can rarely be retrieved when they are greater than 5 or 6 megs.  I'm past that by more than a factor of 10.  This then raises the issue of "How do you download and extract the attachments from a 73 meg email".  We kicked it around again and I thought about switching to Outlook Express or Eudora both of which tend to be better in my experience for big emails.  But I knew that was a stretch so then we came on the idea of FTPing it to my local box and "de-mimeing" it with a script.   Mime stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions and is the technical standard that encodes an email message for transfer.  It also encodes the attachment so "de mimeing" is the process of extracting an attachment.  I've done this before in Perl and I know there are PHP tools so it was off to Google.  After looking at a bunch of php and Perl stuff, none of which looked fast or easy, I raced over to Download.com and guessed that there must be a utility for this.  I mean I can't be the only one who's ever been stupid with email?  Can I?  Apparently not.  There were several tools there and after sorting through them I found the Decode Shell Extension from FunDunc.  It worked absolutely rippingly well.  About 2 minutes after download I had my 250 odd meg set of files on my hard drive.

All that just to get a damn email.  Now you are probably thinking "Why didn't you just ask her to FTP it to you".  Answer a) Geek Pride.  Answer B) When I saw how large it was I realized that this wasn't a trivial consulting job and could be real revenue and I didn't want to do anything to possibly mess up the deal.  I told her to email it to me and she did so.  It's not her fault that I was a bloody idiot.

So then I went to extract the data and realized that a bug in the last release of our old software would mean that I would need to press ENTER more than 22,000 times to extract the data.  And so it goes.  Need to try again with different extraction settings?  Another 22,0000 times.  Sigh.  Maybe I can train the cats to hold the ENTER key down.

And so it goes.

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That Inbox Buddy Tutorial About Spam ...

I blogged it over here.  You do need to make your window fairly large due to the pictures (and that's a definite problem with this template design.

1:20:52 PM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Inbox Buddy Update

That new project I mentioned has kept me from blogging much about Inbox Buddy but I thought a quick update is in order.  The product is doing well although we do have some installation issues tied to Microsoft's lack of a view creation API for Outlook 2000 (sigh.  APIs for lots of things but not that).  We've got a new release coming out this week that adds a bunch of new features and after it goes through some more qa I'll post the 0.904 release.  One of those features will be BCC warning so you at least know that you are replying to everyone on a BCC.  Think about it -- we've all done that.  Your boss BCC's (blind carbon copy) you on an email and then you think you are part of the conversation and accidentally reply.  Oops.  When I worked at the late, lamented Dataware this happened all the time.

Oh and there has been some confusion about why Spam isn't automatically routed to a folder in Inbox Buddy.  That's an easy thing to do and I'll blog a tutorial on it over on the Inbox Buddy Blog.  This almost certainly should be a default although the natural developer fear of false positives has scared us away from it (we'll probably do it soon).  Thanks to Matt Mower over at Novissio for righteously hammering me on this early this morning.

7:49:04 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Ah... If You Recently Installed Sendmail

I'd go read this document:

The CERT/CC has received confirmation that some copies of the source code for the Sendmail package have been modified by an intruder to contain a Trojan horse.

The following files were modified to include the malicious code:

sendmail.8.12.6.tar.Z
sendmail.8.12.6.tar.gz

These files began to appear in downloads from the FTP server ftp.sendmail.org on or around September 28, 2002. The Sendmail development team disabled the compromised FTP server on October 6, 2002 at approximately 22:15 PDT. It does not appear that copies downloaded via HTTP contained the Trojan horse; however, the CERT/CC encourages users who may have downloaded the source code via HTTP during this time period to take the steps outlined in the Solution section as a precautionary measure.

The Trojan horse versions of Sendmail contain malicious code that is run during the process of building the software. This code forks a process that connects to a fixed remote server on 6667/tcp. This forked process allows the intruder to open a shell running in the context of the user who built the Sendmail software. There is no evidence that the process is persistent after a reboot of the compromised system. However, a subsequent build of the Trojan horse Sendmail package will re-establish the backdoor process.

[ More ]

Before anyone rails on Open Source being such an informal thing that it allows this type of stuff to happen I'd point out the many, many security advisories from Microsoft alone this year.  Each approach has it's pros and cons and even Microsoft can have malicious staff members.  I'd also suspect that this event will force many Open Source staffers to crack down more on the build process.

And, in closing, I'd comment that Sendmail has had issues for a long time and perhaps it's time to look at Qmail.  Qmail is Open Source and just plain awesome although I'll admit it can be a prick to install and configure.  Once up though it's absolutely rock solid.  I got my buddy Apokalyptik to install and support it for me on a contract basis and it's been stellar.  Apparently it's also been more than a year (I think it's actually several years) without a security alert.  Recommended.

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Reposting: Hey !  I Can Find that Blog on the Radio

(I know it's bad form to repost an entire entry but this happens today so I thought it appropriate.  I hope you can tune in; I suspect that it's short, probably only 10 minutes or so).

I wrote that title with the deepest apologies to REM.  Sorry guys but it seemed the perfect lead in to letting folks know that if you listen to AnchorDesk's David Coursey on CNET Radio, I'll be interviewed about O'Reilly's Essential Blogging on next Wednesday, 10/9, at 12:00 pm PST.  You can find it at CNET Radio.   The real topic is Essential Blogging but I suspect that it will also cover basic blogging questions (and why to blog) and comments on tools.

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Google Revisited: Comparing Search Engine Results

With the recent change in Google's ranking (and, in apologies to Mark Pilgrim, I now think Google has some real errors in the new ranking when I didn't think so before, but it's still not as bad as some are making it out to be), I thought it might be interesting to look at how Google compares for a specitic search with other engines.  And I picked a query that has relevance to me -- Scott Johnson.  No quotes, no phrases, just those two words (except for AllTheWeb which gets a special mention for automatically adding quotes).  All I'm measuring is not which page comes up first but where a page that is related to me comes up.  Sometimes it's a page from my website, sometimes it's a blog page and sometimes it's my O'Reilly book catalog entry. 

• Google -- # 1
• All the Web -- No Quotes -- #9
• All the Web -- With Auto Inserted Quotes -- #3
• HotBot -- #15
• Lycos -- #6
• Teoma -- #1
• LookSmart (inktomi powered results) -- #31
• Wisenut -- #1
• Alta Vista -- #1

What's really interesting here is that almost all of this is almost certainly related to my blog.  I didn't have anywhere near these kind of results before I was a blogger.  It's also extremely interesting to me the similarities between Google, Teoma, Wisenut and Alta Vista.  That's just plain shocking to me.  True the comparison isn't entirely valid since they result in different pages at times but these searches all give results related to me.

Lessons From All This

There are two easy lessons from all this:

1. Right now the single best search engine optimization technique?  A simple weblog.  And I know that Google seems to treat radio.weblogs.com as a highly valid source of input so I recommend Radio.  But I think it really matters that you blog regularly and somewhat consistently. 
2. Don't spend exorbitant fees on search engine optimization.  As ranking algorithms have gotten much more complex without explicit, inside knowledge of how the engines work it is very unclear to me that it works at all anymore.  I suspect that you'll get dramatically better results by becoming a blogger.

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To Amazon, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200, Go Stand in the Corner

It's been a few days without a real rant (flexes his fingers) so here goes.  Amazon:

WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ????

I was over at GeoCaching and noticed that there is a cache in Nahant.  Go figure.  It's like a mile from me.  This might be enough to finally get me to buy a GPS.  As always, with consumer electronics, I'm the last around to get one (I only got a DVD player a few months ago) since I can't write it off, I know it won't work right and will just be difficult.  So anyway I surfed over to Amazon and searched for GPS and then selected the 278 results in Electronics.  And got a list of results.  Hmmm.... $250 odd is more than I want to spend for a GPS.  So I'll just use "Sort by" and sort by price.  And then I saw this fine bit of blithering, pathetic idiocy that just boggles my (admittedly little) mind:

[ Click for Picture ]

You can't sort by price.  You can't sort by price!  Go figure.  One of the very real advantages of shopping on a computer is something like sorting.  Yes I know that I can look by "Best Selling" and then infer a price relationship since cheaper tends to sell more but that's just not the same.  And then I said to myself "Wait I know that Amazon's crew of largely Perl monkeys can sort a database by price" so let's see if they do it elsewhere like in books.  So I did and got this: 

[ Click for Picture ]

That's right -- search for a book and you can sort by price but search for electronics where sorting by price really matters and you can't.  Go figure.  That's a stupid revenue optimization strategy or it's bad product management.

New slogan for Amazon's programmers: "Amazon.  First we'll take away your ability to sort by price and then tomorrow we'll remove the search engine."

Disclaimer: I have no bias against Amazon.  I use them frequently and I think they absolutely rock.  Things like this frustrate the ever loving crap out of me since they can do better.  I'm a fan and I want Amazon to do well.  For all their flaws they have done a good job and I hope they succeed.  They even released an XML based webservice API.  And now this.  Sigh.

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Thank You Dawn ! Ten Best Things to Say If You Are Caught Sleeping At Your Desk

10. They told me at the bloodbank this might happen.
9. This is just a 15 minute power nap like they raved about in that time management course you sent me to.
8. Whew! Guess I left the top off the white out. You probably got here just in time.
7. I wasn't sleeping. I was meditating on the mission statement and envisioning a new paradigm.
... [ More ]

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Any Elance Users Out There?

At the FuzzyGroup we do web design and are always looking for new projects.  I was wondering if anyone out there has had luck getting work through Elance.  Elance is a site where you can post work to be bid on by service companies.  It now requires you to pay between $150-$500 per quarter [ GO ].  Anyone have any input on this one?

11:01:49 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Ah, Hollywood...  Could You Buy a Clue ?

I see on Doc Searls article on Digital Hollywood this quote:

Tom McGrath, President of Paramount Enterprises and EVP of Viacom Entertainment Group, said

"We...are heavily dependent on first-run licensing from major TV networks to survive. If you follow through the train of logic that John Taplin started with, it's not a pretty picture.... The evidence from TiVo is basically people just don't watch commercials at all. It's not a question of watching the ones they are interested in or not interested in.... It is a transformation of the industry. As producers we rely on the fact that there is a market for good programming. Right now the penetration of these devices, of VoD (Video On Demand), of this disintermediation, is not so great that we face collapse in the near or intermediate future. But it's something that we think about all the time.

Disclaimer: I added the bold.  So the EVP of Viacom's Entertainment Group is just now realizing that people don't watch commercials?  Hello !  It's called the "clicker" or "remote control" and we've all been using it to flip past commercials for at least the past 15 years now.  And you are just figuring it out?  Even though some bloggers disagree with the convention of using IM speak, all I can say to this is ROFLOL (picture me rolling on the floor laughing out loud). 

And we wonder why these folks have confusion in the new digital age?  They apparently haven't figured out the old remote control age!  A Tivo doesn't really do a damn thing to affect commercial watching -- it's been dead for years only no one bothered to wake up and tell the entertainment industry.  Here's an exercise I'd like to see some consumer marketer try:

1. Stop all broadcast television advertising
2. See if it affects your sales at all.
3. Record much larger profits.

The bottom line here is that convention marketing is dead and has been for a long time.  It feels to me like a con game where advertising agencies tell businesses "If you don't advertise you'll die" but no one has tested the alternative.

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Read This !  Generation Wrecked

A non blogger friend just sent me this, a great Fortune magazine article about the "Generation Wrecked":

Ten years ago grunge musicians and college-age Cassandras who had never held a day job preached that corporate America would crush their generation's soul and leave them without a pension plan. Films like Singles and Reality Bites chronicled their transition from college graduate to Gap salesclerk.

A few years later the core of Generation X--the 40 million Americans born between 1966 and 1975--found themselves riding the wildest economic bull ever. Salesclerks became programmers; coffee slingers morphed into experts in Java (computerese, that is)--all flush with stock options and eye-popping salaries. Now that the thrill ride is over, Gen X's plight seems particularly bruising. No generation since the Depression has been set up for failure like this. Everything the dot-com boom delivered has been taken away--and then some. Real wages are falling, wealth continues to shift from younger to older, and education costs are surging. Worse yet, for some Gen Xers, their peak earning years are behind them. Buried in college and credit card debt, a lot of them won't be able to catch up as they approach their prime spending years.

(I added the bold).

This is a really, really scary article.  If you have a job now and you're not happy?  My advice: STAY PUT.  This recession has been what I've called to friends for some time "The Quiet Recession".  If you weren't directly affected then you didn't realize how bad it was.  This article spells it out clearly and succinctly.

Now, if I was really, really cynical, I'd comment that America's current Iraq fervor is because a) Bush knows exactly how bad it is and b) he knows that he can't fix it and c) war is a big distraction.

But I'm not cynical.  No I'm not.  Really I'm not.

8:34:06 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

A Follow Up to the Google Post

Oh and just to clarify even my Google rankings changed.  Searching for Scott Johnson now gives me only the 3 top pages on the Internet.  So while I still have the top place I now have fewer of the top places and I don't think that's bad.

7:13:37 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Hmmm.... Google's Different

Kasia is wondering why she's no longer the top result for some google queries.  Thanks to Scripting pointing me to Mark Pilgrim there is an answer:

Specifically, Google is now apparently cross-checking link text with the linked site, and discounting or ignoring links whose text does not appear in the linked site. This all but kills off Google bombing. Searching for "go to hell" no longer takes you to microsoft.com; searching for "talentless hack" no longer finds ohmessylife.com, although it finds a lot of people who were previously participating in the Google bombing. No definitive word yet on whether Google is actively penalizing such sites.

Unfortunately, the algorithm tweaks necessary to stop these two techniques have caused a wide range of collateral damage, apparently coming down hardest on medium-to-large sites that had previously been doing everything right (as far as page structure, link structure, accessibility, and general honest hard work putting together a usable and useful site). The Webmasterworld forums are alive with complaints and speculation: (see Mark's site for the links)

...

Regardless, Google’s search results in general appear to be significantly degraded in many key areas. The forums are full of people complaining that spam sites, doorway pages, and obvious cloaking attempts, which Google used to be so good at filtering out, are now popping up in top spots with disturbing frequency. Nobody in the forums wants to talk about which keywords they’re tracking, so I tried to find my own concrete example of crap search results. It didn’t take long.

Just as a general comment it doesn't surprise me that Google's results have been degraded with this change -- but I doubt that this is permanent.  Google has actually changed their algorithms a bunch of times and there is always a "issue".  This type of stuff is hard and it's even harder when people are actively trying to subvert you (i.e. Google bombing).  Google will (almost certainly) fix this.

I've told countless clients over the years that the best search engine optimization is this:

1. Build a good site. 
2. Create relevant content.
3. Extensively cross link it.
4. Regularly update it.
5. Worry about meta tags and optimization a little but not a lot.

You can definitely spend $$$ on search engine work and sometimes it will pay off but it's a constant battle and you may just want to focus your efforts on building a better site.  That pays off in the long run a lot more than countless tweaking.  It is, however, substantially worse for the web consultant.

Note: Google's one of the few companies that I really "trust" and it seems like we're all jumping to conclusions way too fast (some people are actually saying "Google's reign is over" with these changes).  Come on people !  Give them a chance to fix their bugs.

7:11:27 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Non-ADA Compliant Websites Under Attack

This has absolutely frightening implications for people that make content management systems where the default templates are NOT ADA compliant (UserLand, MovableType, Blogger take note).

scubacuda writes "According to Law.com, Robert Gumson, a blind man who uses a program that converts website content into speech, is suing Southwest Airlines (with the help of Miami Beach, FL-based Access Now) for its website being incompatible with his screen-reader program. The case has been filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act under the untested legal theory that ADA provisions on the accessibility of public accommodations to the disabled apply to Internet Web sites just as they do to brick-and-mortar facilities like movie theaters and department stores. There have been previous lawsuits alleging that the ADA applies to the Internet, but all have settled without a ruling on the merits: 1999 the National Federation of the Blind sued AOL alleging its service was inaccessible to blind users (AOL agreed to make its sites compatible with screen reader technology); over the past two years, Access Now has sued Barnes & Noble and Claire's Stores for maintaining Web sites that allegedly violated the ADA (both settled)."

From SlashDot

Here are some real examples using the "Bobby" tester which checks for compliance:

• Run Ray Ozzie's Website through the Bobby ADA Compliance Tester [ GO ] -- Fails on A, AA, AAA tests
• Run Scripting.com through the Bobby ADA Compliance Tester [ GO ] -- Fails on A, AA, AAA tests
• Run this Blog through the Bobby ADA Compliance Tester [ GO ] -- Fails on A, AA, AAA tests

Having just build and released an ADA compliant site for a client I have mixed feelings about this.  With the Internet making everyone in the world a publisher does this mean that everyone in the world has to support ADA compliance?  I can understand government websites being required to be compliant but Southwest?  Or my blog?  Once you go down this road it's a very slippery slope.  Here's hoping Southwest wins the lawsuit and doesn't cave.  That would be a bad precedent. 

[On an aside I hope that they do make their site ADA compliant but of their own volition just because it makes business sense not because of this lawsuit].

10:26:07 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Have You Faxed From DigitalConsumer.Org ?

I just heard about Digital Consumer and if you care about copyright, MP3, your online rights and similar issues then you should take a look.  At only 6 months old it's up to 50,000 "members" (I'm not real sure what a "member" is).  Even better than sending an email to your congress man, this site can automatically generate a customizable fax to your representative.  Click Here to See.  I took the time to customize the fax (my changes are in bold below).  Bear in mind that I know little about politics but I do know enough to relate it to local issues i.e. the industries for which my state (Massachusetts) is known.

I really hope you take the 2 to 3 minutes
to use this website to send a fax today.  Thanks.

[The Fax]

As a constituent and an ardent consumer of digital media, I write today to urge you to support a Consumer Technology Bill of Rights, and to express my concerns about the recent trend toward allowing one-sided copyright laws to eliminate my Fair Use rights. 

Please bear in mind that the Massachusetts economy is dominated by the technology industry and this can only cost our state jobs.  Given that we are not doing well these days, I'd strongly encourage you to keep this in mind when you have to vote on these issues.    Another side of our Massachusetts economy are colleges and universities and these copyright extensions increase our educational costs by not allowing materials that students need to study to enter the public domain.  Given that this can only cost us jobs and increase our cost of education, I just can't see that this bill is a good thing for Massachusetts

Historically, our country has enjoyed a balance between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of citizens who legally acquire copyrighted works. Generally speaking, rights holders have the exclusive right to distribute and profit from artistic works. Consumers like me who legally acquire these works are free to use them in most noncommercial ways. Unfortunately, this balance has shifted dramatically in recent years, much to the detriment of consumers.

To prevent further erosion of my rights, I would like to add my voice to DigitalConsumer.org in calling for a "consumer technology bill of rights". It is simply an attempt to assert positively the public's personal use rights. These rights are not new; they are historic rights granted in previous legislation and court rulings that have over the last four years been whittled away.

Under the guise of "preventing illegal copying" I believe Hollywood is vilifying their customers - people like me - and using the legislative process to create new lines of business at my expense. Their goal is to create a legal system that takes away my long-cherished personal use rights and then to charge me an additional fee to regain those rights!

Copy protection, especially to prevent overseas piracy for illicit sale, is an important issue. But before Congress considers yet another change in the law at the behest of the copyright holders, I urge you in the strongest possible terms to protect my Fair Use rights.

Thank you very much for your attention to this important matter.

10:04:53 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Watch Out for the BugBear

This looks like a NASTY new virus.  I know of one person who got it posing as an Amazon mail.  The attachment comes in as an SCR, EXE or PIF file (all of which qualify as executable) and what it does is open holes in your firewall to allow someone to remote control your PC at a future point.  Apparently there are over 1,000 infections to date.

W32.Bugbear@mm is a mass-mailing worm. It can also spread through network shares. It has keystroke-logging and backdoor capabilities. The worm also attempts to terminate the processes of various antivirus and firewall programs.

Because the worm does not properly handle the network resource types, it may flood shared printer resources, which causes them to print garbage or disrupt their normal functionality.

It is written in the Microsoft Visual C++ 6 programming language and is compressed with UPX v0.76.1-1.22.

Also Known As: W32/Bugbear-A [Sophos], WORM_BUGBEAR.A [Trend], Win32.Bugbear [CA], W32/Bugbear@MM [McAfee], I-Worm.Tanatos [AVP], W32/Bugbear [Panda], Tanatos [F-Secure]
Type: Worm
Infection Length: 50,688 bytes
Systems Affected: Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Me
Systems Not Affected: Macintosh, Unix, Linux
CVE References: CVE-2001-0154

Symantec's Warning

Apparently there is a hole in Internet Explorer's iFrame feature which may let it self launch if you are running Outlook's Preview Pane so be careful (as a general rule of thumb, you always want to have the Preview Pane turned off and use AutoPreview instead).

This is yet another reason to go with hardware firewalls to protect your cable modem as opposed to software products like ZoneAlarm.  It's a lot harder for a virus or worm to reach across to a hardware device and screw it up (but it's not impossible).  I use the excellent LinkSys BEFSR41 Broadband Cable / DSL Router.

Or, of course, you could always just get a Mac.  Looking better and better.

6:53:07 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

From Natrak: Four New Security Alerts

And he even named me by name:

Scott is going to love this: "Gartner forecasts that, due to legacy code and resistance to cultural change, Microsoft will not deliver necessary security improvements before 2004."

[ More ]

The worst part here is that it's not hard for me to see that it could take until 2004 (just 15 months away) to make secure the CURRENT code.  Not the new code which will still have holes in it but just the current code.  Microsoft's business model is tied to upgrade revenue which in turn is tied to new features.  And new features will bring new security flaws.  That's like a 99.9% certainty since it's only after the cultural changes are made that new code will be written in a secure fashion. 

 

1:16:36 PM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Negotiation 101: Analyzing a Contract

[different, random, but hopefully interesting]

I'm helping a friend (party A) out with some financial negotiations and it NEVER ceases to amaze me what people try to get away with.  The circumstance is that party A is being bought out of shares in a private company by party B, a manager but not owner in the business.  Party A is an owner but not an active participant in the business so Party B has significant advantages and a much deeper understanding of the business and direct access to the company's books.  While party A may technically have access as a shareholder (they are roughly a 20% shareholder), practically speaking they don't. 

My overall comment on the process is that it seems that a sense of equitable fair dealing seems to have flown the coop and / or people seem to think that the other party in the negotation must have "fallen off the turnip truck" (for those non-english native speakers, this means an unsophisticated individual). 

Here's the standard approach that I use for any contract I'm asked to look at ...

==> Read Story <==

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Good News !  Tinderbox is Getting Better and Better

I just exchanged a nice email with Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems and the author of Tinderbox, a very cool blogging application for OS X.  I've known Mark for like 15 years now and he really, really understands this stuff.  Apparently TinderBox is going well and getting a great user community going.  That's just so cool when a small company brings out a good product and does well.  And here's a look at how TinderBox actually looks (click on it, it's cool):

[ The Tinderbox Weblog ].  Recommended.

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Spam and Blog Comments

I see from Dave that Burning Bird is now getting Spam in comments.  Given that I've just helped architect a pretty damn sophisticated (and yes I AM blowing my own horn here) anti spam system, I can pretty easily see a few solutions here:

• A comment black list organized by poster IP address where any blog author could say "This ipaddress / whatever" is a spammer.  And then if enough people agree or some other criteria a blog comment system could check the black list before the comments go public.
• A comment approval system which Jabber IMs you the comment and you reply "Y" or "N" to allow it.  I'd hate to think that we'd have to do this but it might be necessary.  Even though Burning Bird gets a lot of comments, most of us don't so it might be workable for low volume blogs.
• A comment approval system which lets "trusted comments" appear perhaps tied to your personal contact database (which a spammer wouldn't know).  Big issues here of course.

I'm a huge fan of blogs allowing comments.  To me comments bring a high level of interactive flow to blogs and I'd hate to see those minions of Satan known as spammers wreck this.

11:46:27 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Inbox Buddy Build #3 is Up

Ok.  We're making some real progress now even if it isn't fully in this build.  We just uploaded a fix where a problem where input field validation in one of the training dialogs could (embarassingly) prevent you from advancing.  Oops.  These things happen.  Thanks to help from Kenneth LeFebvre we now understand a rare but possible runtime error (thanks Man!, sorry I don't know what to link to).  We continue to get good suggestions from folks like Matt and Demitrious.  So it's not a major fix today unless you have this training problem and then you want it bad.  We're also getting good feedback on some of our language being confusing and trying to fix that.  Thanks everyone.

10:43:40 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This   

Letting Everyone Know It's Going to Be A Bit Slow for the Next Month

I just picked up a major new project that is going to suck the ever loving life out of me over the next 5 to 6 weeks and things will be slow here (i.e. no time to think and write my longer pieces).  So expect a lesser flow for a while.

9:11:57 AM      Google It!   comment []    IM Me About This