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Saturday, August 23, 2003

Memorial for Uncle Stuart who died last year at age 82. Stuart worked for the San Francisco parks department, lived alone and was a lifelong Seals and Giants fan. He had a sharp wit, and would speak of books he had read: he had many tales of his years in Golden Gate park.

We all were wondering how to memorialize this quietly dignified, vital, thoughtful guy, who was a quintessential San Franciscan. When the Giants announced that you could buy stones in the new park at McCovey Cove, it seemed perfect. Linda took this picture today before the game: Stuart had taken her to games when she was a girl. Stuart wouldn't have wanted a big fuss... we miss him...
Comments 7:46:34 PM

The SoBig trail deadends in Vancouver: "A computer in British Columbia was apparently used to create the account. Experts said the computer belongs to an innocent home user who was hit by a previous version of the virus that allowed the clandestine programmer to seize control of the computer. That makes catching the writer of the virus more difficult, experts said." From canada.com...
Comments 4:22:39 PM

SoBig has another surprise: from Dave Farber's IP List:

> From: "Jerry Heidtke"

> Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 17:11:27 -0500
> Subject: RE: [Full-Disclosure] Sobig has a surprise...
>
> All the experts were totally faked out. While everyone was concentrating
> on getting the "magic 20" machines shut down, no one realized that
> different copies of Sobig.f had different lists of servers to contact.
>
> We put a block of udp port 8998 on our firewall this morning. We had 3
> previously undetected infected machines on our network, each of which
> tried to contact a different list of 20 machines. One of the lists
> corresponds to the one that Sophos and others have published. The other
> two lists have no addresses in common with the published list, or with
> each other.
>
> I wonder how many different sets of servers there were, how many
> different variants of Sobig.f there were, and how many infected machines
> now have some additional trojan, worm, or ddos code waiting for a
> command to do something.

Ruh-roh... anybody know if all the 'magic' machines were running Windows?
Comments 2:37:27 PM

Sun's Mad Hatter screen shots: last week internal machines at Sun were hijacking this image of the next-gen 'Looking Glass' desktop that I snapped at LinuxWorld during Jon Schwartz' keynote.

The accompanying story makes a good point: a lot of companies are running Windows 98, NT or even 95 because they just don't see enough advantage to justify the 2000 or XP desktops. My experiment last week shows that the most evolved Linux desktops are ready to be used by real-world users. Linux for mom? Almost there...
Comments 2:22:45 PM

Microsoft.com is being served from Linux, according to Netcraft. Microsoft, like other very busy domains, including Apple, has signed up for Akamai's distributed serving system. As a result, Microsoft pages are served from 'enterprise class' Linux machines. Heh. Guess Linux is ready for prime time...
Comments 1:45:23 PM

The hunt for SoBig: the NYT article and an AP report (that appears to be a rewrite of NYT) point to Vancouver as a possible source for SoBig.

The CTO of Easynews, a Phoenix ISP, said that someone set up an account with a stolen credit card number, and then 7 minutes later, posted what may have been the first example of SoBig.f to a porn news group disguised as an image. The FBI has subpoenaed Easynews: the CTO said the source appeared to be a Vancouver residence, which suggests that they may have traced a dial-up connection. Anyone in Vancouver aware of a raid this morning? Interesting... shades of Takedown and Fugitive Game, the story of Kevin Mitnick's pursuit and capture...
Comments 12:36:21 PM

Tales of Infrastructure: Gumshoes Hunt Down a Virus, Experts Retrace a String of Mishaps before the Blackout. Clearly, we need better ways to deal with extremely complex systems...
Comments 12:12:10 PM

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