All Things Techie With Huge, Unstructured, Intuitive Leaps

Java Update Virus Injection

This is a new virus injection from a hacked site.  I was at a respectable site when all of a sudden, a notice popped up saying that I had to update my java.  I was on a static site and it looked suspicious.  Without clicking on the update link, it never came from Oracle/Java but rather from a domain called Upkendint, which I traced to Panama.


Domain Name: UPKENDINT.COM
Registry Domain ID: 1852189971_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.enom.com
Registrar URL: www.enom.com
Updated Date: 2014-03-27 02:02:05Z
Creation Date: 2014-03-27 09:02:00Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2015-03-27 09:02:00Z
Registrar: ENOM, INC.
Registrar IANA ID: 48
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@enom.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.4252744500
Reseller: NAMECHEAP.COM
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
Registry Registrant ID:
Registrant Name: WHOISGUARD PROTECTED
Registrant Organization: WHOISGUARD, INC.
Registrant Street: P.O. BOX 0823-03411
Registrant City: PANAMA
Registrant State/Province: PANAMA
Registrant Postal Code: 00000
Registrant Country: PA
Registrant Phone: +507.8365503
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax: +51.17057182
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email: A9DB4936860A4CAD9573A6830797575F.PROTECT@WHOISGUARD.COM
Registry Admin ID:
Admin Name: WHOISGUARD PROTECTED
Admin Organization: WHOISGUARD, INC.
Admin Street: P.O. BOX 0823-03411
Admin City: PANAMA
Admin State/Province: PANAMA
Admin Postal Code: 00000
Admin Country: PA
Admin Phone: +507.8365503
Admin Phone Ext:
Admin Fax: +51.17057182
Admin Fax Ext:
Admin Email: A9DB4936860A4CAD9573A6830797575F.PROTECT@WHOISGUARD.COM
Registry Tech ID:
Tech Name: WHOISGUARD PROTECTED
Tech Organization: WHOISGUARD, INC.
Tech Street: P.O. BOX 0823-03411
Tech City: PANAMA
Tech State/Province: PANAMA
Tech Postal Code: 00000
Tech Country: PA

You really have to be careful these days and verify that what you clicking was actually sent by the entity that they say they are.

Caution.

Mysql infile and outfile, moving data

Well, I had to use these commands again, so I thought that I would refresh yours and my memory.  I had to take messages from one database and transfer them to another.  The easiest way is to dump the necessary rows into a csv file and read them back in to the other database.

Here are the commands:

To copy the data to a file:

SELECT senderId, 
   senderName,
   messageBody,
   showOrNot,
   meId, 
   req,
   whens,
   co  
  INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/msg.csv'
  FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"'
  LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'
  FROM messagetable
  LIMIT 100;

To read it back in using mysql command line:

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE 'msg.csv' INTO TABLE messagetable
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' 
ENCLOSED BY '"' 
LINES TERMINATED BY '\r\n';

Hope this helps someone.

Hilarious Facebook Spam



Sometimes spammers are just plain idiotic.  I got this spam designed to look like it was sent by Facebook.  It was sent to my email address.  I am not on Facebook, but my Facebook name would not necessarily be my email address.  However I supposedly had notifications for my email address.  All that I had to do was click the link (yeah right).

The absolutely hilarious part was the unsubscribe at the bottom.  Here is the notice in its entirety:

This notification was sent to <my email address>.com. If you don't want to receive these notifications from Facebook in the future, please unsubscribe. Facebook, Inc., Attention: Department 415, PO Box 10005, Palo Alto, CA 94303

That means I have to send a letter by snail mail -- regular post to Facebook to unsubscribe from their electronic notices.  Idiots.

I do notice that most of my spam now comes to my Yahoo mail account.  Google is quite adept at filtering it out.

Chrome Browser Crashes

I had Chrome go down again.  It told me that a heap has been corrupted.  I have a debugger, so I got the exact place where the Chrome Browswer died.  Here are the gory details:


Unhandled exception at 0x771815de in chrome.exe: 0xC0000374: A heap has been corrupted.

Debugger information:  The heap:
771815B4  mov         eax,12Eh 
771815B9  xor         ecx,ecx 
771815BB  lea         edx,[esp+4] 
771815BF  call        dword ptr fs:[0C0h] 
771815C6  add         esp,4 
771815C9  ret         18h  
771815CC  mov         eax,12Fh 
771815D1  xor         ecx,ecx 
771815D3  lea         edx,[esp+4] 
771815D7  call        dword ptr fs:[0C0h] 
771815DE  add         esp,4 

Toshiba Laptop Cooling System Warning

I was on an airplane, working on battery power with my Toshiba laptop for a couple of hours when I got this message:

System Warning

Warning: A problem with the cooling system has been detected.  Please turn off the computer immediately and return it for service.

Needless to say, it scared the crap out of me.  I immediately turned it off and thought that my machine was toast.

I operated it entirely the next day without a warning.  This morning, the innocuous dialog box with the same message popped up.

The thing was pumping out heat from the fan.  I immediately got a can of compressed air and sprayed every orifice under the laptop.  Dust and crap and all sorts of stuff came out.  I was amazed at the amount of dust and particulate matter that spewed out.

I then googled the problem on another device, and came up with this URL : http://botcrawl.com/warning-a-problem-with-the-cooling-system-has-been-detected/

This URL suggested that uninstalling the Toshiba Value Added Package.  I did this for good measure, but I noticed that after spraying the compressed air and getting all of the dust and junk out, the heat was no longer being pumped out of the fan ports.

My laptop does run cooler now.  Prior to this I had never used the canned air to blow out the dust, but I did notice that my computer would definitely run hot out of the fan port and it now runs cool.

All this to say is that I solved the problem.  I think that it was a bunch of dust and crap accumulated in fan assembly, because my computer runs cooler.  Problem solved without a trip to repair shop.  I am going to keep a can of air around and regularly give the holes in the underside a good shot every once in awhile.

Batting 1000 in MH370 Predictions

The world is abuzz with the latest possible find of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 by the Australians.  This is the diagram that they have released.


I have been making inferences all along, and two days ago, using logical inferences, I predicted that the search should start some 2,000 kilometers off Perth in Australia.  I published this map in the blog entry below:


Well some possible wreckage has been sited some 2,260 kilometers off Perth.  My inferences were within roughly 10 percent of where the possible wreckage was found.

If it turns out to be MH370, then I have batted 1000 on my inferences.  

Again, time will tell.

Probable Location of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370

(click on picture for larger image)

Probable Location of Flight MH370


I have been amazingly accurate with my inferences and predictions about Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370.  Days before it was even intimated, I put out the possibility that it was in the Indian Ocean.  And then a couple of days later before the authorities admitted it, I said that it was a deliberate act from the flight deck.  I even named the co-pilot as the rogue character (see entries below this one in this blog).

So here I go again.  Where to look?  Well we do know that the last satellite transmission was somewhere in the red arc pictured above.  It is cut off by the blue circle as the maximum distance and amount of fuel that the aircraft had.

So let's assume that the co-pilot wanted to fly the plane to kingdom come, until it fell from the sky never to be seen again.  What he is hoping for (and you read this here first) is that the plane is never found.  And it may never be.  My guess is that the flight path would circle around the island of Sumatra just in case there was radar there.  Remember, they wanted to avoid radar.  Then they would just fly straight south until the plane stopped flying.  They wouldn't want to come too near Australia on one side, and didn't want Madagascar's radar picking them up, so they flew pretty much south.

The distance traveled would be a function of speed.  My guess is that they would travel at "normal" airline speeds -- not too fast and not too slow.  That would bring them close but not all the way to the maximum distance arc.   So if I were in charge of the search, I would start looking on the arc about 2000 kilometers off Perth Australia due west and look up and down the arc there. It stands to reason that MH370 is somewhere along that arc.  And if the plane is found, I am willing to bet that the pilot would found with either a bullet, or massive trauma to the head, and he was dead around the time of the turn west from the Beijing flight plan.

Time will tell, again!

#McConnelling - Mitch McConnell Campaign Ad


This is my #mcconnelling effort when Jon Stewart of The Daily Show asked for entries and putting Mitch McConnell's silent video to music.  Enjoy.

Technology Solutions To Prevent a Repeat of Flight 370


Here are some real simple solutions to prevent a repeat of Flight MH370 scenarios from repeating.

1) When the transponder is turned off, before it goes off, it sends a signal that advises that it is being switched off.
2) There is real time monitoring and recording systems that monitor that signal.
3) The same for ACARS.  When it is switched off, before it goes silent, it transmits a switched-off signal as well.
4) A hue and cry is issued when the ACARS is turned off.  The airline head office and controlling ATC sector is notified immediately and repeatedly.
5) A secondary module called a handover module is hooked up to the ATC (Air Traffic Control) radar processors to monitor handoff.  As a plane is leaving a sector, a system generated message is sent to the ongoing ATC zone and the handoff is picked up.  If it fails, alarms go off.
6) Flight plans are filed in electronic format that is easily translated to machine readable format.
7) The radar processor has a flight plan deviation module that reads and monitors the flight plan.  If the aircraft is not where it is supposed to be, alarms are raised.
8) A QoS (Quality of Service) channel is created to stream meta-data realtime when the autopilot is set, programmed, re-programmed and/or changed. Any major changes in the cockpit or airplane are monitored in real time.
9) A flying plane transmits a machine generated heartbeat to the airline technical office every ten minutes.  The pilots have to manually acknowledge this signal even when the plane is on auto pilot.
10) All of this information is fed into a big data repository where it is mined for the benefit of the industry.

Inference -- And Fearless Prediction Again -- The Co-pilot did it!


Update:  I made this inference two days before any authorities did.

Update 2: 2 days later, authorities now say that the last voice transmission came from the co-pilot validating this earlier prediction.

As part of my job, I teach computers to make inferences.  I have an inference engine in my head.  Four days ago, using a well-reasoned argument, I inferred that the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, under a certain set of circumstances, was probably in the Indian Ocean. (See the entry two posts below this one.)   Today, it was announced that the USS Kidd is in fact searching the Indian Ocean, because telemetry signals indicated that the plane flew for hours after the transponders went silent.  The inference looks to be largely correct.

I have another inference to make.  New facts have come up.  Radar and ACARS (engine reporting to the satellite) data shows that it wasn't a random left turn.  The aircraft turned at specific GPS waypoints.  The only way that this could happen, was that either the autopilot was programmed that way, or a someone watched for the waypoints, and manually followed them.  Only a professionally trained pilot would know how to do this.

So that leaves two scenarios.  Either a professionally trained pilot hijacked the airplane, or the pilot or co-pilot did it.  The cabin door to the cockpit is reinforced so that if there was a hijacker, he would either have to break into the cockpit or sneak his way in.  We do know that the young 27 year old co-pilot was a loose cannon who invited women to fly in the cockpit, so that could be how the hijacker got in.  However, if that was the case, the older 52 year old pilot would have sounded the alarm and somehow issued a mayday - even as he was being killed.

The extreme knowledge of turning off the transponders, and then no mayday and then the plane flying for hours is very strange.  In any inferential reasoning, the rule of Ockham's Razor comes into play.  Ockham's Razor is a tool of logic.  It is referred to as the tool of parsimony.  Essentially, if there are two equally valid explanations for an event, we must take the simplest one.

The simplest explanation here, is that for whatever reason, be it mental illness, religious fanaticism or whatever, the co-pilot took over the plane, and flew it into the ocean.  When it is all said and done, there is a very very high probability that it will turn out this way.  The second most probable event is a hijacker, but I am betting that the co-pilot did it.

LaunchRock Launches New Crowdfunding Platform



Hello LaunchRockers!
We have some big news. We are joining forces with Fundable, the largest business crowdfunding platform to help startups get to the final frontier of launch: fundraising!
The most consistent request we’re getting from our LaunchRock community is how to take the large followings you’ve created, and turn that demand into an operating business. Fundable has helped startups raise over $87MM of capital to get their businesses up and running.
What Does This Mean for LaunchRock Users?
You now have access to an incredible tool to raise capital for your business. You already have followers who love your idea. You can now convert those followers into backers and investors for your company.
U.S.-based LaunchRockers can now receive 50% off of a monthly $179 subscription to the Fundable platform. Redeem Code RockYourRaiseby March 31st to take advantage of this discount.
International users, reply to this email to learn about our upcoming international crowdfunding opportunities.
Cheers to Launching and Funding companies!
The LaunchRock and Fundable Teams

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 ~ My Analysis

(click on graphic for larger image)
Update:  I made this prediction four days before any authority did.

Here is my two cent analysis of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 mystery.  Point A on the graphic is where the transponders stopped working at cruise altitude.  Point B is where the military radar last saw Flight 370, still at cruising altitude in the Straits of Mallaca, near the tiny island of Pulau Perak.

There are two possibilities at point A.  The first is that the plane suffered severe mechanical malfunction that took out the transponders and the pilot turned the plane around.  The second possibility, is that the plane was hijacked either by the pilot with mental issues, or by terrorist act.  The transponders would be turned off either ordered by the terrorists or by the mad pilot.  I saw a Pentagon analyst say that if this was a terrorist attack, this could be dry run or a feasibility study to see if this would work in the United States.

The heading is way off course.  There are two possibilities again.  Either the pilot believed that he was headed back to Kuala Lumpur and was mistaken, or the course is deliberate.  It doesn't much matter until point B is reached.

If the pilot is flying a damaged plane, and he believes that he is on the course back to Kuala Lumpur, he will hold his course to point C until he sees the lights of the city.  Unfortunately he get to North Sumatra and there is no city.  He keeps flying until the plane falls out of the sky between points C and E.  If the pilot was not under coercion and sane, then he would realize that by point E that he had flown long enough to reach Kuala Lumpur and missed it.  Again in the same state, he should have realized that he was not over the Malay Peninsula and might have turned south to point D, when reaching point D should have realized that he missed Kuala Lumpur.  With the damaged plane, sane pilot scenario, the wreckage should be found in the orange circle, or at maximum in the pink circle or if there was a course change, in the yellow circle around C,D, and E.

The terrorist or mad pilot scenario is scarier.  If there was a terrorist or if the pilot went mad, there was enough fuel in the plane to take the flight out into the deep Indian Ocean to point F and past so that the plane would never be found or not found for a long time.  If the plane ditched around land, the water is relatively shallow compared to surrounding ocean. This same scenario would hold true if the plane de-pressurized killing all aboard and then continue to fly on auto-pilot like the case that killed golfer Payne Stewart.

So there you have it.  If there is a reasonable explanation, I would look in the Indonesian waters off North Sumatra for the wreckage.  If the loss of the plane defies rationality, if it is found, it will be somewhere off in the Indian Ocean.

Time will tell.

Using mysqldump To Back Up Routines, Stored Procedures, Triggers, Functions etc



I had to answer this question again, so I will post it here.  If you want mysqldump to save routines, stored procedures, triggers and functions, here is the command:

mysqldump -uroot -p<password> --routines <name_of_database> > c:\<filename>.sql

What's App Spam


This piece of garbage appeared in my inbox.  It is the spammers latest attempt to inject my machine with a virus.

Ever since WhatsApp sprang to prominence by being bought by Facebook for billions of dollars, scurvy, scum-of-the-earth spammers have seen the prominence as a new way to inject computer viruses.  So who is doing this?  Those soulless, Commie, frigging lawless, a@@holes in Russia.  Here is the sending email address:
WhatsApp Messaging Service service@73news.ru via beta.tagtech.ru 

Amateurs.

The Nate Silver of Rugby and Bitcoin


Gotta say that I scored a fairly big one in the predictions department with my RugbyMetrics.  I did a running analysis of how the teams were playing, scoring and defense stats and came up with a regression formula.  In the latest fixtures of the Aviva Premiership, Bath the number three team was playing the Saracens.  My analysis showed that the Sarries would triumph over Bath by a score of  23-16.  I tweeted that prediction a day before.

On game day, the Saracens did prevail with a score of 23-10.  That is an amazingly accurate prediction and my regression formula warrants a trip to the bookie shop.

On another tack, in a previous post, I put up a video (done by someone else) saying that BitCoin was in a bubble.  Well, Mt. Gox failed a few days later.  I predicted a Super Bowl win for the Seattle Sea Hawks earlier this year and they upset the Broncos big time.

  I should start backing my predictions with money.

Calling Linux chmod from a Java Class

I had this java application where the system created a file.  Since the file was created in a part of the directory structure that was locked down tight, I needed to alter the permissions of the file from the java class before I could operate on it.  I made a chmod java class with a static method to do it.  This is how I did it:

package com.newco.utils;

import com.sun.jna.Native;

//  used to grant privileges to system created files.
/**
 * The Class Chmod.
 */
public class Chmod {

/** The libc. */
private static CLibrary libc = (CLibrary) Native.loadLibrary("c",
CLibrary.class);

/**
* Chmod.

* @param pathe
*            the pathe
* @param val
*            the val
*/
public static void chmod(String pathe, int val) {
libc.chmod(pathe, val);
}

}

.WAV File vs. MP3 File


I wanted a special sound file embedded in an Android app every time an event finished.  It was a custom sound with verbal instructions, so I needed an embedded sound file to put into the resource raw folder.  I tested Android and it will take both an MP3 file and a WAV file.  I wanted to know which one was more suitable.

Was I in for a shock, when it came to comparing size.  The wav file was 10,337 KB.  The mp3 file of the same recording was 1,144 KB.  Ten times smaller.  Microsoft is still a piece of crap.  MP3 it is.