Archive for May 2007
Über-Cool Lightning Radars
16 May 2007 in Root | Comments (0)
The thunderstorm season started tonight with some mediocre thunder going on. (No, I’m sure that none of my neighbors were playing AC/DC’s Thunder 
) The whole storm that came over Vaasa/Vasa yesterday was surprisingly powerful, I at least thought. The water poured down heavily and the wind had gusts at storm strengths that I thought belonged in the autumn, not spring. 
Well, it is time to keep an eye on those lighting radars that are plentiful on the net. The good with these radars are that they are ideal for predicting when/if a thunderstorm will get near you. The bad is that they have varying data and calibrations, but that needs to be expected since they are only amateurs maintaining them. The pros (FMI, Foreca, SMHI) do not sadly allow give free access to their lightning radars, which is a bit of a shame. FMI has had their lightning radars only available for farmers and aviation needs, but last year they (thankfully) made their service available on mobile phones as well… for a smaller fee. But, in the end, the information from the free radars are not the significantly less accurate than what the meteorological institutions have to offer.
A local storm chaser group have put together a link list of Swedish and Finnish lightning radars. My two favorites are Zalama in Muurame and Stormtracker Wasa in Vaasa/Vasa. It’s worth checking out if you have concerns that lighting might destroy your home electronics or computers, or just wanna go golfing.
YLE’s Website and Finnish Websites Under Attack
15 May 2007 in Root | Comments (0)
The homepage of YLE – the Finnish Broadcasting Company –, Finnish Eniro and Suomi24 — a Finnish portal — have been under a so called website flood attack or (in geek speak) denial of service attack that started yesterday. According to Helsingin Sanomat, the attack started yesterday and continued today with the attacker, or more presumably attackers, adapting to the defenses put up by YLE.
The same article by HS quotes the Finnish Ministry of Communication as claiming this to be the largest attack on a Finnish website to date. The last big attack was on F-Secure a few years back.
The interesting part here is that no-one either mentions the reason of the attack (if they know it) or genuinely do not know why someone is attacking them. Since the severity of the attack is quite extensive, it seems like someone is commandeering a zombie network of compromised computers to attack the websites in question. There is a possibility that the attackers have tried getting money from the websites as a protection payment, and when the websites didn’t cough up the dough, the attack started.
F-Secure recently said on their weblog that this method of blackmailing hasn’t been working well for the attackers so most of them have switched to other methods of illegally gaining money.
I can’t figure why someone would try to attack YLE for other than money… not that YLE has money to spare. I’m paying them 200+ € in TV-license fees already and all of that has gone to ensure digital TV in Finland (I personally suspect ). Ok, there are two highly unlikely possibilities to why someone might want to attack YLE:
- the digital TV mess
- disgruntled Eurovision Song Contest fans
But I think I can safely assume that no-one of the above options have enough resources to initiate a destructive DoS attack. 
Joost Is Down?
9 May 2007 in Root | Comments (0)
Hmph, trying to launch Joost today just shows a polite message about a new version being available. But, the Joost.com website seems to be down with either a server internal error or some proxy error. Sigh, and I wanted to watch some classic clay animations…
Update 10th of May: Joost seems to up and running fine right now. I only now had to download the latest version: 0.10.2 The old 0.9.2 version is outdated apparently.
Man, The WiFi and Bluetooth Space Is Getting Crowded Around Here
9 May 2007 in Root & Security | Comments (0)
Looks like the 2.4 GHz spectrum is getting crowded around my apartment these days. Way back, ’bout 2 years ago, when I moved to my current apartment, I was the only one using WiFi in the building. Well, except for someone in a neighboring house who also had WiFi, but I only saw that access point near the windows.
Today, when I tried to use my Bluetooth Plantronics stereo headphones to listen to some music in the kitchen but it turned out to be more difficult than previously. All was well for a few seconds and then…. silence… I quickly checked that the headphone and transmitter were connected and the power on — and yes, they were on and the music was still playing.
The music came back for a second, silence, some music for a bit more than a second, silence… and some music now until the track changed and more eerie silence. Aaand finally the music came back on.
This is probably what it sounds like when the headphone and transmitter try to find a less congested channel to broadcast on. I had thought there were quite few WiFi access points that could interfere with my Bluetooth headphones, but boy was I wrong! Using my Pocket PC and a program called WiFi Graph I checked out the number of APs it could find in my vicinity. The sum: 7 (including my own). So, all of my neighbors seem to have now!
Funny and scary bit was that 4 of those APs used the same WiFi channel number 6, and two of them had their manufacturer’s name, Zyxel, as the SSID. I’m afraid that those who didn’t change their SSID didn’t fix the password from the factory default either. 
Even more worrying is that only I and another WiFi user have enabled some sort of WiFi encryption (WPA or WEP), the others don’t seem to have any encryption in effect (unless they are using IPSEC or VPN, which I doubt they are using).
It is somewhat unfortunate that Bluetooth has to share frequencies with WiFi on the 2.4 GHz band, but what can you do when there is nothing left really for them to use? Plus, me being a sort of “bitten by the Bluetooth”-fanatic it probably doesn’t help that I have a good number of Bluetooth devices in good daily use: my computer, phone, Pocket PC, keyboard and mouse. (Sure, I have a bit more Bluetooth devices here also, but they are not always on. )
I wonder how long before the 2.4 GHz band will be over-crowded in apartment buildings by all of the super-converged-devices. Five years, perhaps?