Category Archives: Tech stuff

Head Rambles and Cowangate

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I have been watching the ‘Cowangate’ business with some interest.

I’m not talking here about peoples reactions, so much as the effect it is having on Head Rambles.

The first post on the subject went up on Monday, and the resulting traffic stream is remarkable.  So remarkable, that I had to investigate further.

I did a search for ‘Brian Cowan portraits’ and various logical combinations of other searches and came up in the #1 slot worldwide in Google.  I see Donncha has since jumped to the top of the queue in most, but the two sites vie for the top two spots.

What is also interesting is that Head Rambles’ Google Ranking has dropped to zero!  Does Google not trust its own top ranking search results?

I’m not particularly worried about rankings as the important traffic to Head Rambles tends to come through links and RSS feeds, but it is interesting to note how easy it is to hit top spot without even trying?

Finding the nonexistent

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So much for a quiet Paddy’s Day.

As The Old Fart wrote yesterday, we had a bit of trouble on the server.  He claimed credit for finding the cause, but he really hasn’t a clue.

The symptom of the problem was that the blogs that I host seemed to vanish off Google’s radar.  Any search for example for ‘head rambles’ would only produce old results, while the newer material just failed to appear at all.

I ran the usual tests, and Google reported that the sites were fine and were being spidered on a regular and frequent basis, so what the hell was going on?

I checked the logs for a couple of the blogs and found some very unusual activity.  There was indeed a phenomenal number of visits to the sites from Google, but they were successfully finding files and directories that didn’t exist!

How do you successfully find something that doesn’t exist?  For a while I was baffled.

I think it was more intuition and luck than logic, but I checked the .htaccess files and there it was in all its glory – a hack.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Slurp|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^ http://doormoney.biz/ [R=301,L]

Somehow [and I still don’t know quite how] they managed to modify each .htaccess file and add those lines. 

The upshot was that Google was visiting what it thought was my sites, but in fact was that other site, which as far as I can make out is a warez site.

Needless to say, I removed the lines and locked down the files, and immediately Google started getting a 404 [not found] instead of a 200 [successful] so that solved that.

Since then, one of my Elite Bloggers posted an article, and it appeared within fifteen minutes in Google

I did a wee search around the Internet to see if this was a common hack and it is not unknown.  I found a couple of interesting articles on it here and here.

So someone else had a wasted Paddy’s Day too?

I am not alone.

The lifespan of the Internet

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The Internet has just celebrated its twentieth birthday.

A mere two decades on, it has been embraced by the world and has become as essential to society as the telephone or the printing press.

My own intoduction to the Internet came about somewhere in the early nineties.

In those days, web pages were static and graphics tended to be used for illustration rather than decoration.  Multimedia was virtually unheard of, as speeds tended to be low.  My corporate connection to the Internet backbone was a dedicated 256K line which served 2,000 staff.

My home connection for many years was a 56K dialup which served me very well.  Then broadband arrived and my connection jumped to a (relatively) massive 3M.

My connection is still 3M and is remarkably constant. I have few contention issues and am pretty much guaranteed maximum speeds at all times.

I have noticed lately though, that I am experiencing more of the problems I used to be familiar with in my dialup days.  I get page load errors, sites that are very slow to load and general timeout errors.

Has the Internet reached capacity?  Has YouTube, media streaming and the sheer volume of information saturated the bandwidth?

Is it just me, or has anyone else experienced this?

Trojan wars

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Every now and then, a nightmare scenario pops its head above the parapet.

For the last couple of days I have been suffering an army of them.

The first sign was probably a couple of weeks ago when a six week old laptop hung up on me.  I managed to revive it and thought no more about it.

Two days ago, the same laptop started crashing.  It would work for a while, then hang for a minute or two before descending onto the Blue Screen of Death.

Once again, I managed to revive it, but my suspicions were more than aroused.  I ran a multitude of diagnostics which all came up clean.  I then ran a deep anti-virus scan and that is where I found the cause – a deeply embedded Trojan.

You may ask why I didn’t do a scan at the start?  In fact, all my machines run the usual anti-virus, anti-Trojan, anti-spyware and firewall software, but this one had somehow slipped through.

About three weeks ago, I revived an old PC that hadn’t been used in about two years.  I needed it for a single function, for which it was ideal.  Naturally, its virus signatures were two years out of date, and I updated them immediately, but my theory is that the Trojan snuck in during the update period.  It then spread through the network, infecting my laptop and causing the resulting havoc.  I still don’t know how it breached the defences, which are normally very tight.

The obvious thing to do then is to run deep scans on all the machines on the network, which I did, and this resulted in another laptop failing completely.  Obviously the Trojan had infected a system file and the AV had then removed it, rendering the whole system unstable.

So, to date, I have had to reformat and reinstall on two machines.  This machine that I am currently using is now up to about 80% strength.  There are a load of packages yet to be installed, and I have then to customise the whole interface to my personal preferences.

The other laptop has a slightly dodgy CD drive which means constantly rebooting to get the drive to run properly.  I am currently trying to load the OS on that one, and will have to reload all the software if and when that is successful.

The other two machines seem to have survived the attack, and are now clean, having been thoroughly disinfected.

My problem now is that if I miss any element of the Trojan, the fucking thing is going to replicate, and I will be back to square one.

I can’t win.

Free money

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Not long after Head Rambles was launched, I signed up with Google Adsense.

It seemed like a fair way of covering expenses, and I had heard good [and bad] reports about them.

Before long, I discovered that the only way to make significant gains was to make the ads the primary function of the site, with the content running second.

I hate sites where I have to pick my way carefully around banners and Google links.  It’s irritating in the extreme and gives the strong impression that the site owner is more interested in making money than in imparting information.

After running Google Adsense for a couple of years, I have decided it just isn’t worth it.  Taking into account the irritation they cause to readers and the server overheads slowing down the site, and balancing that against the pittance that was being earned, I decided to strip them off the site as soon as the payment level was reached.

I reached that level a couple of weeks ago, and the cheque should be in the post shortly.  As soon as I hit the magic mark, I removed all traces of Google Adsense from the site.  Plugins were removed and all coding in the template was erased.  Good riddance.

What is very strange though is that I’m still earning.  Within the last two weeks or so, my earnings have continued to grow at their customary snails-pace.

I like that.

Good on ya, Google!