There Is No Cat - Diseased Pariah News

Thursday, September 4, 2003

Diseased Pariah News

Someone who visited this site recently, probably today, is infected with the Sobig.F worm. Last Friday, after hitting over a thousand copies of the virus received (and caught in my spam traps), I shut down the address listed at the bottom of the pages on this site, which was drawing hundreds of virus-infested e-mails every day. At the same time, on the main page only, I hid a new e-mail address, damnedvirus at this domain, in comments. Interestingly, the spammers found it before the virii, but no matter. I’ve received four new copies of the virus this morning, starting at 7:39 am EDT (1139 GMT). The e-mail addresses I’m receiving them from mostly seem to be related to China, coming from the following domains:

sina.com.cn
zhaoh.com
dobest.com
chinaren.com

All of the e-mails have dates given as GMT+0900, and were received by my SMTP server from a computer known as n170219.ap.plala.or.jp, which appears to be a Japanese ISP. So if you visited this site some time before 1139 GMT (8:39 PM in Japan) from Japan and visit Chinese-language sites, please please please disconnect from the net, download some virus protection software, and disinfect your computer.

Posted at 11:26 AM

Comments

Er, make sure you download the anti-virus software *before* you disconnect from the net....

Posted by Ralph at 11:37 AM, September 4, 2003 [Link]

something funky is going on with your home page...in Opera7/Win2K, the right hand column lays on top of the center one.

validator doesn’t choke on anything in particular, except I think an unclosed paragraph, and the fact that <sigh> isn’t a real tag. ;)

Posted by elaine at 12:14 PM, September 4, 2003 [Link]

It was the sigh two posts down that will killing Opera. I forgot to escape the greater-than and less-than signs in my HTML. That also caused the spurious missing paragraph ending message. Feh. It works now. Looks like Opera is just checking for the presence of a greater-than sign to close a tag, which is probably not the most graceful thing to do. Much better to look for the actual close of the particular tag....

Posted by Ralph at 12:34 PM, September 4, 2003 [Link]

darn sighs. are you doing much auto-encoding with missouri?

Posted by Elaine at 1:30 PM, September 4, 2003 [Link]

Not much, just with comments to ensure that they’re valid HTML and that URLs in comments auto-link. For the postings themselves, I pretty much rely on my Old Skool Mad Koding Skillz; I’m more comfortable with HTML the closer I am to the metal. I experimented a bit with incorporating Texture into my process on my development machine, but didn’t have much use for the Usenet-style markup it uses when BBEdit and HomeSite make raw HTML so easy for me to write. Of course, every so often we see the result of that when I sigh....

Posted by Ralph at 2:23 PM, September 4, 2003 [Link]