I always suspected that anyone who likes to write Perl programs can’t be a healthy human being, but I didn’t know what evil, murderous psychopaths these people really are until I read this headline:
How to optionally kill a child and capture status if not killed
How could killing a child ever be optional? It’s illegal! It’s disgusting!
We must not tolerate these criminals in our midst any longer. Now is the time to put an end to that vicious disease called Perl.
There seems to be a new kind of scam, involving the telephone network: my sister (from her O2 mobile phone) called me (on my Alice fixed-line phone), but the Lithuanian premium-rate number 0037091005481 was displayed as caller ID – although we’re both in Germany! This has happened to dozens or probably hundreds of people in Germany in the last few weeks, apparently mostly to customers of O2 and Alice.
Of course, phone scams have been around for a while, but they usually involve social rather than technical engineering. The twist in this one is that the scammers must have hacked some kind of telephone switches. I don’t know what hardware and software phone providers are using these days, but I think it’s safe to assume that it’s connected to the Internet, and it’s increasingly involving VoIP. It’s also interesting to note that Alice cooperates with O2 for its mobile services. Integrating disparate systems can get messy – maybe a door was accidentally left open somewhere on the way?
Being curious, I called that mysterious number and heard the following recording:
Thank you for calling pentowork [sic? the name was hard to understand] payment system, the most efficient internet based billing solution. To receive your unique PIN code, you are required to hold the line for thirty minutes.
So the aim seems to be the same as in many other phone scams – get people to call an expensive number, and make them stay on the line for as long as possible. The three or four calls it took to correctly write down the recording cost me about €10, but I also got to enjoy some nice background music: Comanche from the Pulp Fiction Soundtrack and Man on the Moon by REM. I wonder what they selected for the remaining half hour…
More reports and speculation can be found at this thread about the scam (in German), some of which involves the Lithuanian secret service, letters to Vladimir Putin, emails to the Bundesnetzagentur and the fact that 0037 was also the international calling code of East Germany.
Short note to myself and whom it my concern. If you try to sudo gem install mysql on a Debian system and it responds, after some working, with:
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing mysql:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
(...)
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more
details. You may need configuration options.
(...)
Gem files will remain installed in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7 for inspection.
Results logged to /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/gem_make.out
then this should be the solution for you: First you install libmysqlclient15-dev, which generates a mysql_config file, and the install the gem using the config.
I’m currently updating a not-so-small application from Rails 2.0.2 to 2.2.2 and it seems that about every other plugin is not compatible with the new version, because one or the other method was removed, and I have to update them as well. Not such a big problem, if a compatible version exists, but takes quite some time, and I don’t understand that I have to go through this hassle (and other hassles) about everytime I update to a new Rails version. I don’t remember having this kind of trouble when I was working in Java Land. Can somebody explain?
I need unit tests for my unit tests testing whether the unit tests do correct tests or not. And a decent TestNG documentation.