Happy Birthday To My Wife: Firefox Spotted In Outer Space

Hey there,

Today's post is dedicated to my wife, who shall remain ageless ;)

These photos are actually from about a year ago, when we were just starting this blog and the rest of my family ceased to exist for a little while :) You can check out the original post on blog.wired.com, but I've included the entire post here (minus the surrounding link-love logos) Her birthday was actually yesterday, if you put any stock in the date stamp on these posts ;)

Happy **th birthday, sweety :) (Her actual age has been removed to protect the innocent... who am I kidding. I'm guilty as Hell ;)

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Firefox Logo Spied In Deep Space

By Charlie Sorrel April 11, 2008 | 6:43:02 AMCategories: Elsewhere in the Tubes  

One of these is a photograph taken by the Hubble space telescope on December 17, 2002, featuring the variable star V838 Monocerotis. The other is the same photograph overlaid with a familiar logo. Can you tell which is which?

Below is another photo of the same star, from the Wikipedia entry on V838 Monocerotis. If the above photo has been photoshopped to look more like the Firefox logo, the editing seems minimal: it's been rotated relative to the photo below, and some of the gas cloud may have been edited out around the "tail" of the fox.

If you've got a link to the original Hubble photo used above, let us know in the comments so we can compare. UPDATE: An eagle-eyed commenter, Wevah, spotted the original version of the Firefox-like nova photo on Wikipedia. It looks like the only modification was to rotate the image. It must be a sign from the stars!

Firefox logo spotted in deep space by the Hubble Telescope

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, Mike

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Finding Your Google Index Rank With The Linux Or Unix CLI

Hey There,

Today, I'm throwing out a little script that's most definitely a "work in progress." I ended up slapping this together after doing a lot of site search engine monitoring (it's hard work, doing all that clicking ;) Every time I post, I'm constantly curious about where my site stands with regards to certain keywords or keyword phrases. Of course, it doesn't make all the difference in the world, but when you combine an obsessive-compulsive personality and a problem, no matter how goofy, there's always an answer :)

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: This script use's wget's --user-agent option. DO NOT use "Mozilla" as your user agent! Check out this page, near the bottom regarding being sued for masquerading as Mozilla.

The script attached below can be called (and fed arguments) in a few different ways. In essence, what it does is search Google (using the search keyword or words you provide) and finds the index of the first occurrence of the URL you entered in Google's search database. Of course its the definition of a cheap hack since I'm not using Google's API (unless they've adopted bash ;)

Below are a few of the ways you can call the program (click on any picture to make it larger). Basically, you can supply the arguments to the program, echo your args through a pipe to the program, cat a file through a pipe to the program or redirect a file's STDIN to the program. Examples below:



And the corresponding Google web page:



One thing that's interesting to note (among the million other things - like not identifying CAPTCHA and opting to just use random wait times between queries - that aren't perfect about this rough draft of a script) is that the index numbers get skewed the higher up you go. I still have to figure out how to compensate for the "Google stagger" (when one result returns a result plus an additional indented result). Check out the following query using "grank", which puts us at positions 482 and 483:



and you can see that the actual index in Internet Explorer is more like 539 and...



Firefox shows the result at 530:



Still, you get a pretty good idea, from these results, that the search query "shell process accounting" isn't going to bring me any traffic... darn ;)

I hope you enjoy the script and find some good use for it :)

Cheers,





This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

#!/bin/bash

# grank - find your google rank index
#
# 2008 - Mike Golvach - eggi@comcast.net
#
# Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
#

if [ $# -lt 2 -a $# -ne 0 ]
then
        echo "Usage: $0 URL Search_Term(s)"
        echo "URL with or with http(s)://, ftp://, etc"
        exit 1
fi

if [ $# -eq 0 ]
then
        while read x y
        do
                url=$x
                search_terms=$y
                $0 $x "$y"
        done
        exit 0
else
        url=$1
 shift
        search_terms=$@
fi

base=0
num=1
start=0
multiple_search=0
not_found=0

for x in $search_terms
do
        if [ $multiple_search -eq 0 ]
        then
                search_string=$x
                multiple_search=1
        else
                search_string="${search_string}+$x"
        fi
done

echo "Searching For Google Index For $url With Search Terms: $search_terms..."
echo

num_results=`wget -q --user-agent=Firefox -O - http://www.google.com/search?q=$search_string\&hl=en\&safe=off\&pwst=1\&start=$start\&sa=N|awk '{ if ( $0 ~ /of about <b>.*<\/b> for/ ) print $0 }'|awk -F"of about" '{print $2}'|awk -F"<b>" '{print $2}'|awk -F"</b>" '{print $1}'`

while :;
do
        if [ $not_found -eq 1 ]
        then
                break
        fi
        wget -q --user-agent=Firefox -O - http://www.google.com/search?q=$search_string\&num=100\&hl=en\&safe=off\&pwst=1\&start=$start\&sa=N|sed 's/<a href=\"\([^\"]*\)\" class=l>/\n\1\n/g'|awk -v num=$num -v base=$base '{ if ( $1 ~ /^http/ ) print base,num++,$NF }'|awk '{ if ( $2 < 10 ) print "Google Index Number " $1 "0" $2 " For Page: " $3; else if ( $2 == 100 ) print "Google Index Number " $1+1 "00 For Page: " $3;else print "Google Index Number " $1 $2 " For Page: " $3 }'|grep -i $url
        if [ $? -ne 0 ]
        then
                let start=$start+100
                if [ $start -eq 1000 ]
                then
                        not_found=1
                        if [ $not_found -eq 1 ]
                        then
                                break
                        fi
                fi
                let base=$base+1
                first_page=0
        else
                break
        fi

        let sleep_time=${RANDOM}/600
        echo "Not In Top $start Results: Sleeping $sleep_time seconds..."
        sleep $sleep_time
done

if [ $not_found -eq 1 ]
then
        echo "Not Found In First 1,000 Index Results - Google's Hard Limit"
        echo
fi

echo "Out Of Approximately $num_results Results"
echo
exit 0

, Mike

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Fight Phishing From The Unix Or Linux Command Line

Hey There,

This weekend, we're going to look at a little something (actually a HUGE something) that we all seem to have to deal with now (through email, IM, etc). It's called phishing and, for lack of a better explanation, it's a fraudulent way for a malicious individual, or group, to get username and password information from you using deceptive practices (was that redundant? ;) It's most commonly used to get information regarding a person's online bank accounts, credit card/mortgage management information, etc. In other words, stuff that could really screw up their lives if someone else had it.

First off, I'd like to be clear that I am "not against SPAM." As annoying as it may be, I don't begrudge anyone their right to send me a sales pitch, even if that product is a complete scam and I didn't ask to be pitched. I've been throwing stuff out that I get in my regular postal mail since I've been able to throw stuff out and I'm not sure if I've ever double-opted-in (the ethical way) or just had my address sold to some random company when it comes to internet SPAM.

Phishing, on the other hand, upsets me to no end. I do begrudge everyone their right to try and, literally, steal from others, using the internet. I feel the same way about the folks who used to steal carbons from credit cards (when that trick used to work... sadly, to a degree, it still does) and that other, more honest, faction of individuals who walk right up to the counter, point a gun in a bank teller's face and demand everyone else's hard earned cash. I'm not that this sort of activity should be encouraged, or glorified, in any way. I'm just saying it, at least, shows some character. If you're going to steal, and that's your business, why not come right out and say it? Only cowards pretend they're not pointing that figurative gun in your face and giving you a good mugging.

I can, literally, feel my email box filling with requests for password-resets at my bank of choice. Funny thing is, a lot of times, these clowns don't even bother to verify your personal information before they try and scam you. IMPORTANT NOTICE TO PHISHER'S WORLDWIDE: I do not have an account at the Federated Bank Of Hindustan. And, even if I did, it's been so long since I've attempted to speak Urdu that I can't possibly remember my clever username ;)

If you have the time and inclination to hurt these phishers, check out sites like The Anti-Phishing Working Group and PhishTank, and read up on how this whole operation works at sites like Security Focus. PhishTank actually even has a plug in for FireFox named Site Checker. Here's another site that provides a great list of possible phishing programs that may be running on your machine. The advantages that these organizations bring is that they don't merely do "anti-spam" work (which is, by all means, necessary and laudable). They actually collect data on phishing schemes, get to these people backward through their own chains of deceit and, if possible, have them put in cell block A (or wherever it is that they can legally squirrel away thieves and murderers - preferably together).

Unfortunately, though the calls-for-action are many, you should not expect any automated anti-phishing toolbars, etc, for your web browser. There's a very good reason why they're slow in coming out. Phishing is a lot like "social engineering," whereby a stranger attempts to extract personal information from you under a false pretense. Using this as an example, a stranger may also innocently request information you're not comfortable with giving under a legitimate pretense (?) or it all may be a big misunderstanding. This is why most phishing, SPAM and "social engineering" confidence violations are handled by manual submission or, at least, with some degree of user interaction. If you set Internet Explorer on auto-pilot to trash every site it thought was a phishing site, I'd bet about 50% of legitimately required bank (or other e-commerce) authorization, or confirmation, emails would end up getting skunked and ruin your web experience (and a few reputations in the process) very very quickly.

To wrap this all up (although it's certainly not the only solution), I prefer to use PhishTank since they have a very easy email submission process (You must register with them to send phishing complaints, and I encourage you to investigate their legitimacy on your own; but I like 'em a lot) which works whether or not you're sending them phishing information from your PC email client or from your Linux or Unix box (or any box that you may not have actually "received" the message on -- more below).

This is where the Linux and Unix command line comes into play. While you can easily forward an email from your mail client of choice to phish@phishtank.com (Not a mailto link on purpose), you will almost always lose some vital information in the forwarding. Instead I prefer to do the following:

1. From my email software of choice, view the entire email, including headers <-- Aside from the phishing URL, this is the most important part!

2. Log on to my Linux box (like I'm not already ;) and use any editor, like vi to paste the "entire contents" of the above output into a file.

3. Then, I send email to PhishTank using the customized email address that they've provided me. Their customized email address, for a user to send reports in from anywhere, is of the following format: phish-YOURACCOUNTNAME.YOUR_RANDOMLY_GENERATED_PHISHTANK_KEY@phishtank.com. Note that your randomly generated key will remain the same unless you want to change it. You can use any email client you like to send them the email, then. Assuming you put in it a text file called WTF, you might use mailx to send it, like so (Note that no Subject line is actually necessary):

host # mailx -s "Phishing Abuse Report" phish-YOURACCOUNTNAME.YOUR_RANDOMLY_GENERATED_PHISHTANK_KEY@phishtank.com < WTF

And, just like that, you've launched an investigation and, hopefully, put some purse-snatcher out of business.

And, lest it be said that I never said it, always double check any emails you receive from PhishTank, any bank, any service, even from me :) It never hurts to take a second and make sure you're not being scammed. The alternative can be devastating!

Best wishes,

, Mike