Interestingly, MoGo‘s online commercial shows their Bluetooth mouse being used on an airplane… Isn’t that illegal or something?

A bit over a month ago, my trusty old 12″ laptop went dead. Just out of the blue. I think I’d booted up the Ubuntu live CD, then I shut down, and then the laptop did nothing. If I plugged the power cord in, I’d get a charging light, but pressing the power button resulted in absolutely zilch.

Scouting around Google, this appeared to be a semi-common problem with my specific model, and the best guess was that it was somehow related to some ACPI bug in the BIOS that resulted in some weird state in the CMOS (enough acronyms for you?). Some people reported success after holding the power button down. No luck here.

The only other options were:

1. Cutting the CMOS battery off the motherboard
2. Leaving the main battery out until the CMOS battery died

Not wanting to harm my laptop, I opted for the latter. And so my laptop sat. Every few days, I’d pop the battery in and give the power button a go, but it was the always the same disappointing void. I began to seriously doubt that the laptop would ever recover.

Until tonight. I popped the battery in like normal and hit the button. And there was a little blue light.

How you say… w00t.

So here’s some hope for you Averatec 2370 owners with inexplicably dead machines on your hands: give them a rest without their batteries. It just might change your world.

So I just discovered that my dedicated machine, which is generally doing absolutely nothing, was running at a load average of about 1. The top CPU abuser? Some command I didn’t recognize (barbut). I was immediately suspicious. I killed the process, then noticed that it had been running as the cvs user, so I ran a ps to find all commands running as cvs.

webkill?

Yes, that’s right, my dedicated box was an involuntary participant in a distributed denial of service attack, orchestrated by an IRC bot, also known as barbut (which I found, source and all, in /home/cvs/).

Time for damage control. First, I obliterated the user cvs. Then I installed and ran rkhunter; the “good” news is that no root kits were found. Then I went to change the SSH port — oh, wait, I’d already done that, but never restarted with the new config: shame on me!

One of the unfortunate side effects of using CVS over SSH is that you need accounts with shell access. Apparently I’d created a user with a basic password to allow friends to check code out of my local CVS server; I’m guessing that password just got brute-forced. There doesn’t look to be anything else amiss, so I guess I was somewhat lucky.

Anyone want the source code to an IRC bot?

I once heard someone say, “Dogs are for wimps too scared to bite people themselves.” I tend to subscribe to that world view, although, deep down, it’s really just that I don’t like dog hair. On the other hand, dogs have nothing to do with my story.

I snack constantly. I cannot survive without snacking. Probably a year and a half ago now, I was sitting at work doing something with an SD card. On my desk I had a bag of Wheat Thins with a little trickle flowing out onto my desk from which I would snag a cracker and pop it into my mouth.

At some point, I put the memory card down.

Later I was blissfully coding away when I felt a hunger pain. I grabbed a cracker, I popped it in my mouth. I bit down. Maybe you can see where I’m going with this — what I’d just thrown to my expectant molars wasn’t a cracker, it was a little blue SD card.

And the moral of the story is simple: flash memory devices are durable… unless you bite them.

In the end, sanity prevails. The eBay seller sent me a message this afternoon saying that Vonage assured him his account would be terminated by COB. In my initial contact he’d promised to cancel the account a few days ago; obviously took him a little longer, but I won’t hold it against him. Still somewhat cynical, I attempted to activate the new adapter online… and it worked!

I’m a little sad, however, that I won’t have an excuse to play around with ettercap.

The moral of this latest installment? Don’t take what Vonage says at face value. When they tell you go buy a retail device (for nearly three times the price you paid on eBay), just take that to mean: get the person you bought it from to deactivate the old one. Oh, and don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.

The best Obama ringtone.

This post tells the humorous story of how a regular consumer hacked his neighbor’s wireless AP, then proceeded to lock his neighbor out of it with a new password, MAC filter, & c. Only to discover that his neighbor had, in fact, retaliated by hacking his wireless AP. Or something like that.

Use your Wii-mote to create a multi-touch system.

The days of inserting a memory card into a memory card reader might be over. Instead, allow the Eye-Fi SD combined-memory and Wifi card do the legwork for you. When your computer is on, the Eye-Fi can automatically upload your pictures not only to your PC, but to the web.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a camera that takes an SD card. What do you think the chances are that this will work in an SD to CF converter?

Making lemonade from lemons? Here’s a way to put something annoying (CAPTCHAs) to excellent use (digitizing old manuscripts). Ingenious.