Nitin Khanna

I was once described as a philosopher programmer. I think I'd like to describe myself as a lifelong student.

The Old India

India

So, I was reading about Xerxes, because I’ve recently watched 300 Part II and it’s very interesting how in a short period of time, in a very small part of the world, entire kingdoms formed and fell, armies moved across oceans and civilizations blossomed and razed to the ground. While reading about Xerxes (and this is Wikipedia, everything is linked and I often go binge-wikiing), I started reading about his father, Darius I. Darius died fighting revolts from the Greeks, Egypt and the Babylonians, amongst others. But before he did that, he went a little East to raid and conquer this wonderful place called Afghanistan. Along with that, he decided to conquer Taxila. Wait, Taxila? Isn’t that supposed to be part of Indian history? I definitely read about it. Interesting, reading on! Continue reading →

To the hacker trying to log into my WP blog

Please, just stop.

Let’s talk about what you want in the comments section?

 

Update: The hacker has been using an IP – 74.91.20.14 from Kansas City which has been blocked.

Update 2: The hacker has now started using an IP –  94.185.85.42 from Sweden which has now been blocked too. Good luck idiot.

Update 3: My hacker has turned into a spammer. Apart from using the following IPs to try to log into my blog,

91.217.101.247, 78.130.226.69, 109.175.6.137, 94.50.173.99, 95.56.146.170,

95.239.168.196, 217.118.81.13, 217.9.237.26, 176.102.32.47,  200.29.112.243,

92.60.234.183, 189.195.192.33, 77.66.236.145, 189.72.213.165, 203.77.43.96,

94.29.189.206, 60.249.130.169, 46.172.200.79, 178.234.219.188, 182.178.58.119,

88.206.117.39,  85.217.201.124, 95.82.248.125 (and a lot others)

(use geoiptool and whois to see where these IPs are from and who they belong to)

I am also being bombarded by spam comments and link backs on my blog. Boy am I glad to be running Disqus instead of the default comments right now!

In other news, I found out that Cloudflare only allows blocking of 2 IPs for a free account. That means I’m left to my own devices to reduce this threat. Thank Johanee for the wonderful Limit Login Attempts plugin for WordPress.

 

Update 4: Ok, I’m kind of liveblogging this. But it’s turning into an interesting nightmare. The more I heckle this hacker, the more I’m being bombarded with spam and the more IPs he’s using to try to log into my account (to avoid the login attempts limit). Here’s a nice map showing the IPs I’ve logged (Shows the number of machines under his control) –

IPs around the world. Most of these are showing as Windows hosts, but some are registering as Mac. That doesn’t look good!

Attribution: The above map is from http://www.phpace.com/tools/network-tools/ip-to-location/ which seems to be using Google Maps and the MaxMind GeoIP service.

 

Update 5: It seems that the dictionary attack has come to an end for the day. The hacker used an intelligent list of commonly used passwords instead of just bombarding me with all possible words from a-z. Thanks to the ThreeWP Activity Monitor plugin, I’ve been able to compile a list of IPs, browsers associated and passwords used by the hacker. I’ve created a nice Google Map to pinpoint all the locations of the possibly infected computers used by the hacker. That map is more comprehensive than the image above. I’ve also attached a nice python list of all the IPs, if someone wants to do something with them (for example, if someone from CloudFlare wants to include said IPs in their network).

Google Map

Combined Info on passwords, IPs, user agent info of infected computers.

python IP list

Attribution: Google Maps for the map, Maxmind for the GeoIP API, pygmaps for the library. If anyone’s interested, I’ll upload the python code I used to create the map (though it’s pretty simple).

 

Update 6: You would have thought this person would have given up after a week of hitting on my blog, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I receive about 7-8 spam comments a day and 30-50 login attempts a day. I’ve started to hit back. I’m recognizing frequently used IPs and reporting them for abuse to their owner companies. I’ve sent a list of IPs to Cloudflare and asked them to put those IPs in their block lists. I’ve found something called RBLs (Realtime Blackhole Lists) which list IPs used by spammers. Many of these lists already have the IPs that I’m getting hit with listed in their files. Most of these lists do not accept user contribution but some of them do. I’m finding the ones that do and systematically reporting every IP used by the hacker.

Also, I’ve downgraded his level from hacker to spammer and from spammer to script kiddie. From here on out I’ll be referring to this person only as a script kiddie.

Thief: How Square Enix stole my money…

I recently finished playing Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition on the XBox One. It’s one of the best games I’ve played recently and certainly one of the best Tomb Raiders in the series. The game kept me on the edge, made me think, laugh, weep and go through the whole spectrum of emotions as I killed thugs and blew up half the island. One of the high points was the origin story of the dual pistols that I just knew was going to be a part of the game and indeed, it was. After I finished the game, my brother suggested another Square Enix title that seemed very interesting – Thief. I instantly bought the game, spending no time in downloading a digital copy. Big mistake. Continue reading →

A brief update on Fever/AppFog

Recently, AppFog sent out an email telling us that free accounts will be further restricted in what features and resources they are will receive. This felt like a major issue for me at that time, since I have Fever running on the service and I’ve dedicated close to 1 GB of RAM to the app.

When the changes finally made through, I realized that I was wrong. Upon monitoring my Fever installation during updates, I realized that it doesn’t use more than ~150 MB of RAM at a time. The only other thing is the database size, which is more than 300 MB for me, something which cannot be easily hosted anywhere else.

I ran some numbers and have found that the most basic paid plan from AppFog can allow for 8 Fever installs with 256 MB each but with the restriction of 200 MB of database storage per install for $2.5/mo. So, if you can find 7 other people who don’t have more than, say, 300 feeds in their Fever installation, AppFog would be the perfect place for you. It would also be a good way of giving back to the service that has supported free Fever installs for so long.

To everyone else, I must ask this – tell me about your Fever installs. How much are you paying? How much RAM and db are you using? Would you be open to sharing space with me (and possibly others) to reduce hosting costs?

I love Fever. It’s one of those services that are just the perfect fit, in this case for reading RSS feeds. I’m grateful to Shaun Inman for continuously working on this application, even though it seems that new installs are at an all time low and he’s busy with personal stuff. I am ready to pay for the hosting, but I figure that if we work together, we can reduce our costs greatly.

A short note on Bootcamp/Windows

I got my hands on my brother’s awesome 15″ Macbook Pro and seeing the 500 GB hard disk, I decided to try installing Windows 8.1 on a small 50 GB partition.

After an evening wasted, I realized what the problem was. After scouring the Apple forums, I realized that I have to give Windows an unformatted 50 GB space to do with as it pleases, since any other format (NTFS included) was greek to the OS. So I did just that. Turns out, Windows split that space into 2 partitions – 1 49 GB disk with NTFS format and 1 200 MB disk with Mac OS Extended format.

Now, here’s the thing. Mac supports NTFS, no matter how reluctantly, but Windows has never cared to understand Mac OS Extended. Why then, it was formatting that small segment in that format, I know not.

The end result? Currently, I have Win 8.1 in a VM.

Update: God knows why, but I tried again, this time with a different ISO and a different approach. If there’s one thing that’s consistent about Microsoft, it’s their inconsistency. The process failed in a whole new way. I’m done with Bootcamp. VMware wins my money. Now and forever.