Script Kiddies...

I just noticed someone has attempted to gain access to my machine this morning, around 5am, using no less than 81 webserver exploits. I've had this when I was connected directly to the 'net once, but they were all IIS hacks that were used (and failed, of course). These were a mixture of Windows-specific and Unix hacks.

What this fool failed to realise is that:

1. My logs were open and being monitored live (I'd been debugging scripts a few days ago)

2. I have little tolerance for people trying to hack me

3. Performing a traceroute back to his machine gave me his username (the network uses the owner's username as part of the hostname)

Now, I could have just sent my logs to I.S. and let them deal with the problem. However, I like to play with things a while before annihilation. So I used good old finger to get his full name, and noted that he is indeed a compsci. Plus he's one of this year's new intake. Tut tut, he really should be revising rather than attempting to be a h@><0r. So now that I had his name and email address, I decided to send him an email.

I'd be willing to bet he has no idea how I got his username, or how I got his full name. I'd also be willing to bet he is bricking himself.

Officially Had Enough

I have officially had enough of exams. And when this crap is finished, I still have the world's nastiest assignment to do.

If I Looking For Frog

him name is hopkin green

I lost my frog

P.S. I'll find my frog

I am the king of notes!

I just got a message from a friend saying that some of his friend's are using my notes to revise. This intrigued me. I'd put my notes online simply because I wanted them to be useful to people, but I didn't expect anybody to actually find them. Anyway, they did and I now know how...

Google for cs331 small real time systems, or, cs353 interactive multimedia systems... My notes rank highest :)

Passed ... Probably

Before the exam everyone was saying "oh god, I'm going to fail". There was a very ominous air about the whole thing, and while everybody was laughing and joking we all knew this exam was going to be nasty. When we got in we found the papers and sat down. The invigilators did their usual spiel and we started at 3 minutes past the hour. There was a flurry of question booklets opening, and from all of the non-computer scientists pens started scribbling frantically.

The computer scientists all sat and stared at the paper. I supressed my sobbing as I opened the paper, as did most I should imagine. Still, it was only the first question on this page; perhaps there were easier questions? I turned the page and the questions were worse. I turned the page and they looked even worse still.

Eventually I decided to answer the question on game design, the question about illumination models and the question about shading.

As I drew near to the end of the first of 3 questions I glanced at my watch. An hour had gone! Half of my time was up and I wasn't even a third of the way through yet. Crap! I knocked it up another notch (BAM!) and answered another question in just over half an hour. Then I made intelligent guesses at the answers for the last question. Afterall, you can't lose marks for being wrong. You can only gain answers for being right. Hopefully I convinced them that I knew enough to pass the module.

Others were less lucky. The post-mortem began as soon as we were all outside. Some of the answers given by some people sounded ridiculous. I was glad to find that none of my answers seemed wrong, per se. One of my mates only answered two questions (the instructions were: 'answer one question from part A, one question from part B and one question from either section). Oops. There were arguments over the meaning of the word "translation", there were in-depth discussions about what answers were being sought for various questions, then there were in-depth discussions over the interpretation of the questions and the ramnifications the interpretation would have on the answer...

...To summarise this exam was one gigantic mess. It showed little resembelence to what we were taught in the lectures, the questions were a little too vague in places, and there wasn't enough time. However, the good news is I'm quietly confident that I have passed.

Now to start revising for Interactive Multimedia and Formal Methods. *shudder*

Da Da Da Dummm...

Just a quick blog. In half an hour my first exam of the year begins. It's for the module Interactive Computer Graphics, and my thoughts about it are these: "Erk!", "Shit!", and "Ah well"...

We'll see how I feel about it afterwards. Wish me luck.

I'm Alright, Jack. Keep Your Hands Of My Stack

Money... It's that time of year where everything goes wrong cash-wise once again. I still owe the accommodation office £900 from when my last rent payment bounced, and now my latest £800 payment just bounced. The bank have cancelled the direct debit and charged me another £30. The University have written and told me to get the money or prepare to be made homeless. Stupid thing is that my loan has come through, but it wasn't enough to meet one instalment of rent. And the government expect me to pay my rent, my tuition fees and buy food with it.

I can't wait to get out of this fucking University.

POP3

I never realised just how simple this protocol really is. I've just knocked together, within one or two minutes, a Perl script that checks how many emails are waiting for me on the POP server. Originally I had this script running in the bash prompt, but someone told me that Information Services have been known to ban people from the mail servers for excessively checking their email. So I set it to run as a cron job every two minutes instead and store the result in a file, which the bash prompt picks up.

Maybe when I get more time I will re-implement it as an IMAP script that can detect actual new messages rather than just returning the number of mails in my inbox. That, and maybe move my password for the entire UWA network out of the script and into a safer location ...

Software Patents

I've been interested to learn about the "menace" that is currently threatening the IT world in the EU: Software Patents. As part of one of my modules "Professional Issues in Software Engineering" I had to write a 2000 word essay on the subject, which I have just finished. I found it utterly fascinating, I can honestly say it is the first essay I have actually enjoyed writing; I hope to score well with it.

So what was my conclusion? "Patents are evil, cast down the evil ones and smite then with the hammer of open ideas and the sword of free thought exchange"? No. I'm actually not bothered about the change in the EU ligislation because, and this is the point that people seem to be missing in this whole sordid affair, it is not a law on software patents. In fact the law continues to expressly forbid them. What it does say, however, is that inventors who have created a "technical effect" by way of an "inventive step" that is implemented "not wholly" in Software may be granted a patent.

And that, to me, seems perfectly reasonable. Say Joe Bloggs develops a fantastic new way of welding car bodywork. Clearly he stands to make a lot of money from this; car manufacturers will be biting his hand off to get at this new technology. Joe Bloggs must, of course, protect his invention with a patent. Otherwise the car manufacturers could just see how he does it and make their own version of the same technology. Joe Bloggs would then get nothing for his genius.

That is fair, yes? But what, then, if - as part of his brilliant new welding system he uses some clever software? Under the current legislation he is not, technically, allowed to patent and therefore protect the work that he did in software: Only the hardware. This could put his work at risk. That is not fair. And it would seem that the EU agree with me here, because they have already granted thousands of patents to protect inventions like this.

So while the law appears to forbid the granting of patents on software, the EU itself clearly are allowing patents that exist "not wholly" in software, and case law upholds these patents. This is a huge ambiguity in the law, and so something needed to be done to fix it.

Enter, stage left, the draft directive for the amendment of the patent law. The draft directive still forbids the granting of software patents, but allows the granting of patents that will protect people like Joe Bloggs above. At the moment more than 50% of the existing software patents in Europe belong to multinational companies, who are well versed in patents and who can afford to hire expensive lawyers to defend their patents if they are challenged. The draft directive will create a more level playing field so that the smaller companies and ordinary people will know what they can and cannot patent, and what will and will not be upheld in a court of law.

So it would seem that a lot of the worries of the average person regarding software patents are unfounded. As an advocate of the open source/freeware community I stand to lose a lot from "a law on ideas" such as that which can be found in the USA, but I can not find anything in the proposed law on patents that could cause this. I agree wholly that any law on software patents would have to be worded extremely carefully to avoid multinationals like Micro$oft from exploiting it, but I think that what the EU are doing at the moment is in the best interests of inventors.

Free IT Support

The BBC News website is running an article that rings true, stating that kids are basically free IT support to their parents. I know that feeling. Despite telling my Mum repeatedly over the Christmas period that I was extremely busy I still ended up reinstalling Windows, Office, fixing various problems with permissions, removing spyware (god knows how she got that, she's not on the 'net!) and generally answering questions about computers.