Slashback: Exactitude, Fortitude, Picnic

Slashback tonight with another assortment of corrections, amplifications, looks backward (and even looks forward to looks backward). In this last case, it looks like you may even get fed.

You mean we have to reprint all the invitations? Reader Ian Cowley wrote with a slight correction about the end of an era:

"Your article on slashdot.org about the billionth second of the epoch is sort of (but not entirely) flawed.

Yes, UNIX systems will report 1000000000 seconds at 01:46:40 on 9th September. Which of course means the 1 billionth number will be 01:46:39.

But, these systems do not account for leap seconds. According to TAI (international atomic time), the 1 billionth second since the beginning of January 1st 1970 will occur at 01:46:17 on 9th September 2001, as 22 leap seconds have been inserted since 1970 (the first was 1972, the last 1999).

So celebrations of the 1000000000th second should be at 01:46:17, whilst 01:46:40 can be reserved for celebrating 1000000000 displayed on UNIX system clocks."

Errr ... thanks. We'll just have to start at "Unix Day, Observed."

What price the capture and humiliation of virus spreaders? JayHerrick writes: "We have posted a small bit of JSP that reports the number of times our server has been queried for a 'default.ida' page. It's stylish, it's cool, and it'll probably get Pepsi all mad at us because we ripped the Code Red logo off one of the bottles." Equally stylish, despite the name, is a small tool named codeRedNeck, described by reader mindriot thus: "As CodeRed probes port 80 of a machine, CodeRedNeck first answers on that port and then goes silent, thus forcing the worm to wait until the connection times out." He advises: "Read the original idea by Tom Liston. Heise also has more on this."

Even More Auspicious dates. No matter which date you choose to mark it, Linus' little kernel-that-could is about to mark its tenth birthday. ikluft writes:

"The "Linux10" Linux 10th anniversary picnic and BBQ will be held on Saturday, August 25 from 11AM to 6PM at Sunnyvale Baylands Park in Sunnyvale, California. Details and directions can be found at Linux10.org. If you can attend, please use the RSVP form so the organizers know how much food and soft drinks to provide (only provided if you RSVP.)

Linux10 is being organized as a family event -- bring the kids. In support of that goal, it is also a no-media event. Linux and Open Source enthusiasts who work for the media may attend and participate while off-duty.

Linux10 will gladly link to other Linux 10th anniversary events. Let us know the URLs for those events."

Reader big_drew adds: "The event is free (food, softdrinks, cds -- sorry, no free beer, but byo is ok)" and says "If you can't make it out to CA, you can still get the t-shirt (profits will be used to fund the picnic)."

Anyone want to organize a picnic in the vicinity of Knoxville, TN? :) I can bring some pasta salad and watermelon.

Ten candles all around here, too. Simon Spero writes: "As noted in http://www.w3.org/History.html, today, August 6th, is the 10th anniversary of the first public release of the CERN Web Software."

Re:01:46:40 on 9th September

[Jaeger]

Universal Coordinated Time

If you have Perl on your system, this snippet will tell you exactly what time (localtime) the billionth second, according to Unix, will pass:

perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1000000000), "\n"'

I'm a little disapointed that the billionth second occurs the day after my 21st birthday. One day earlier would have been way cool...

Re:JSP Garbage

[JediTrainer]

You might want to note that this can take long to run. I've had approx 1800 attacks on my machine, with a log file of about 55MB, and running this command right in the web page would make each request take about 10-15 seconds.

Multiply that by 1 request per second and you're toast. I'd suggest strongly that you use something else to generate your statistics OFFLINE, such as this excellent perl program [kryptolus.com] which also generates quite a nifty, sortable report!

To the author of that, by the way, a warm thank you! I'm using it myself!

Re:Linux Birthday Bash

[CurlyG]

Hell yeah! How about Flagstaff Gardens in the CBD if the weather's good?

Surely LUV would be willing to help, too...

How Code Red uses sockets...

[Scott Robinson]

Umm, I hate to be the damper in evil plans for Code Red ...

... but according to incidents.org [incidents.org] and other virus websites, Code Red uses non-blocking socket connections "uses a nonblocking socket to connect to each target. Specifically this means that if one thread is stuck waiting for a slow connection to a particular target, the wait will not slow down the rest of the threads from continuing their scanning function."

Any servers which "wait" are just wasting their own processor and memory.

Scott.