nixCraft Linux Sys Admin Blog

Mozilla Firefox Addon Shipped With Malicious Adware Virus Code

Posted: 08 May 2008 01:05 PM CDT

The addons has been downloaded several thousands of time over past 3 months. Mozilla warned that a malicious program inserted adware code into a Firefox plugin. According to Mozilla security chief Window Snyder:

Everyone who downloaded the most recent Vietnamese language pack since February 18, 2008 got an infected copy. Mozilla does virus scans at upload time but the virus scanner did not catch this issue until several months after the upload.

=> Virus found in Vietnamese language pack (Via Y! news)

How To Find Out If ISP Is Throttling BitTorrent Traffic

Posted: 08 May 2008 05:34 AM CDT

You can now easily determine if your ISP throttling and shaping Bittorrent traffi with simple online tool.

From the project web page:

Certain ISPs have been shown to rate limit or block BitTorrent traffic sent by their customers. While there are multiple reports of this on the web, only a few ISPs have admitted that they manipulate BitTorrent traffic. And, to date, it is hard for users without networking expertise to gain evidence about the behavior of their ISP.

This test suite creates a BitTorrent-like transfer between your machine and our server, and determines whether or not your ISP is limiting such traffic. This is a first step towards making traffic manipulation by ISPs more transparent to their customers.

=> Glasnost: Test if your ISP is manipulating BitTorrent traffic

You can also load this tool on your own server or laptop computer running Apache and PHP 4.3 or above:
$ cd /var/www/ $ sudo apt-get install libpcap0.8 libpcap0.8-dev $ wget http://broadband.mpi-sws.mpg.de/transparency/glasnost-1.1.tgz $ tar -zxvf glasnost-1.1.tgz $ cd glasnost $ make $ su -c "chmod a+s bt_client" $ mkdir 0777 logs
Fire a web browser and type http://localhost/glasnost/selftest.php or http://your-domain.com/glasnost/selftest.php