kahrn's abode

Blog Moving

kahrn — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:53:35 +0000

kahrn’s abode is now moving over to kahrn.com/blog.

Please update your bookmarks and/or RSS feeds. The new RSS feed is available at kahrn.com/blog/feed.

New articles will be posted on the new blog. This blog will be removed in the next few weeks.

Twitter hacked. Prognosis?

kahrn — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 11:59:10 +0000

According to various sources both official and unofficial (status.twitter.com, techcrunch.com) twitter was hacked last night.

It is reported that the hack was performed by a group identifying itself as the ‘Iranian Cyber Army’. The questions we need to ask now are: Was this the group that was really responsible? Or is someone trying to smear them? If it was them, why? Is it to prevent free speach in Iran? Is something big about to happen?

The most important question to many people in the west, of course, is — did they get any data?

Nobody really knows. Few media outlets are mentioning anything related to comprimised data.

The real answer is that nobody has a clue if they have any login data/personal data. My take is that if they are capable of modifying the DNS record to their own servers — then they would have been clever enough to harvest all of the information being sent to the twitter domains. This includes all data being sent via any API using login credentials for third-party site interaction.

If they were prepared and skilled, then it would have been a relatively simple task. Which means that we have tens of thousands (possibly even entering hundreds of thousands) of accounts that are potentially comprimised, If they were able to listen and log the data being sent to them.

If this is the case, then I advise you to change your password immediately. Even if you have not interacted with the API yourself in the last 24 hours, it is entirely possible that your login credentials are being used on a gadget/widget or third party site that MAY have posted login information while the DNS was comprimised, meaning your account is also potentially comprimised.

My first Windows 7 gadget

kahrn — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 22:02:05 +0000

This article has been moved to the new blog.

http://kahrn.com/blog/2009/12/my-first-windows-7-gadget/

Gradually enlarging a form in C# .NET

kahrn — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:46:09 +0000

This article has been moved to the new blog.

http://kahrn.com/blog/2009/12/gradually-enlarging-a-form-in-c-net/

10 Very useful web design and web programming tools

kahrn — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:28:31 +0000

This article has been moved to the new blog.

http://kahrn.com/blog/2009/11/10-very-useful-webdesign-and-web-programming-tools/

Why it is important to specify a character encoding

kahrn — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:26:20 +0000

This article has been moved to the new blog.

http://kahrn.com/blog/2009/10/why-it-is-important-to-specify-a-character-encoding/

Your entire life.

kahrn — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 21:28:07 +0000

The image you see below is earth. Hundreds of millions of miles away. This is your home and it will most likely be the place you live the rest of your life and eventually die. A Tiny, tiny dot in something unimaginably vast.

The small dot that we live on. A very small stage. In a vast cosmic arena.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfwY2TNehw

The extract below is from Carl Sagan. A rather famous astronomer that really puts this image into perspective.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Facebook Privacy Breach

kahrn — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:18:35 +0000

Facebook, one of the web’s leading social networking websites has compromised private data.

Private data from thousands of users has been released despite the privacy settings on some profiles. It appears that anyone can access any data stored on the notes application, regardless of its privacy setting. This data is now easily accessible, as major search engines such as Google have already indexed the data.

Once again the security of social networking has come into question. Is it really safe to trust a company with information that details almost every aspect of our lives? Facebook has yet to comment on the latest data breach.

You can read more about this over at reddit.com.

Free VPN

kahrn — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:13:35 +0000

This article has been moved to the new blog.

http://kahrn.com/blog/2009/09/free-vpn/

I was a victim of the recent VAServ attacks

kahrn — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:45:45 +0000

Some of you may have seen a recent news article about VAServ’s entire infrastructure being compromised leading to data loss/theft on over 100,000 sites.

I was a victim of this attack (I host around 6 sites on my VPS — all of which were downed). Luckily I managed to get into the server today, and it seems most of my files are intact (so far). A quick reboot of mysql and it seems everything is working as it should be.

Sadly the DNS provider was also hacked, so trying to access via domains will fail. Moral of the story? Always make backups. I almost lost EVERYTHING. Anything can happen.

You can read more about it over at slashdot.