I just got this email in my mailbox. Basically, this guy asked me if I’m interested to deploy about 100 (up to 1000) people to manually input captcha pictures on the popular websites; such as Google,Yahoo, etc; so they can break about 400K captcha-protected forms per week.

The big question : if I’m this guy’s the target (google etc), how do I protect myself from these scammers?

The good news is, captcha has gotten to the point that it’s pretty hard to break with computers.
But the bad news, with these cheap labors, they can use humans to break it.

I think this means that we can’t only rely on one solution. Our solution will need to be robust.
A good example is Spam Karma 2; it protect WP using combinations of captcha, bayesian filter, blackhole list, and several other methods.

Here’s the copy of the email that I got from him :

Bisnis ini booming di India

Untuk buat google account, gmail account, etc. kita butuh untuk menulis captcha.

Nah ada orang yang mau bikin 400 K captcha seminggu.

Kalo satu orang tiap jam bisa bikin 500 captcha ya kita bakal butuh 50-100 orang plus mandor waktu jumlah pegawai sudah 1000 lebih.

Bisa juga dimulai dari kecil dulu.

Bayaran mungkin antara $.60-$.90 per hour.

Kalo berminat tolong email indodataentry@xxxxxx.com

There’s currently a problem with Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy) gdm (gnome display manager) : XDMCP can’t be used to login remotely.

This means, among others, you’ll have problems logging in from LTSP 4.x terminal where the server is gutsy. LTSP 4.x still uses XDMCP for its terminals login.

Currently, as reported by Hendy Irawan (hi there), the problem still exists on the latest gdm patch (2.20.1-0ubuntu2).
Richard Seguin also reported that this issue still exist in Hardy Alpha 3.

There are several workarounds discussed in the bug report’s discussion.
But the one that works for me is to set the remote login to plain in gdmsetup. This is on plain gutsy install (eg: no updates installed)

You may ask – why LTSP 4.x ? Since Ubuntu already included LTSP5 since Ubuntu 5.x (hoary)
Well, LTSP5 seems to have problems with very old workstation and/or workstation with limited amount of RAM. LTSP 4.x is working just fine on these machines.

Anyway, hope it helps someone out there.

UPDATE : Paket PCMAV 1.1 + ClamAV sudah bisa di download dari sini.

Ada satu client saya yang lumayan pusing dengan masalah virusnya. Setelah diteliti, ternyata kebanyakan virus lokal. Kebetulan ubs pelanggan majalah PC Media, maka kemudian saya setup agar mereka bisa deploy PCMAV v1 + ClamAV, sehingga total virus yang bisa dideteksi menjadi 200.000 virus lebih.

Karena ternyata proses setup / memadukan PCMAV v1 + ClamAV ini lumayan memakan waktu, maka kemudian saya upload, dengan tujuan agar Anda bisa langsung memanfaatkannya tanpa perlu memakan banyak waktu lagi.

Harap diingat lisensi PCMAV, yaitu Anda hanya boleh menggunakannya jika Anda berlangganan / telah membeli edisi majalah PC Media ybs.

Semoga bermanfaat.

[ Download PCMAV v1 + ClamAV ]

ScriptumLibre.org melaporkan bahwa TrendMicro telah menuntut Barracuda Networks karena menggunakan ClamAV, software anti-virus open source, di dalam produknya.

Barracuda/ClamAV dituduh telah melanggar paten Trend Micro; yaitu karena melakukan pemeriksaan virus di server SMTP/FTP.

Padahal ini adalah hal yang wajar – tentunya kita semua ingin menangkap virus sebelum virus tersebut berhasil masuk ke jaringan kita bukan ?
Ini adalah suatu kewajaran, dan sangat tidak layak untuk dipatenkan.

Analoginya, bayangkan jika saya memegang paten atas “roda mobil yang bundar”.
Akibatnya, setiap perusahaan mobil jadi harus membayar royalti ke saya, kecuali jika mereka menggunakan roda yang tidak bundar di mobilnya 😀

Ini bukan perlindungan terhadap hak intelektual, namun pemerasan.

Just say no to software patents.

Just say no to Trend Micro, let’s vote with our money, seperti komentator Slashdot yang satu ini :

I’ve been evaluating their client server product for SMB for a week now. I need about 75 licenses to replace our aging Symantec Corporate 7.

I was a couple of days away from purchasing 75 licenses for one company and 10 for another, but then this. I vote with my dollars and if my research shows their claims are BS, they just lost 85 x 2-year licenses.

Solusi alternatif ?

Jika tidak menggunakan Trend Micro, lantas apa dong ?

Untuk server :

Mari kita dukung ClamAV dengan menggunakan berbagai produk mereka di server kita.
Saya sendiri sudah menggunakan ClamAV selama bertahun-tahun di server saya, dan sangat menyenangkan: install & forget. ClamAV berjalan secara otomatis, tanpa membebani server terlalu banyak, dan meng update dirinya secara otomatis juga.

Untuk desktop :

Saya pribadi sudah lama merekomendasikan NOD32 (*) kepada kawan-kawan saya. Softwarenya “ringan”, kerjanya cepat, dan deteksinya juga akurat.

Informasi lebih lanjut

Detail lebih lengkap bisa dibaca di artikel Linux.com

Ajakan

Mudah-mudahan ini bisa menjadi peringatan kepada para vendor, bahwa siapa saja yang nekat meng abuse sistem paten di dunia IT akan segera mendapatkan hukumannya. Mari – sebarkan informasi ini seluas-luasnya !

(*) Tapi sepertinya sedang ada masalah dengan NOD32 cabang Indonesia – beberapa minggu yang lalu saya mencoba membelikan lisensi untuk seorang client saya. Sampai saat ini saya masih belum mendapatkannya. Jika Anda ingin membeli lisensi NOD32, mungkin langsung ke eset.com saja untuk sementara ini.

Saya mendapat ini dari seorang kawan, yang saya tidak tahu apakah beliau akan keberatan jika saya sebutkan namanya disini (kabarkan saja ya pak), di sebuah milis.

Untuk para pakarnya, apakah ini (amblas s/d 35 cm) buruk ? Misal; apa efeknya ke pondasi rumah/gedung ?
Kalau dari kacamata orang awam, seperti saya, wah 35 cm itu lumayan signifikan ya.

Isi email ybs dan file kiriman beliau terlampir :

Kalau mau dibuat bombastis, mungkin itu judul dari Pidato Ilmiah Guru Besar – ITB, Prof. Hasanuddin Z. Abidin. Judul aslinya sih “Peranan Geodesi Satelit dalam Memahami Dinamika Bumi di Wilayah Indonesia”, tapi coba lihat isi di dalamnya, khususnya pada gambar yang saya sertakan dalam lampiran (attachment) email ini. Ada beberapa tempat di Jakarta ini yang turun 35 cm dalam setahun!

Berita buruk ya? Belum seberapa. Lihatlah beberapa tempat di Bandung … 1-2 cm/bulan! Sidoarjo? 0.5 – 2 cm per hari arah horisontal dan 1-4 cm per hari arah vertikal. Lebih lengkap orasi Prof. Hasanuddin Z. Abidin, lihat di http://www.pirba.ristek.go.id/det.php?id=478

Download :
[ Land subsidence in Jakarta ]

update : untuk memperlancar, ada saya tambahkan prosedur untuk pendaftarannya di akhir posting ini.

Saya mendapat kiriman email di bawah ini dari seorang kawan.

Jika Anda tertarik & yakin memiliki kans untuk terpilih (misal: pemimpin di suatu institusi / organisasi), silahkan berkomentar, nanti saya akan kirimkan informasi kontak kawan saya tersebut kepada Anda.

Harap baca baik-baik keterangan program IVLP ini.
Jika ada komentar yang jelas menunjukkan bahwa ybs belum membaca situs tersebut, saya akan terpaksa mengacuhkannya.

Semoga bermanfaat.

From: Platt
Sent: 29 Januari 2008 15:23
Subject: International Visitors Leadership Program (IVLP)

It was nice to see you today at lunch. Per your request, attached is a brief summary of the IVLP. We’re looking for candidates that are under the age of 40 and have preferably never been to the United States before. This is a good opportunity for someone that you view as a future leader – it’s a chance for them to network and build relationships with counterparts in the U.S.

There is also additional information on the IVLP website:

http://exchanges.state.gov/education/ivp/

If you have any questions, feel free to let me know. Our deadline for nominations will be coming up in the next few weeks, so if you have any one you think would make a good candidate please let me know!

Best regards,

Bagi yang tertarik, silahkan ikuti prosedur ini :

1. Kirimkan surat lamaran Anda (ringkas, to the point) melalui form ini

2. Jika ingin melampirkan CV, upload ke sebuah lokasi di Internet, lalu cantumkan URL nya di surat yang Anda buat di poin 1

3. Layanan ini tanpa garansi ! 🙂 Saya hanya membantu me relay informasi dari Anda kepada pihak ybs

Semoga berhasil.

After my post on increasing WordPress Performance, I’ve been helping several other people with their overloaded website.
The most unique probably is the one owned by (let’s call him) Mr. King.

Mr. King has got a very popular website. PageRank 2 only, but since it’s a niche rarely targeted by others, people are flocking there anyway.
He’s making (my guess) thousands of dollars every month, just from Google AdSense shown on his website.

However, the popularity brings other problems. His powerful server (I think it’s a quad core,with 4 GB RAM) was constantly overloaded.
After I optimized the server, it’s working fine now.

Except for the static pages.

First, a little bit about “static” page in WordPress. It’s not really static actually, it’s dynamically generated. In itself it’s not a problem.
However, when you utilize WordPress’ permalink feature, essential to make your website more visible on Google, **and** you have thousands of pages; then it started to get, um, “interesting”. Note that this may probably an understatement 🙂 considering the fun I had while optimizing the website.

Basically, I think this is how permalink for pages works in WordPress :

[ 1 ] A visitor requested a page, in the form of a people (and Google) friendly link.
Example : http://asiablogging.com/links-2-asia/

[ 2 ] Due to WordPress-generated .htaccess file, Apache will translate the permalink into loading index.php and passing along that permalink to it.

[ 3 ] WordPress will lookup that permalink in the rewrite table, and got the real URL.

The rewrite lookup record can be viewed with this SQL command :
select * from wp_options where option_name=’rewrite_rules’;

[ 4 ] The real URL loaded and shown to the visitor.

So far so good.

However, when we’re talking about **thousands** of pages, then things started to become messy.

Last time I checked, the rewrite lookup table (the thing I was talking about in point 3 above) for Mr. King’s website is about 21 MB in size.
And **everytime** he add a new page, that record will be recreated again, from scratch.

WP developers have acknowledged the problem as very serious. This is because the way it works at the moment (WordPress version 2.3.1), this scheme is not scalable / will give poor performance over as little as 1000 pages.
And since it’s within the WordPress’ core, it will require a rather significant overhaul to get this fixed.

Don’t get it wrong, they’re (I think) most happy and flattered that some people are actually trying to make WordPress to work as substitute of a Wiki 🙂 It’s just that there’s this technical glitch at the moment that will be causing difficulties to many others from following the same path.
So last time I checked, they’re very interested to get this fixed.

Back to Mr.King – I have now optimized the server so it performs much faster, despite the bottleneck I described above.
There’s still slowdown noticable when creating a new page, but it’s now quite bearable

Anyway, again that was fun indeed. I guess this is why I chose IT as my career path back there years ago – it was fun (and very useful to many people), and it still is today.
Enjoy !

update:
His server had problems and crashing his website. Mr King said that the datacenter guys are looking into it, but I’m welcome to look around as well.

Soon it’s pretty clear that the hard drive of the server is dying. I told Mr King to relay that to the techies, which responded with “how did you figure it out ?” (dmesg + google – duh).

Long story cut short – they botched big time, but thankfully I managed to snatch a backup of Mr King’s website before it went down the flames.
Now I host Mr King’s website on my server, and he’s a very happy guy again.

I was very happy when I found out that there’s a key combination that will invert the display of my Mac laptop.

If you press Cmd – Ctrl – Alt – 8, then your screen will change into an inverted state.
See the screenshot for the example.

This is most useful for example when you’ve been using your laptop for hours straight and still need to do so for several more hours, but you fear for your eyes. No worries, just press that key combination, and the display will become more easy to your eyes.

It’s also very helpful in very dim place – sometimes a place is just too dark, even the lowest brightness setting will still hurt your eyes. No longer a problem now; just press the buttons.

And when I need to do that quick SSH session in the middle of the night without waking up my significant other because of the brightness from the screen, this is just the ticket.
No, I don’t do it very often. Honestly.

Happy holiday everyone, hope you find this post useful too.

Beberapa hari yang lalu saya membeli bundelan promosi MacUpdate, terimakasih kepada Nanda untuk informasinya.
Yang paling saya perlukan adalah Swift Publisher untuk memungkinkan desain dengan cepat. Seringkali saya perlu, dan akhirnya jadi membuang-buang banyak waktu mencari-cari clipart yang cocok **dan** legal / bisa saya pakai untuk keperluan saya.

Kemudian saya juga memerlukan Yep untuk melihat ide interface sebuah DMS (document management system), PulpMotion untuk foto-foto keluarga, Marine Aquarium untuk eyecandy & anak-anak 🙂 , iStabilizer untuk memperbaiki video-video rekaman handycam / handphone.
RapidWeaver sangat menarik, software ini memanfaatkan interface Mac OS X secara maksimal sehingga membuat website kini menjadi sangat mudah.

Ternyata cerita bundelan ini belum selesai sampai disitu saja.

Beberapa hari kemudian saya mendapat kejutan di mailbox saya — MacUpdate mengumumkan bahwa SRS iWOW 2 plugin for Mac iTunes disertakan di bundel promo tersebut, dan yang sudah membeli mendapatkan serial numbernya di email tersebut berikut link downloadnya.

Keterangan mengenai software ini adalah sebagai berikut :
“SRS WOW HDâ„¢ – improves the audio performance of compressed and uncompressed audio by expanding the size of the audio image in the horizontal and vertical sound field and creating a deep, rich bass response. The patented techniques in SRS WOW HD also retrieve information lost in the mixing process to create a more natural audio experience.”

Terus terang, saya skeptis 🙂 bombastis banget gitu lho. Lagipula saya sudah melihat sendiri speaker laptop Powerbook saya ketika sedang mengganti hard disknya, kecil mungil nian. Gimana mau “deep, rich bass” ?
Ah, tapi gratis ini tho? Ya sudah, saya kemudian download dan install.

Saya benar-benar terkejut. Begitu plugin iWOW tersebut terpasang, kualitas output dari speaker laptop saya meningkat drastis !
Tercengang lumayan lama juga 😀 tidak menyangka speaker-speaker kecil itu bisa menghasilkan suara sebagus itu. Bahkan murottal juz-amma As Sudais pun jadi terdengar makin bagus.

Dasar skeptik, tetap saja masih kepikiran : “ah paling sugesti nih”. Lalu saya tekan switch On / Off di plugin tersebut.

Bedanya banyak euy 🙂
Antara ketika plugin tersebut diaktifkan dengan ketika tidak, kentara sekali bedanya. iWow !

Saya pikir jika dibeli terpisah pun sangat layak, karena memang memuaskan. Lha ini malah dapat gratis, hehe.
Highly recommended.

Bonus : saya ketawa saban melihat playlist juz-amma di iTunes …. murottal As-Sudais dianggap genre “Blues” ! 😀 Hah… ada yang doyan bercanda nih….
Skrinsyut terlampir.

Nano_startrek_2.jpg

Originally uploaded by ETCHSTAR

I was busy with life (and about 18 blog drafts to be finalized), when I stumbled on this.

My God I **SO** want this. And normally I don’t drool over iPods 🙂

And I want this Powerbook too.

Gah…. distractions. Must.. focus.

😀