Strange WHOIS from Lithuania's registrar

Here's an odd WHOIS record from Lithuania:

$ whois -h whois.domreg.lt nic.lt
[Querying whois.domreg.lt]
[whois.domreg.lt]
% Hello, this is the DOMREG whois service.
...
%
Domain:                 nic.lt
Status:                 registered
Registered:             2002-01-08

Everything looks normal enough until we get to the "Contact organization" field:


Contact organization: <script>alert('Cia galetu buti nepageidaujama programa \n This could be dangerous program');</script>


Someone put a line of Javascript where the name of the contact organization is supposed to be. Thus, when you do a web-based whois lookup for this domain you are greeted with a scary looking message suggesting there may be danger is your WHOIS lookup.

There appears to be no danger, and perhaps this "warning" was placed as a gag of some sort. But it makes me wonder if WHOIS records are filtered for malware or other bad content. I can imagine rogue domain name owners putting a Javascript src link in their contact info and waiting for someone to bite.

UPDATE:
I changed the code under my WHOIS lookup to prevent script execution. So you will see no scary popup message. To see the problem in action, check this domain name at uwhois

My Response to Shoeboxed.com

Someone at Shoeboxed.com has written the strangest review of My Receipts.

I attempted to respond to the Shoeboxed article on their site using the "Comments" feature on their blog, but I guess my comment was not approved.

Shoeboxed is one of many companies offering receipt management solutions. NeatReceipts is probably the best known maker of this type of product, though it differs from Shoeboxed in many ways.

With no disrespect to either NeatReceipts of Shoeboxed, I have no use for such a service. This is why the Shoeboxed article about My Receipts is so strange. It seems to portray me as a competitor or unworthy participant in the world of receipts management.

I would think that even a casual glance at My Receipts would reveal that the project is not an effort to organize or catalog my expenses. For lack of a less pretentious description I guess we could call it an art project.

My reasons for continuing the receipts project all these years are mine and mine alone. I feel no need to explain myself. I have avoided any public explanation partly because people do "get it," but also because I believe artists' attempts to voluntarily explain themselves is usually self-serving.

At any rate, if a casual glance at My Receipts does not convey the spirit of the project then a not-so-casual glance at the rest of my web sites might reveal a few clues: Randomness, as I have said many time and in many places, is everything to me. Without randomness and without chaos of ideas there is nothing.

I take issue with Shoeboxed.com's assertion that My Receipts site makes "a strong case for the existence of a site such as Shoeboxed."

This statement lacks merit as my site exists for reasons entirely different from those of Shoeboxed. Using me as an example does not validate their business plan or accomplish anything productive, and I can not help but be a little piqued at being laid out to dry in this preposterously misguided manner.

Someone at Shoeboxed claims:

"... the security and organization are lacking with Thomas’ method."

This is, simply, like comparing apples to oranges. "Security" has a different meaning in the context of my project, and is a marginal priority. "Organization" was, is, and never will be part of the spirit of this project.

"At the same time, with a personal and secure account, Thomas would not have to put all his receipts on display to everyone."

I do not "have to put all [my] receipts on display to everyone." There is no compromise occurring here. In fact that statement in particular is so puzzling to me that I will not attempt a meaningful comment.

"Shoeboxed can work for him ..."

No. It can not.

Read the whole review here and make up your own mind about My Receipts.

Browsing the Afribone... To run yourself!

Using Google's translation engine, a web site from Guinea reads like a medieval thriller!

Burden



The strike of syndicaleux paralyses the country. Forces of the ogre and demonstrators clash. Tabassés citizens, prefects driven out, ransacked residences, died and interpellations. To run yourself!



Rehandling



On January 19 at the evening, Fory Coco got rid of Fodé Bangoura, its ex Petit President. Large
snub for trusty servants. To run yourself!




RTG



Significant ultra hearts, shocked by the way in which Radio operator Gbantama and the TV Coconut covers
burden, are not long in being moved. To run yourself!



Futurelec business - Guinean State Necessary is to seize or save?




Source URL:
http://www.afribone.net.gn/lynx/

Translation URL:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.afribone.net.gn/lynx/&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=19&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dsite:.gn%26num%3D20%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff

Art is...

Someone needs to send a memo over to the folks at ArtIsAnalCheese.com: Your domain name, strategically sliced and diced, makes for a pretty unsavory idea. Art is anal, but why bring cheese into the mix?

I'm reminded of another unfortunate URL I saw in Manhattan: The One Ill Building. I don't think I'd want to live in the only ill building.

.htaccess: Invalid command 'UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU'

I've never seen this error before. It appears that this error was logged 6 times during the split second it took to save a change to my .htaccess file. During that split second, 6 attempted page views returned code 500 Internal Server Errors. Weird.

[Fri Sep 21 12:36:08 2007] [alert] [client xx.xx.xx.xx] /var/www/html/.htaccess: Invalid command 'UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU', perhaps mis-spelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

&^@_=

Strange how some arbitrary strings produce empty results pages, but others do not. I was honestly looking for pages containing strings of = characters as separators.

=====

+++++

&&&&&

@@@@@

_____

The Things Google Remembers

I did not know that Google saved search records for so long. Today is September 10, 2007, and I used Google to search the name of an author. I thought her name sounded failiar, and now I know why. I visited a page of hers almost 2 years ago, as Google helpfully pointed out. I guess I knew I was doing this -- allowing Google to save my searches and to remember which pages I actually clicked on -- but somehow I thought that this search data was being stored locally on my PC. That does not seem likely since this PC is new as of January, 2007.

phx.gbl. keymachine.de, et al.

Gazing at my access_logs this week, I learned a couple of interesting things.

Evidently, Microsoft is dabbling in the world of referer_spam and bogus hostnames to clog access_logs with confusing junk. This is apparently being done as some kind of quality test.

I have noticed this for months and even though I think I understand what might be going on behind the scenes at Microsoft I am still puzzled by this rather blunt implementation.

Long story short, if you see hostnames liks this in your access_log, it is evidently Microsoft running some kind of s00per-s3kr3t QA script comparing its live.com search results with the pages in its index.

bl2sch1081908.phx.gbl
bl2sch1082210.phx.gbl
bl2sch1081904.phx.gbl

(basically, anything appearing to come from the *absolutely meaningless* .gbl top-level domain)

I am happy to know that Microsoft is working to improve its Live.com search results, but the vague and clumsily stealthy way of doing it is, well, puzzling.

Another thing I learned this week is that there are a lot more spam drones masquerading as Googlebot than I realized. I usually filter out Googlebot traffic from my access_logs, as I know my sites are well indexed and I do not feel a need to monitor Googlebot traffic to the sites on a daily basis.

I turn that filter off once in a while, though, and I was a little surprised yesterday to see hits coming from a rogue drone at (where else?) keymachine.de claiming to be Googlebot:

ns.km30217.keymachine.de - - [06/Sep/2007:14:55:37 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 206 14484 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
ns.km30217.keymachine.de - - [06/Sep/2007:14:55:39 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 206 14484 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
ns.km30217.keymachine.de - - [06/Sep/2007:14:55:41 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 206 14484 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

The hits all return status 206 (incomplete download), which is not a common error for small HTML pages.

Keymachine.de (owned by Keyweb.de) is a German hosting company that I know only for the referer_spam and abusive drone traffic it sends my way. It is mostly banned from my sites but I had not noticed its reappearance as a phony Googlebot until recently.

Pizza Question

Why, in the year 2007, would Caruso Pizza, located about a half mile from the site of the World Trade Center, issue receipts with the date "09-11-01"?

missed dream

woke up throughout the night thinking, i should write down this dream. this is a strange one, or a twitchy one, i thought.

i do not believe that dreams contain mystical or magical messages, but I do think they occasionally say something about yourself and about your anxieties and buried introspections. this dream had something of that about it, and i woke up half way thinking this would make an interesting note-to-self for later.

i had a longer dream last night, and i remember that one well. i have had this other dream in some form or other many times over. i often dream of being sentenced to death. the verdict can not be appealed, and the sentence is always in response to some indiscretion never clarified in the dream, but which all seem to agree was pretty inconsequential. in these dreams i get death on a technicality.

the only time i remember a reprieve of sorts was when someone told me, on my way into a gas chamber, that "no one actually dies in there."

last night, though, the dream had me going to the electric chair, and i was given a final day in the city to eat all i want and go wherever i wanted. my final meal was supposed to be a can of sardines, but when i opened the can it contained some kind of large beans.

i was accompanied this day by a man and his son. they worked for the state, and their job was to make me feel like this was any other day and that nothing bad was about to happen. i woke up asking the man if there was any way out of this, thinking about the pain of the electric chair.

details change but the focus of the dream is always the death penalty.

since childhood i have regarded institutionalized life-or-death decisions with some sense of foreboding. growing up in Florida, the death penalty was a frequent point of contemplation at my high school. the topic came up so often and so conspicuously that over time i came to regard it as inevitable.

History

So many projects on the table, so little direction. So much to say, so few means with which to say. Other days it is the opposite: So little to say, yet so much means with which to say it. I hit tab a few times in my SSH window and consider the list of 1877 possibilities. Commands I'll never use, functions whose purpose I will never know. There is 'tic,' a command whose man page is a wall of unfamiliar words. Why do I have the 'sb' program? Oh, to transfer files via ZMODEM, of course, which I haven't done in 13 years. Good to know the functionality is there should I get a phone call from a BBS in the past. I type 'history' at a command prompt and see the list of mundanities that are my recentness. Commands (tail -f, pico, perl -e, vi, uptime, w, grep) repeated and repeated until they form a tower of null, a sky-high column of forgotten keystrokes, tasks of microscopic significance consuming the meta spaces of my life. Here is to another day of feckless endeavors.

The Deeps

Speaking of The Deeps, and speaking of of casting about, I was in a graveyard once when I spotted this poem on the tombstone of Jane Fowler Jones:

The Unknown Deeps

There are deeps we cannot fathom.
In the blue sun-lighted sea,
Though we mark each surface ripple,
All beneath is mystery.

Thus the soul may seem as tranquil
As a sea without a wave.
While there are to thee unopened
Deeps as secret as the grave.

Cast into the sea a pebble.
Cast into the heart a word.
It is all alike -- thou can'st not
Know what mighty deeps are stirr'd.

Jane Fowler Jones
Who died June Twelfth, 1902

Casting About

Today is directionless. Yesterday was, as well. I have had fun setting up the Mailbox Locator but of late I can hardly stand to think about it. I recently posted about 750,000 payphone numbers to my old stand-by (the Payphone Project). I did this after a friend told me that a patient had gone missing from the mental hospital at which she worked. The patient called from a payphone, and no other resource except the Internet allowed them to match the location of the payphone to its phone number that showed up on the caller id. That, I think, is cool, and adds wings to my claim that the phone companies have no reason to keep this information confidential.

Maybe it is the beautiful weather that has me casting about like this. I could stand up and sit at that piano across the room to finish learning Bach's Well Tempered Clavier. The WTC is one of the great mountains of piano music, and one does not choose to approach it in its totality on a whim.

But playing other composers' music is a re-creative act. I am in a mode for creating, or for rummaging through that part of my mind. To say that one is creative is not a compliment. In most situations creativity is an annoyance. It bothers people, especially those who ask a lot of questions.

I could do something more substantive with my random words project, or with the dictionary server I finally got around to setting up. So many fabulous words have turned up in the randomness of things: Shockdog is today's crunchy sounding word. It makes me think of the sentence "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz," which is notable for the fact that it contains all 26 letters of the English alphabet. Jackdaws. Shockdogs. Maybe today's project should be the creation of a sentence that uses the word Shockdog and contains all the letters of our alphabet. That would be a noble achievement.

What is a Jackdaw, anyway? Ah, it's a bird. I think I knew that at some place in life.

I heard something interesting on Paul Harvey this morning. You know it will be of transcendental significance when Paul Harvey announces that you need to give him your "undivided attention" as he reads you this next news item.

The story is that the design of the neurons in our brains are amazingly similar to the design of the known universe. Here is what he is talking about.

I resist weepiness over the notion that the universe is in us, and we are in it, and our tangible connection to distant nebulae and galaxies is as direct as our connections to our parents. But I do find found it interesting how patterns repeat in nature. Patterns and principles repeat in life. I once read a description of how the Internet works, and I thought its design contained a good metaphor for human relationships. Minimizing points of failure is a baseline principle in network design, as are redundancy and backward compatibility. Substitute a few words and generalities and one could apply the same ideas to all manner of existences, hopefully without reducing it to a pithy maxim.

I have read that scientists, with all their knowledge and information, are more likely than others to believe in God. I wonder how true that is.