Book Review: Zero Day by Mark Russinovich

Zero Day by Mark Russinovich
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is an easy read for anyone who has ever used a computer connected to the internet. The book is even more interesting and compelling if you have ever installed an anti-virus product on a PC. So, there you go; this book will be a good read for almost anyone who picks it up.

The plot is all to believable. A group is creating a storm of worms and viruses to invade the computer systems that control our banking, airlines, power generation – you know, every part of our life. This threat as been real and possible for quite a few years now. The recent publicity surrounding the stuxnet virus that targeted the Iranian nuclear programme has shown just how real this kind of scenario is.

Rootkits and zero day operating system vulnerabilities represent an open risk to the way our economy operates. Even though this book has been several years being created, the threat has been around for several years now. In fact the author, @markrussinovish has said that he was surprised at how quickly a scenario like stuxnet eventuated.

I was expecting this to be a thriller in the mould as Deamon by Daniel Suarez but it is quite different. Along the way Russinovich explains a lot of the internet and virus jargon that may be unfamiliar to some. Coupled with the fact that the chapters are short and crisp – sort of web page length I’d say, Zero Day is accessible to geeks and internet newbies alike.

A great, modern thriller – well worth a read.

I do so hope that this book helps the world wake up to mitigating the risks we face with so much of our economy online.

 

Book Review: Freedom™ by Daniel Suarez

Freedom (TM) by Daniel Suarez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As a follow on to Daemon, this book already has a good start. You won’t want the first book to end so will happily keep reading through the second book.

It does get a bit slow near the beginning you will forgive the author as it picks up again and you see the future of the world as we know it being fought out.

Still worth the effort to sit down and read this book too.

View all my reviews

 

Book Review: Deamon by Daniel Suarez

Daemon by Daniel Suarez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What an awesome ride this book is. I’m not a gamer but I really got in to the 3D virtual world that the author creates for this book. It is obviously written by someone who understands gamers, the internet, wi-fi, security, robotics, law enforcement: you know all the bits needed for a really good techno thriller.

All geeks will love this book.

I don’t read a lot of fiction. I’m the sort of person that thinks fiction is a bit of a waste of my lifetime’s worth of brain activity. This book is not a waste of your reading effort.

Would love for the book to become a movie as that would only add awesomeness to the whole story.

No description of the plot needed here – just confirmation that this book is worth reading.

Some adult content, you wouldn’t be reading this to your kids.

View all my reviews

 

Book Review: Heaven is for real

Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back by Todd Burpo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Really hard to digest this book. I don’t think I have digested it and might never actually get it. Until i get to see for myself I guess.

The amount of detail that he reveals after his near death experience is amazing. None of it was too wild to be un-biblical, but all pretty crazy.

He also found out things about his mum and dad that he could not have known.

The real challenge of this book is to be able to decide for yourself what this little boy’s recounting of his trip to heaven and back means for you.

That heaven is real and wonderful and a young boy felt totally at home there is great news. But we already knew that; if you know your New Testament. That he got to come back and nonchalantly detail what he saw is huge.

For parents grieving over their very sick children, this book is also amazing. God is listening and grieving with you. He is right there feeling your pain and hates it like you do.

Again, this is not new for those who know their Bible. It is good to hear it again and see it in operation for real. Must be a great comfort.

As I say, still digesting it .

View all my reviews

This book has been on the NYT BestSeller list: Celestial Sales for Boy’s Tale of Heaven (more than 1.5 million in print).

 

Please pass by here Googlebot

Dear Googlebot,

Please pass by here and index Russian Language School in Perth, Western Australia as soon as you can.

kthxbai,

me.

 

What DLLs does my cygwin built .exe need ?

If you have built a unix tool under cygwin, how do you know what DLLs are needed when you want to give someone the executable file you have built ?

cygcheck is your friend

Here we can see 3 DLLs would be needed to accompany the iperf.exe that I have built.

   1:  C:\temp>\cygwin\bin\cygcheck iperf-gf.exe

   2:  Found: iperf-gf.exe

   3:  iperf-gf.exe

   4:    c:\cygwin\bin\cygwin1.dll

   5:      C:\WINDOWS\system32\ADVAPI32.DLL

   6:        C:\WINDOWS\system32\KERNEL32.dll

   7:          C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntdll.dll

   8:        C:\WINDOWS\system32\RPCRT4.dll

   9:          C:\WINDOWS\system32\Secur32.dll

  10:    c:\cygwin\bin\cyggcc_s-1.dll

  11:    c:\cygwin\bin\cygstdc++-6.dll

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

 

ie. cygwin1.dll, cyggcc_s-1.dll and cygstdc+-6.dll

 

WordPress page.php is for a static non-blog PAGE, index.php is for a blog POST

If you want to change the look and feel of a PAGE to wordpress, you will want to look at page.php. This is the template file for the theme you have selected, located in the themes directory /wp-content/themes/UR_THEME/page.php

If you want to change the look and feel of a BLOG POST, index.php is your man.

In WordPress, a PAGE does not have categories but can have comments.

A POST can have categories and tags and comments.

Typically you would use a POST to create a new blog item and a PAGE to create a static web page like About or Contact ME.

 

Compiling iperf under cygwin (iperf.exe win32)

Use the setup.exe that is part of cygwin to select and install the official iPerf packages for cygwin.

iPerf is included in the net group. Select the src box too if you want that.

After it has run, you can find the files in /usr/src

Follow the instructions to extract the distribution using

   1:  cd /usr/src

   2:   

   3:  cygport iperf-2.0.4-1.cygport all

   4:   

   5:  cd /usr/src/iperf-2.0.4-1/src/iperf-2.0.4

   6:   

   7:  ./configure

   8:   

   9:  ./make

  10:   

.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, “Courier New”, courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt
{
background-color: #f4f4f4;
width: 100%;
margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

will then all work just like it does under a unix proper, you will get an iperf.exe in the src directory.

The iperf binary will also get installed in /usr/bin/

 

Reducing SPAM links on wordpress blog comments–remove url in form

On my main wordpress blog I run Akismet to detect SPAM comments. This is the first line of defence

Next I also run WordPress HashCash which forces commenters to be running javascript on the web page before they can leave a comment. The JS requires a sum to be calculated, and if it doesn’t match the required value you know that it is likely that it isn’t a human using a web browser trying to leave a comment. Probably it is a spammer doing bulk POST request to sites all over the net.

Lately this regime has been letting a few through each day.

This is unusual, but shows that spammers are now willing to pay real humans to sit down and leave comments on blogs.

So the next step I’m trying now is to remove the URL from the comment form. This will make it harder to leave a web address in the usual way. They can still POST this field, but only from a hacked browser or javascript aware bot.

It killed spam comments dead for the last few days. So far so good.

My web site visitors (not here, the self hosted one that I haven’t linked to) tend to be not be computer enthusiasts, so don’t have their own blog to legitimately link to, so I don’t think they will care.

 

Keeping notes here now.

Thought I might post little snippets of stuff as I think of them here now. That way I can search for them later. Be prepared, this blog is about to get weird and hard to follow.