Residential ISP log data from the east coast USMark: if you're reading this I need you to get right on this issue please. (Thanks!)# whois.ripe.netinetnum:        31.13.6… Read More

 One of the sillier things I've done as an AWS/linux admin is provision an EBS disk as swap to an EC2 instance. I kept getting max allocate errors for a script I needed to run to execut… Read More

This weekend I spent some time migrating a few low-traffic websites from Nginx to AWS S3's static web hosting service.In theory, this is a straightforward process: move content from the old… Read More

There has been grumblings since July that some of the folks over at LHC may have discovered a new fundamental particle: the dicharm tetraquark.From Quanta Magazine:[Igor] Polyakov went… Read More

CVE-2021-40444 is a new remote code execution vulnerability in Windows that involves embedded ActiveX controls in Office document files (.doc, .docx, .docm, .dochtml).  All versions of… Read More

Six years ago (sigh), I wrote but never published this blog post begging users to find an alternative to the PPTP VPN protocol. They were already years out of date at that time. Even today… Read More

Below, I've included what would have been the first post in a series of posts I wrote about the badBIOS controversy in October 2013. I found the evidence in support of badBIOS to b… Read More

This is the latest update of the list of windows license keys for key management service activation I publish every few years. Reference the KMS activation post I wrote for Windows 2012 for… Read More

I can recall listening to a radio program some 10-15 years ago. The host of the show believed that it would soon be possible to build a faster-than-light communications system using quantum… Read More

I watched Rob Eastaway's 2019 for the Royal Institute today. Everything from RI is great and worth checking out, but Eastaway delivered a statistic I hadn't come across before: 90% of a… Read More

I needed to setup a quick Cassandra environment in Windows today, but I ran into a problem when executing the quick start guide from Cassandra's (excellent) website.The quick start assumes a… Read More

We tend to overestimate the reliability of authority figures, and this impacts how we should analyze data for public policy.Public data is an intrinsic appeal to authorityThe CDC's WONDER da… Read More

Over the last month or so I've noticed that all of the ads and retail descriptions of low-end PCs I have been seeing have updated their description of the included version of Windows. Instea… Read More

During the pandemic I've been spending my time in a somewhat rural area. There's a lake. There's bugs.  There's lots of flora and fauna of all shapes and sizes. Every once in a while I… Read More

 Oooo boy, I can't wait to browse discounted "Dog Supplies" on Amazon. Wait. What? Read More

Microsoft fully ended support for their Windows 7 product in January of last year. The change is primarily administrative: Microsoft will no longer distribute security patches for free with… Read More

Over in Europe, Irish Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon has just succeeded in her push to prevent Facebook from transferring data on European users back to the United States. At issue… Read More

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Full disclosure: I've been employed by several companies that were customers and/or vendors of SolarWinds. However, I have never been employed by SolarWinds and I was not compensated for thi… Read More

Yesterday, on December 14th, all services associated with Google Workspace (AKA GSuite - or for those who aren't familiar with it, what is essentially Google's paid "business" services) went… Read More

Over the last few weeks, a botnet has been mass-uploading a specific package of what appears to be malware (I haven't had time to look at the payload itself yet).Cleverly, the person(s) behi… Read More

Three years ago I wrote a blog post demonstrating how the International Business Times appeared to be associated with some extremely shady online advertising networks, resulting in Internati… Read More

For over a year I assisted the Palm Beach Post with an in-depth investigation on the State of Florida's involvement with sparking the current heroin epidemic. That investigation has just bee… Read More

Earlier this week a young government contractor named Reality Winner was accused by police of leaking an internal NSA document to news outlet The Intercept. The documents outline the intelli… Read More

Good news for current and future clients of Josh Wieder Technical Consulting: customers can now retain a variety of unique services related to popular hosting billing platforms Ubersmith &am&hell…Read More

Earlier this week, several servers I maintain were targeted by automated attempts to upload a remote access trojan (RAT). The RAT is a simple rot-13 embedded PHP script. The script provides… Read More

Its been quite some time since I've received a 419 spam message in my inbox. But - like matter itself - 419 never dies - only changes form. I found the message below in my inbox this morning… Read More

Today Wikileaks released a massive new trove of leaks focused on the CIA's IT-based espionage capabilities. Wikileaks has named the document release Vault 7. The trove has just been released… Read More

Since I was gifted a new Raspberry Pi this Xmas, I've found myself becoming much more interested in the details of computer hardware than I've previously been. Among the first thing that I'v… Read More

Over the past few days I've been working on a project that involved building an authentication mechanism for a new website which checks user logins against a WHMCS admin database. There are… Read More

Getting the hang of Linux file-system permissions can be tricky for beginners. I still have problems every now and again translating symbolic permission notation to octal permission notation… Read More

Four days ago I received an email from Dawid Golunski through the list illustrating one of the more brutal pair of security vulnerabilities I have seen recently. Here's how it wo… Read More

I was asked by Fox News to comment on how Wikileaks might be able to publish documents in spite of a reported shutdown of Julian Assange's internet access within the Ecuadorian embassy. You… Read More

A Dell "feature" that appears to be designed to force customers to use only Dell parts reduced the speed of a set of SSDs one of my customers installed on their rack-mountable R900 server by… Read More

Never let it be said that I do not support the aspirations of today's young people. My contribution to the next generation was helping a local teen build out a high powered gaming… Read More

Here is a copy of the email I was sent by Pandora to inform me that my account was compromised kindof but not really and it was totally not their fault.This is somewhat old news (I received… Read More

Someone more cynical than myself might think that Microsoft's sudden 66% decrease of OneDrive storage space is a bait & switch - give away the space for free until users become dependent… Read More

I'd like to tell you a story. Its a story that doesn't particularly make me look very good. It was at a point in my career where I still had a lot to learn, and like many young peo… Read More

Since I've published my findings on malware in the GI Files Wikileaks file dumps and my subsequent attempts to encourage Wikileaks to label such malicious content, I've repeatedly been told… Read More

    A few minutes ago I clicked a link to an article and I noticed something fishy. The new site attempted to automatically redirect my browser to this:    This piec… Read More

I was interviewed yesterday by Fox News science correspondent James Rogers. I was asked for my input on the distribution by Wikileaks of emails leaked from a Democratic National Committee em… Read More

Five days ago someone on Hacker News pointed out that Google's Safe Browsing system labeled Wikileaks.org a "dangerous site".At some point the Google warning was rescinded, however Google co… Read More

Until the site went offline some 35 hours ago, torrent distribution site Kickass Torrents was widely believed to be the most popular torrent site on the internet, having surpassed the l… Read More

    Recent versions of WHMCS introduce a feature called "Product Bundles". The idea is simple - a single link combines a number of products, possibly with a specific set of Configu… Read More

Comcast is my current home ISP. Over the last year, I've had a ton of problems with them filtering all sorts of legitimate (outbound) traffic. The latest fun times I've had is the… Read More

Its come to my attention that blog has way too much helpful technical information and not nearly enough bitching & complaining. With today's post, I hope to tip the scales a bit.During t… Read More

    Several days ago I noticed that several Comcast / Xfinity residential internet connections throughout the Southeastern US were unable to download or upload torrents. I have a h… Read More

    Several days ago I noticed that several Comcast / Xfinity residential internet connections throughout the Southeastern US were unable to download or upload torrents. I have a h… Read More

When used correctly, encryption works really well. It works so well that most people can't wrap their brain around how powerful it is.The biggest gains we can make in improving online securi… Read More

Popular Bitcoin exchange Coinbase has started a Bitcoin giveaway. Signup for a Coinbase account using the partner URL below, purchase US$100 worth of Bitcoin, and get US$10 worth of free Bit… Read More

So you've screwed something up. You made a typo in your sshd_config file. You added a firewall rule, or a route, or some other thing, and lost your network access to your EC2 instance. And o… Read More

A lot of people connect to Linux machines from a Windows desktop computer. Despite the number of people that have to do this for one reason or another, there are hardly any SSH clients for W… Read More

So it turns out that setting your AWS EC2 server's hostname to be persistent across reboots is a surprising pain in the ass, at least with my usual OS of choice - RedHat/CentOS Linux.If you'… Read More

When I'm not writing about computers for free on the internet, I actually work with computers (for money). Most of what I do involves doing stuff with computers directly, but sometimes I hav… Read More

Lets say we have a form. The form is straight-forward: HTML radio buttons that posts to a PHP processing script that saves the results to a database. The radio buttons correspond to bindary… Read More

Did you have a PayPal account between April 2006 and November 2015? During that time, did PayPal ever place a hold or reserve on your account? Did PayPal suspend or cancel your account? Than… Read More

As part of my consulting business I have a number of web servers I take care of. This morning, I woke up to receive a particularly crappy message related to one of those servers:possible DoS… Read More

I've written a simple bash script that checks for new files in an AWS S3 bucket and emails any that it finds as a compress (tar.gz) attachment - you can find it at my Github account und… Read More

I have used ClamAV and Spamassassin for many years. I've had a less experience with Amavis (now amavisd-new), but I've decided to give it a try with a new mail server deployment I've been wo… Read More

Taking care of some web development headaches this morning, I took a peek at my log data and came across an interesting message generated from a connection initiated by 151.217.0.0/16, part… Read More

I've been slacking on my promise to post weekly links here on my website. I'm sorry, y'all.In atonement, and also as tribute to the forth-coming Star Wars movie, I am offering up some very s… Read More

A few of my Red Hat servers run cron jobs to check for updates. starting yesterday (Thursday October 1st, 2015) at around 3PM I encountered 503 unavailable errors when attempting to contact… Read More

Like most people in IT, I wear a lot of different hats. While I haven't mentioned it before on this website, I have spent the last two years working with a non-profit devoted to researching… Read More

Its hard to believe that its been almost 15 years since I watched a video of a second plane fly into the World Trade Center. I remember panic thinking about my family in NYC - was anyone in… Read More

Recently I have started coming across somewhat unusual entries in the access and error logs for a few of the Apache web servers that I am responsible for maintaining. The entries look like t… Read More

In my internet travels today, I came across a group called the "Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium" (TRAC). TRAC claims to provide:"researchers in the fields of terrorism stud… Read More

In my internet travels today, I came across a group called the "Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium" (TRAC). TRAC claims to provide:"researchers in the fields of terrorism stud… Read More

Recently I was reviewing several of The Pirate Bay's (TPB) new mirror sites that have popped up over the last year since the most recent rounds of raids against the famous website's administ… Read More

Recently I was reviewing several of The Pirate Bay's (TPB) new mirror sites that have popped up over the last year since the most recent rounds of raids against the famous website's administ… Read More

Among the many pies I have my thumbs into at the moment, I am particularly interested in using technology to bring greater transparency to government. One of the most prominent problems as i… Read More

About a month and a half ago I grew so frustrated by the boneheaded way that Amazon EC2 handles IP aliasing that I wrote a pretty lengthy post about the problems entailed and included a smal… Read More

UPDATED: While wlstorage.net has been taken offline and is not currently being redirected elsewhere, it looks like all of that host's functionality is now being provided by https://file… Read More

So Tropical Storm Erika is rapidly approaching my home in South Florida. Those who don't live on the Gulf Coast or the South East usually aren't familiar with the drama that is living throug… Read More

Scams focused on stealing tax refunds remain highly profitable, despite the fact that they are well known and understood by security professionals and the general public, and have been for y… Read More

I received a somewhat horrifying email from Electronic Arts in reference to my Origin account yesterday :I pissed my pants a little.The email definitely originated from EA, and the… Read More

A ton of Skype users were unhappy with the update from Skype 6.x to 7.x. Most of what I have seen is complaining about a few minor changes to the user interface. In the usual baby/bathwater… Read More

This morning I received an interesting message from someone I haven't heard from in a while through email. The subject line was "FIND PDF COPY" (in all caps). Inside the body of the message… Read More

After seeing this I'm convinced we should probably keep the War on Drugs going for a few more decades.Remember, kids: Read More

My mom was at an awards ceremony tonight for journalists in Miami. She was one of the first women in news radio in the South, a Pulitzer Prize nominee and a staunch feminist. So you can imag… Read More

UPDATE: I'm going to be building out pretty much everything I describe here for fixing IP aliasing, multiple IPs and other networking issues with Amazon EC2 with a program called Aliaser whi… Read More

Heres part of the Microsoft's 12,000 word ToS for Windows 10:Finally, we will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other p… Read More

I am a victim of my nostalgia. Yesterday, I revived a years-old post in which I provided bloggees with some of the latest Windows activation keys to update the data for Windows 10. I figured… Read More

I've written a simple bash script that checks for new files in an AWS S3 bucket and emails any that it finds as a compress (tar.gz) attachment. I built it as a supplement for a contact form… Read More

Taking care of some web development headaches this morning, I took a peek at my log data and came across an interesting message generated from a connection initiated by 151.217.0.0/16, part… Read More