Energy Australia social engineering attack

In the middle of a power outage at the moment, so I called Energy Australia to see what was going on.

Me: Hi, I’m in Ryde and have no power.
EA: Sure we are having a problem in that area. What’s your address?
Me: 54 Blah St.
EA: Thats under the name of Ferlito?
Me: Yes.

So if you need to find out who lives somewhere really easily just call Energy Australia and claim your having a power outage. Probably won’t work every time but it will some of the time.

Oh yeah no power till this afternoon. Bummer!

Google Reader Subscribers

I love Google Reader and have been using it for about 4 months to manage the 189 RSS feeds I currently care about. (Here are my shared items for anyone that is interested.)

While browsing the Google Reader FAQ looking for how to get vquences embedded properly I came across the following.


Does Google Reader report subscriber counts?

Yes, Google Reader reports subscriber counts when we crawl feeds (within the “User-Agent:” header in HTTP). Currently, these counts include users of both Reader and Google; over time they’ll also include subscriptions from other Google properties.

Here is an example from my logs

209.85.238.4 – – [26/Jul/2007:07:31:54 +1000] “GET /blog/feed/atom/ HTTP/1.1” 304 0 “-” “Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 5 subscribers; feed-id=15287401989222975041)”

This is something I’ve always wanted to know. The stats aren’t particularly interesting but does point out an optimisation Google could make.

  • /blog/feed/atom/ – 5 subscribers
  • /blog/feed – 2 subscribers
  • /blog/feed/ – 1 subscriber

ie the last 2 are identical (note the difference is the trailing slash) and they are all pointing at the same blog. It would be cool if Google worked out the above are all exactly the same and only probed once.

Even more interestingly Google is probing these URLs at different frequencies.

  • /blog/feed/atom/ – Every hour
  • /blog/feed – Every hour
  • /blog/feed/ – Every 3 hours

Looks like it might be related to the number of subscribers, would be interesting to see other peoples data here.

Out of the wilderness

I took another step out of the wilderness today…

Those who have know me for a while will know that up until recently I exclusively used linux virtual consoles (ie what CTRL-ALT-F1 gives you from within X) to do all my work except for browsing the web. Recently I stopped using them all together and moved totally into the land of X and started using gnome-terminal instead.

Well I suppose it wasn’t that big a step as my processes havn’t changed that much. I simply have a gnome-terminal with tabs full screen in the monitor on my left and a full screen firefox in the monitor on my right 🙂

I took another step today moving from centericq to pidgin for my IM needs. I’m quite liking it so far especially some of the pop up notification plugins since I can follow channel conversations without switching away from what I’m doing.

Now does anyone know if there is a plugin to sync all my configuration settings between different machines. That was the handiest thing about running centericq from inside a screen.

But have no fear I’m still using mutt for mail and doubt that will ever change.

SFD2006 – Return to sender

Pia posting about Software freedom day, software freedom day online shop is up, reminded me about something I’ve been meaning to post for a while.

When you send in the address to get your team’s t-shirts and goodies, make sure you get it right!

Last year I helped pack all the goodies that we sent overseas, this was sometime in August if I remember correctly. We needed to put a return address on the packages so I offered the use of Bulletproof’s address.

6 months later the following turned up on our doorstep.





Notice the use of hemp rope and wax seal. This box has been through a lot!

DSPAM case sensitivity

I use DSPAM to handle my spam checking and have been quite happy with it as it normally delivers >99.9% hit rate.

In the last few weeks the amount of spam in my INBOX had been getting progressively worse to the point where I noticed no spam whatsoever was making its way into my spam folder.

Looking through my logs I eventually found the following

May 10 10:03:03 fozzie dspam[30287]: Unable to find a valid signature. Aborting.
May 10 10:03:03 fozzie dspam[30287]: process_message returned error -5.  dropping message.

I process my spam by using a mutt macro which bounces emails to johnf-spam at inodes dot org. This then passes the email to DSPAM which reclassifies it. It does this by looking at a header it added to the email.

X-DSPAM-Signature: 464400d0223642194712985

However these were appearing in my INBOX as

X-Dspam-Signature: 464400d0223642194712985

I use procmail and a perl script to pre-process some of my email and it uses Mail::Internet which in turn uses Mail::Header. It bestows this piece of wisdom upon the world.

# attempt to change the case of a tag to that required by RFC822. That
# being all characters are lowercase except the first of each word. Also
# if the word is an `acronym' then all characters are uppercase. We decide
# a word is an acronym if it does not contain a vowel.

sub _tag_case
{

Now I can’t see where in RFC822 it specifies this but in section B.2 it does specify

Upper and lower case are not dis-tinguished when comparing field-names.

So on that basis I choose to blame DSPAM and applied the following diff

diff -ur dspam-3.8.0.orig/src/dspam.c dspam-3.8.0/src/dspam.c
--- dspam-3.8.0.orig/src/dspam.c        2006-12-13 02:33:45.000000000 +1100
+++ dspam-3.8.0/src/dspam.c     2007-05-11 16:25:11.000000000 +1000
@@ -2165,7 +2165,7 @@
           while(node_header != NULL) {
             head = (ds_header_t) node_header->ptr;
             if (head->heading && 
-                !strcmp(head->heading, "X-DSPAM-Signature")) {
+                !strcasecmp(head->heading, "X-DSPAM-Signature")) {
               if (!strncmp(head->data, SIGNATURE_BEGIN, 
                            strlen(SIGNATURE_BEGIN))) 
               {

Now to work out the best way to push that upstream.