Zero / Love

Mailer-Daemon and Postmaster are NOT your Friend

zerolove — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:43:48 +0000

Some of you may be excited to get email from Postmaster or Mailer-Daemon, but unless you are the Email administrator they are NOT your friend. There is currently email going out that claims to be a NDR (Non Delivery Report). This is you sent an email to someone, it failed. The problem is the NDR does not tell you who the email was sent to. Just that you sent it. Ohh but look there is an attachment. The attachment says Original Message or similar.

This is NOT the original message, but an html file. This will open your browser. The browser will redirect you to a website that has a flaw in it. Or if you are lucky, to a website trying to sell you something.

I have seen various forms of this, so far they are all from mailer-daemon or postmaster. Most of them originate from Russia. The other subjects I’ve seen are:

Delivery Status Notification

Email Policy Violation

One had this refresh:

Notice that both end with index3.html

The Java Script:

This is Post from: ZeroSource!

Mailer-Daemon and Postmaster are NOT your Friend

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Time, yea I got that!

zerolove — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:29:03 +0000

So I noticed I’m playing these stupid pointless games on Facebook but i’m not updating my blog. I have lots of things to tell people about but I am drawn into these pointless games Farmville, Mafia Wars, and now Frontierville. I’m level 100 on Farmville, I think that is the highest you can go.

So what has been happening with me? I have got several emails of people asking. Lets see, my wife has a brain tumor. A good friend of mine died in a motorcycle accident. My eldest daughter finished her first year of college. My little ones are starting middle school, and playing in the band. FYI Gary Clarinet and Oboe.

So where do I start? Well this is a start…my main focus is my wife. She has a tumor on her pituitary gland. The tumor is producing HGH (Human Growth Hormon). This is called Acromegaly. It is a rare type of tumor, and extremely hard to get rid of. She currently shoots herself up 3x a day with Octreotide to try and shrink the tumor but eventually we will be doing surgery.

So how have you been?

This is Post from: ZeroSource!

Time, yea I got that!

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Live 100.5 Going Silent

zerolove — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 04:42:49 +0000

It would appear that on Sunday around 2pm the Live 100.5 radio station will go off the air. It is being replaced it would seem with NewsTalk 100.5 WAPI.

Don’t get me wrong, I like talk radio. One of my favorite shows is the Matt Murphy show on 1070 WAPI. I listen to talk radio, on AM. When I switch over to FM, it is because I’m wanting to listen to music. Not just any music, I want to listen to classic Rock and Alternative, Live 100.5 was my other radio station. I don’t want to listen to Top 40 and Country. I don’t want to listen to those two fat head guys.

So today the Facebook group SAVE LIVE 100.5 was created. If you are on Facebook join us. The group has grown in 10 hours to 3,500+ members.

Fans rally to save Birmingham radio station Live 100.5

The Radio Carousel returns, unfortunately, for Live 100.5

We are also emailing Citadel Broadcasting. If you want to help try to keep 100.5, you should do the same. Contact info below:

LIVE 100.5, the best radio station that Birmingham has ever known, is being yanked. Let’s let the folks at Citadel Broadcasting know that we are not in favor of this move. Join this Group and then go to the LIVE 100.5 fan page and let your thoughts be known! Let’s keep it civil people. Let the suits know that the listeners of LIVE 100.5 are educated, thoughtful music lovers that spend money in this area and we want a station that fits our high standards and that station is LIVE 100.5, the way it is RIGHT NOW!

Please email or call these two folks and ask them to save LIVE 100.5

jellis@citcomm.com
fsuleman@citcomm.com
AND
judy.ellis@citcomm.com
farid.suleman@citcomm.com
212-887-1670
702-804-5200

Be nice…

Updated: Contacts

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Live 100.5 Going Silent

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Operation Aurora – Continues

zerolove — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:40:50 +0000

So continuing on from the previous post on Operation Aurora. We now know that Microsoft had known about this flaw for a while. Now we will examine the Chinese Governments place in this whole mess.

On January 12, 2010 Google on its own blog, posted that it had been attacked and that it originated from China. At the same time Google threatened “reviewing its business in China”. On the same day U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton released a statement condemning the attacks.

This weekend in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland started the World Economic Forum. The one thing that was not brought up was the attack from China on Google. Lets not forget at this forum both China and Google was present and accounted. You might say it was a big’ol elephant in the room. People were asked about the attacks. The Vice Premier Li Keqiang, of China made it clear “China did not want to discuss Google”.

So where does this leave us? Should this be forgotten for economic reasons? Is it at this time, we walk away and go “Well Shit Happens!”.

There was never a mass attack using this flaw. It seem to be quietly aimed at certain US Companies. I can tell you now, no one is going to know what all was taken and or compromised. I believe these types of attacks will become more and more common, not just used by countries vs countries but individual groups vs whole countries.

This is Post from: ZeroSource!

Operation Aurora – Continues

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Operation Aurora – Chinese Government – More reasons to ditch Internet Explorer

zerolove — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 04:04:57 +0000

If your still using Internet Explorer as your main web browser, I’m sorry. If you don’t know of other browsers that are available. Let me point out a couple. My favorite is Chrome, and my second favorite is FireFox. If you need a reason to change, let me introduce you to “Operation Aurora”.

I believe Microsoft said it best about project Aurora. And I quote:

Microsoft Security Advisory (979352) – Vulnerability in Internet Explorer Could allow Remote Code Execution

So what does this mean? Well if you go to the right web page… just go to it. Your computer can be compromised by an “Hacker”. When Is say hacker, I mean the Chinese Government. For the record, no one in the Chinese Government has come out to say they did it, but… well common sense says different. We’ll get to that later. You know whats funny, is I don’t fault nor do I blame them. I blame Microsoft. I will get to this later.

Lets look at the companies that where effected to begin with:

Google
Adobe Systems
Juniper Networks
RackSpace

unconfirmed but probably so:

Yahoo
Symantec
Northrop Grumman
Dow Chemical

So why do I blame Microsoft and not the Chinese Government? Well its simple… as usual Microsoft has know about this flaw for a while. My simple research shows they have known about it since September of 2009. That is four months to long for what should have been considered a critical flaw. How many of you store not just your personal important but your businesses important data on computers running windows. Now how many of them are being used with Internet Explorer as the default browser? Now how does that make you feel? This should have been put to the top of the priority queue for fixing. It should not have waited till it was being exploited to be fixed.

To be continued…..

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Operation Aurora – Chinese Government – More reasons to ditch Internet Explorer

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Congratulation to the Crimson Tide! Who won the Redneck Award?

zerolove — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:58:27 +0000

First and foremost congratulation to the National Champions University of Alabama. In a move not normal for my family we decided to have a little football party and watch the game. Its unique in my house in the fact that non of us are really into football. I’m originally from Texas, my daughter goes to Birmingham Southern, and my wife only has family who graduated from Auburn. So no real tie to UA except the fact that we are proud Alabamians.

So I’m sure you are wondering, what does this have to do with the Redneck Award? Well the Austin Statesman has a Columnist aka Joke named John Kelso who wrote an article “As far as rednecks go, Alabama may have UT beat“. Well he got it wrong.

You see under normal circumstances my family would have been “War Eagle” all the way, simply because that is where the majority of our family members have graduated and/or attended. Being that Auburn was done for the year, had no chance of going to or seeing the National Championship, we stood behind the other team. You see Auburn, is in Alabama the state. Alabama the school is also in Alabama..

What I never expected to see was the disrespect, the total lack of loyalty to the state, and the complete ignorance that I saw on twitter and Facebook from Auburn fans! One tweeter that was a stand out, and someone who thinks they represent Auburn was @WarBlogle.

At one time they say “Bama fans…you are the only reason we pull against your team. Not the players, not even the coaches. YOU.” … hum really?

As a person looking from the outside in… let me just say Kettle let me introduce you to Pot. So it is Auburn Fans that gets the Redneck award. At least if I was handing it out.

This is Post from: ZeroSource!

Congratulation to the Crimson Tide! Who won the Redneck Award?

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How do you keep updated?

zerolove — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 04:52:35 +0000

Well I’m not talking about news, we all have our favorite news sites Digg and Slashdot? I’m talking about Windows Software, not windows itself. You should have windows update turned on for that. I’m talking about everything else, how do you keep it updated. Do you wait for the software to complain that it is old? Do you have several updaters running in the background, for instance, Java Update or Quicken update? If so, you are wasting memory and slowing down your system. What I have found to be the best and easiest way to keep updated is to use, FileHippo.Com Updater.

This is a small install that I run when I reboot my system. It checks for updates and gives me a safe place to download them from. I also use my favorite Windows Start editor (Crap Cleaner) and turn off and/or remove all other updaters that sit in the background waiting to update a single piece of software. This gives me an updated and faster running machine.

You can run FileHippo.Com Updater from your Start Menu –> Programs. When you do you will be shown the following dialog.

Just let it run and it will provide you with a website list of all the updates it found for your software.

Now lets go through the settings!

Settings for this program are pretty straight forward. First we have the option of setting our browser. This is important because, this is the browser that will launch when it finds an update. You have the option of seeing or not seeing beta programs and it will show you where you have the program installed.

Next one is custom locations, this one is for those that install the software in a “Special” place. Not the standard place the software wants to be installed. This is where you can tell the updater where to look for other programs you have installed.

After that it is a simple connections box. This is pretty standard, if you use a proxy to access the web here is where you would put the information. If you don’t use a proxy or know what it is, then don’t worry about this.

Finally is the Advanced tab, I choose to have it close if there are no updates. Simply when I reboot the machine it checks, if I have no outstanding updates close it. The second it to actually run it when I reboot. I choose to do this, and ever now and then I will run it manually if I know I haven’t rebooted my machine in a while.

This is one of the great services FileHippo.Com provides, I also use it find new software that I may not know about. Visit the site http://www.filehippo.com and see for yourself.

Technorati Tags: Windows,Software,updates

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How do you keep updated?

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Holiday time approaches!

zerolove — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:31:02 +0000

Yep, it is already that time of year again. We just skipped past Halloween and now its on to Thanksgiving and Christmas. This becomes a very busy time of year for me. See this is when people become vulnerable to E-Card type of viruses. Everyone wants to be green and send these fake, none feeling, one click, vi er E-Cards. It again becomes my job to stop them. They are a hindrance on Mail servers, they are a hindrance on IT Staff, and who wants to spend the holidays battling a computer virus.

Most of these E-Cards, even the legit ones, will end up collecting not only the person sending the E-Card to you but also your email address and selling these to spammers. Some use tracking code in their images, links, java, and or flash.

Then there is the malware type, these are the ones that are sent to you. They look legit but they are really from a virus/worm that someone you know has. These cards are fake and will ask you to install and or run something. Once done your machine is also now infected. You get to join in the fun of slowing your company network, getting your company on a black list, and giving your IT Staff something more to do.

Lets face it, these are horrible things and we should all do our part to avoid falling into these traps. So this holiday season if you wanna be in the know and do it the right way, let me recommend Send Out Cards. These are high quality cards, they handle all the hassle of actually sending. It cost about $1 a card. It is actually as easy as using one of those stupid e-cards. Except the final product tho, let me tell you, is a professional looking real card. Give them a try, tell Beth I said hi when you do.

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Holiday time approaches!

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Zbot Variants Spreading!

zerolove — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:17:42 +0000

There are several ways to propagate a virus. One of them being social engineering. This is what the Zbot variants are trying to do. They are sending emails that seem to come from your service provider, Microsoft themselves, and or your system administrator.

How often do you really get an email from Microsoft telling you that there is an update? For most people, this is never. I have worked in the Information Technology field for almost 20 years and I haven’t got an email from them to tell me there is an update. So why do you think they are doing it now? Better yet, do you think they are keeping track of every user that has outlook some and their email address?

So are you the system administrator? Do you actually email people from “System Admin”? I mean really? Security 101 tells you to change the administrator anyway. You should not be emailing from System Admin. So how often does your System Administrator email you?

So by tricking you to think you are going to a real website and downloading a real upgrade or settings change they are getting you to install the Zbot variant.

So what exactly does the Zbot Trojan/Virus do? First off it is a trojan that disables windows firewall, steals sensitive financial data (credit card numbers, online banking login details), makes screen snapshots, downloads additional components, and provides a hacker with the remote access to the compromised system.

Zbot creates a file %System%\sdra64.exe and the hidden files %System%\lowsec\local.ds and %System%\lowsec\user.ds in combination with a hidden directory %System%\lowsec. There were new memory pages created in the address space of the system process(es): services.exe, lsass.exe, alg.exe, iexplore.exe and svchost.exe.

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Zbot Variants Spreading!

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Fail Boat!

zerolove — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 08:34:20 +0000

An Auburn fan tries to go boating….

moar funny pictures

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Fail Boat!

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Can’t touch this!

zerolove — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 07:31:06 +0000

Just wanted to give you a little something…

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Can’t touch this!

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No Related Post

A new Email Service – Not So Fast!

zerolove — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 04:22:45 +0000

There is a new Email Service in town it is called Gmx. Sign up is free, they claim 11 million people signed up already.

So what do they offer?

Mail Collector. This is a way to check and or get your other mail ie hotmail, gmail, yahoo mail all in one place.

Well I wouldn’t know see, when I went to it originally I was using Chrome the newest version of Chrome even. This is what I ran into:

See they do not support chrome. So I opened up IE 8 and was able to sign up. This went pretty well. The interface looks nice. It was easy to navigate. The main login looks almost like a iGoogle page with widgets. There are some good widgets, one for facebook, one for twitter. Setting these up was easy and the login was fast. The widget for twitter is Betwittered I believe. I tried to setup my Gmail with the mail collector and it failed, wouldn’t connect to gmail. So then I tried to setup my yahoo email and guess what, fail again. So my next thing to try now that I have a username and password was to sign in with Chrome since it is my main browser of choice. Fail again, username and password hit login and just sit. At this time I have given up and try to close out IE 8 and it just hung. Ended up having to cntrl + alt + del kill it.

Final Thoughts

So what does this say… lots of good ideas but maybe like Google did they should stick a Beta label on it. I will give it a try again in a few months, see if they have any bugs out of it. I’m always interested in new things. Have you tried it? What did you think? Any issues with it for you?

This is Post from: ZeroSource!

A new Email Service – Not So Fast!

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City Stages 2009

zerolove — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 05:38:32 +0000

City Stages is this coming weekend, June 19 – 21. It is held downtown Birmingham Alabama. They actually close off the streets of a busy downtown area and setup stages for performers. This will be my 3rd stages since moving to Birmingham.

I was told when I first moved here, you don’t go to City Stages unless you want trouble. It is horrible, the people are rude, it stinks and there is never anyone any good.

Wow where they wrong, lets see we are going this year to see 38 Special, Doobie Brothers, Styx, REO Speedwagon, and Lynyrd Skynyrd! Yea that is a pretty good line up if you ask me.

FREE BYRD!

I will be there all three days, starting Friday at lunch. I always purchase my tickets through UCP (United Cerebral Palsy) Bham Casual day. While purchasing casual day T-Shirts are over for 2009. You should still donate to the great organization that is UCP Bham! Talk to your boss and participate in next years Casual Day.

So my schedule will change, check back to see who/where we are going. Are you going? Who are you going to see?

I was going to use the Logo for City Stages in this post but I do not have permission to do so….

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City Stages 2009

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My Daughter

zerolove — Wed, 20 May 2009 03:28:10 +0000

My daughter is graduating from High School next Thursday and tonight was awards night. She walked out with

Birmingham-Southern College – Greensboro Scholarship
President’s Outstanding Academic Achievement
National Honor Society
Honor Graduate – Achieved a grade point average over 4.0
Certificate of Excellence in Honors Anatomy
Photography Student of the Year

She will be attending Birmingham-Southern this fall studying Biology. She has pretty much know what she has wanted to do since she was very young.

People approach me like I should be sad, sad that she’s growing up. It is not sad, it is a great thing. My wife and I have accomplished the goals we set out to, and that is to raise a Strong Woman, A Free Spirit, a Philosopher in her own right, and a person with a keen eye. Someone that I know will touch the world in some magnificant way.

Oh I’m so proud of her not taking the easy road, of long nights studing to get to where she wants to be. I’m so proud of the way she deals with everyday issues and takes the time to think of worldly ones.

I will leave you with a poem, by Richard Wilbur that reminds me of the days of her studying alone in her room, late into the night.

The Writer
by Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

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My Daughter

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