Ghetto Powershell fix: redux

Previously on ducksledge: We are forced to use a government-built program, and it's auto-update process regularly downloads broken builds. This makes using it a bit tricky.

We still have to use the software, it's now installed on every computer in the company, and it's still intermittently failing for weeks at a time. the script has changed a bit, so it's time for a repost.

Here's the updated version.

And here's what it looks like:

Main Changes

• Because the install base is bigger, it's easier to run it over the whole affected IP range than to work from a computer list. This also prevents the occasional hiccup where a computer got missed because the DNS cache was out of date.
• It's a lot more verbose. It's now quick to tell at a glance where the script is up to, which is handy on the odd occasion it gets stuck.
• After each loop it gives you some pretty yet fairly useless stats, because I like pretty things.

What would be required to make this a real fix:

• Get rid of the main loop, and get it to run once through only. Trigger that ever 10 minutes or so from Task Manager. 
• Set it to watch the affected program directory for new folders. If a new folder gets pulled down, it'll assume it's a fixed one.
• Have it identify the directory it's copying dynamically, so there's now zero reason to actually edit the script. Just copy the working files to the right place, wait ten minutes, and it'll start rolling out.

Downloading vidd.me: The fun of sequential file naming

Vidd.me launched recently, as a simple and effective way to share videos online. You upload your video file or gif, it converts it into mp4, and you get a link to the nice html 5 page it's displayed on. It seems to work rather nicely and the team are adding new features all the time without adding new limits.

Since it loads the raw mp4 file into the browser, getting the file is easy. Open up the source to any page and you have something like this:

And with our handy friend wget, you can download the full video from the commandline without any special tools at all.

So far it's business as usual. You could have used anything to download it, (including your browser. Things get a little more interesting when you look at the source of their 'new' or 'top videos' page:
 

There's three things to note here:

• Each preview on the page has '-clip' added to the filename, to distinguish it from the main mp4 file
• Every file seems to be stored on the same server using the same directory structure, d1wst0behutosd.cloudfront.net/videos/
• The files appear to be named sequentially, with gaps for deleted or private files.

This presents a very simple way to find content. At the time I'm writing this they've got around 4200 videos, so let's pull down all the previews on their site in just a few lines:

#!/bin/bash
for i in {1..4200}
        do
                wget "https://d1wst0behutosd.cloudfront.net/videos/"$i"-clip.mp4"
        done
exit

A little while later.

If you feel like downloading everything on the site - full length - you just have to modify the script above ever-so-slightly, like so:

#!/bin/bash
for i in {1..4200}
        do
                wget "https://d1wst0behutosd.cloudfront.net/videos/"$i".mp4"
        done
exit

To take it further, It'd be pretty simple to set up a script that updates your mirror of the site: A cron job that grabs the 'latest videos' page, parses it for the highest video number, and then goes from the last downloaded video until that point (or just count up from the last known video until you hit too many failures in a row). As a side-effect of the one-way sync, you'd have a copy of any videos that were subsequently removed.

I have to point out that the last paragraph could violate the Terms of service, which has a few conditions against scraping and DDOSing you might fall foul of. While they don't seem to have yet, it's also likely they'll throttle heavy users

Instead of that, I'm more interested in picking and choosing based on what looks interesting from those previews I grabbed. Let's create a quick script that lets me specify an arbitrary number of videos (based on their number) and download them:

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$#" -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "no input arguments detected"
else
    args=("$@")
    for arg in "${args[@]}"; do
        wget -nv "https://d1wst0behutosd.cloudfront.net/videos/"$arg".mp4"
    done
fi
exit

It takes the video numbers as command-line arguments, so now I can do this:

 No need for browser extensions or custom software, you can now just grab any video you like with what you have installed.

As long as the privacy controls in place are solid and they put some throttling in place to stop people ripping the whole site every hour, there's nothing wrong with how they've set things up. The site is designed to be as open and accessible as possible, and right now they're doing that from the ground up.

Ambient Computing

That old 24" screen with the broken backlight may never be your main monitor again, but that doesn't mean you can't have a little fun with it:

Remove the backlight and frame, and you're left with a light and thin sheet that blends in with your surroundings, using available ambient light. When you're not using it, it just becomes a tinted window.

Sadly it didn't work quite as well on this laptop, due to the surface area of electronics behind the screen. It'd work much better on more recent models, but I don't have any I'm willing to sacrifice to the cause just yet.

This might take a while

Exifpeeler update: SSL

After months of letting it churn happily along, I finally spent 5 minutes making a fairly important change to exifpeeler: it now supports SSL. If you visit https://exifpeeler.com instead of just http://exifpeeler.com, your data should be secure in transit and not just at either end. 

I've left the http version enabled for now, but of course recommend you use the https version -While people probably aren't scrounging through all your web traffic looking for interesting tidbits, it never hurts to be careful. 

(if this is the kind of thing you worry about, may I also recommend the excellent HTTPS everywhere.)

ExifPeeler: A web-based exif removal tool

I bought a cheap-and-cheerful VPS a year or two ago from the gentlemen at BuyVM.net. I've used it on and off for the many useful things that you can do with a VPS, but hadn't really tested it's limits. But the server is single core with an astounding 128mb of ram and 10gb hard drive, what can you really do with that?

Enter ExifPeeler. It does one thing and does it competently: You upload a batch of pictures, it strips out the EXIF data from them and gives them back to you nice and clean. You can then do anything you like with the pics without worrying about accidentally giving away your location or any other personal data.

Here's what it looks like.

And here's what it looks like after you upload files. Simple, right?

Features:

• Batch upload. You can upload up to 100 files or 50mb at once, and download the results individually or as one big zip file. 
• Unique URLs: Each pic has a unique and distinctive URL. Only you or anybody you link to your images will be able to see them.
• Secure Timed Destruction: After an hour, your files are deleted. There are no options to keep them. Because I have such limited hard server space, I can't afford to leave your holiday snaps lying around for weeks. Let's call it a security feature.
• Cross-Browser Support: Works great on firefox, chrome, and safari. IE9 and below support single-file upload only. I haven't tested with IE10, so let me know how it goes.
• Mobile Device Support: It handles batch uploading from ios, android, and blackberry like a pro.   I haven't tested on win phone 7 or 8, so let me know if you try it. 
• Duplicate Renaming: If you upload 5 pics called 'image.jpg' at once, they'll all get appropriately renamed.
• Relatively Graceful Failure: if any individual pictures you upload fail - say, you accidentally upload a word document at the same time - it will still clean all the legitimate pictures and list any failures separately at the end.

Technology:

The server I'm running it on pretty much dictated the rest of the choices. One PHP script that does all the admin (uploading, removing anything that isn't photos, creating thumbnails, etc), while it farms out all the hard work to exiftool. It double-checks to see that the exif data is definitely gone, and will refuse to even display the image if it's not successfully removed. Every 5 minutes a cron job runs and removes any files uploaded more than an hour ago. 

The key consideration is traffic. I've done some stress-testing, and it should be able to handle multiple file uploads per second. Under heavy load you might get a 5-second delay when uploading large batches (50+ files), but we'll have to see how it goes in real-world conditions.

Why an exif remover?

I really just wanted to see how easily it could be done. While my solution isn't particularly elegant, it works and is damn simple to implement. It consists of one php script, one third-party program, and one cron job. 

I also couldn't find another site that does the same thing. There are sites that will let you remove exif data from single files, there are sites that have exif removal as a bonus feature hidden away in menus, and there are of course hundreds of local exif-removal tools. I couldn't spot a web-based exif removal tool that lets you upload more than one file at once. This fills that niche.

Don't a lot of websites remove EXIF data anyway?

Yes, they do. Sites like blogger, facebook, and flickr will prevent other users from seeing some or all exif data from your pics. The data is still present, and the companies can still use it for what they like. They just don't provide it to viewers.

Most smaller sites don't seem to remove EXIF data. If you're uploading pics to a forum or emailing them to somebody, it's definitely good to remove the EXIF first.

If I shouldn't send files around without removing the EXIF, Doesn't that mean I shouldn't upload them to ExifPeeler?

Yes. If you're worried about it, strip out the data before you send it anywhere. The aforementioned exiftool is good and there are lots of other options. Exifpeeler is great for casual use but if you have information you genuinely need to keep private it's best it never goes on the internet at all. 

Where's the script so I can run it in my own project?

I'll probably put it up here soon, but in the meantime you can email me if you want more info. The script is nothing special, I just want to clean it up a bit and see how it works in the real world before I post it. 

How many times was EXIF mentioned on this page?

18.

If you have the time try it out, and let me know if you manage to break it. If you do break it, please send a screenshot along with a brief description of what you were doing.

Dead Man's Switch on Linux, Part 1: Basic bash

I've always liked the idea of a dead man's switch. It's a partial fix for the 'what happens if I get hit by a bus' problem: how would you give your important account details to your family? How can you get a last minute message to your loved ones? Most importantly, who will delete your porn?

Traditionally, they work with the assistance of a third party. They've been used to launch nukes. Wikileaks used it to cause shenanigans. And you can sign up for some web-based solutions that will send pre-recorded emails for you when you show signs of being dead.

Of course, you have no control over that. the whole site might go down without you realising, rendering your efforts useless. So here's the same basic principle, implemented on your own software in bash script.

If you just want the script, skip to the end. It does things like this:

The Simplest Script Of All

We need three basic components to make this work:

1. The main script file. When run, it checks to see if the timer has expired. If it has, it performs pre-set actions (like sending email)
2. A method to 'reset' the timer. A one-line script file will work fine here.
3. A way to trigger the first script to run. We'll use cron.

We also need a way to check whether we've hit the time limit. To keep things simple, I'm going to use the 'modified' time on the main script file. When it runs, it'll compare when it was last modified against the current time to act as the timer. To reset, you just need to run 'touch myscriptname.sh' to change the modified time. Easy, right? 

So here's the main script, set to do the most important task of all: Delete Your Porn.

#! /bin/bash
# Simple Dead Man's Script

timelimit=30 #Number of days to wait without update

let timelimit=$timelimit*60*60*24 #turn that into seconds
lastaccessed=$(stat -c %Y $BASH_SOURCE)
timenow=$(date +%s)
let timeleft=($timenow-$lastaccessed)
if [ $timeleft -gt $timelimit ]
then 
    rm -rf $HOME/myporndirectory
fi

Here's the 'reset' script, saved somewhere on your desktop:

#! /bin/bash

touch pathto/themainscript.sh

And here's the line you have to add to cron (crontab -e to get there):
0 0 * * * pathto/themainscript.sh

Simple, right? make the scripts executable, and if you ever go 30 days without running the reset script it'll delete all your porn. Careful with your holidays.
It can do anything that can be done from the command line. with minimal trouble it can ftp files around, modify/upload entire websites, start torrents, or just update twitter with what you had for lunch the other day. I want to use it to send an email.



The Slightly Less Simple Script


Obviously I took a simple concept and made it both unnecessarily complex and annoyingly basic. It now has a setup option that should work most of the time, and a 'test' option that emails yourself and makes sure it works.

Boring Notes:

• The setup option assumes a generic install - that you have crontab access, that you have a home directory, etc. It will fail horribly if run as root.
• The setup script creates a .dmswitch/ folder in your home dir. Inside will be the check script, the message file, and an attachment directory. The message file is plain text and as long as you need.
• It also adds a reset_switch.sh file to your desktop. each time you run this, it resets the counter.
• The setup is optional. If you manually move the files where you like and change the variables, it'll work just fine.
• I'm using sendemail to do the email sending since it plays nicely with gmail. You can use any other method you like. If you use the script unmodified you'll need to install sendemail.
• Any files in the attachment directory will be attached to the email. No spaces in filenames though, because I am lazy.

Quick Install:

On debian/ubuntu, it takes four lines and some variable editing.

• sudo apt-get install sendemail libio-socket-ssl-perl
• gedit  dmswitch.sh (or nano, vim, emacs, etc.)
• paste in the script, and edit the email account details to your own. Save.
• chmod +x dmswitch.sh
• ./dmswitch.sh setup

Test it by running .dmswitch/check_switch.sh test . If the email settings are correct, you should have a test email arrive shortly.

Removal:

• rm -rf .dmswitch/
• crontab -e, remove the entry pointing to the script.

Finally, The Script itself.

#!/bin/bash
# Basic Dead Man's Switch v1.0
# Options:
# 1) dmswitch setup
#    sets up the script in your home dir with some default settings.
#    best to set it up manually or automatically rather than a mix of the two.
# 2) dmswitch test
#    sends a test email to the itself.
# 3) dmswitch reset
#    'checks in' with the dead man switch and resets the counter to zero
#    Just does the same thing as touching the scriptfile.
# 4) dmswitch
#    default. if the time has expired, IT WILL SEND AN EMAIL.


#SETUP VARIABLES
#some running variables are based on the setup vars
setupdir=$HOME"/.dmswitch"
setupattachmentdir="attachments"
setupmessage="message"
checkscript="check_switch.sh"
resetscript=$HOME"/Desktop/reset_switch.sh"
croncommand="0 0 * * * "$setupdir"/"$checkscript #cron line for how often it checks expiry. Default is daily.


#RUNNING VARIABLES
#make sure you change the email settings. 
dmdir="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" && pwd )"
timelimit=30 #Number of days to wait without update
expired=0
emailto="someemail@gmail.com" #The target address
emailfrom="myemail@gmail.com" #The account you send with
emailusername="myemail@gmail.com" #The username for your email account
emailpass="myemailpassword" #password
emailserver="smtp.gmail.com"
emailport="587"
emailsubject="Automated email from Dead Man's Switch."
message=$dmdir"/"$setupmessage # the text file you want your message stored in
attachmentdir=$dmdir"/"$setupattachmentdir # put any attachments you want to include here


#checks if the time has run out. Does the maths in unix time.
function checkifexpired() {
    let timelimit=$timelimit*60*60*24 
    lastaccessed=$(stat -c %Y $BASH_SOURCE)
    timenow=$(date +%s)
    let timeleft=($timenow-$lastaccessed)
    if [ $timeleft -gt $timelimit ]
    then expired=1
    fi
}

#sends an email. replace sendemail with whatever program you prefer.
function sendemail() {
    attachmentlist=$(ls $attachmentdir)
    cd $attachmentdir
    sendEmail -f $emailfrom -t $emailto -u $emailsubject -s $emailserver":"$emailport -xu $emailusername -xp $emailpass -a $attachmentlist -o message-file=$message
}

#sets up a directory to run from and creates the necessary files.
function setupdm() {
    mkdir -p $setupdir
    cp $BASH_SOURCE $setupdir"/"$checkscript 
 rm $BASH_SOURCE 
    cd $setupdir
    chmod +x $checkscript
    mkdir $setupattachmentdir
    touch $setupmessage
    echo "If you can read this, I'm dead or arrested or something" >>$setupmessage

    #append cron job to existing cron file
    (crontab -l; echo "$croncommand" ) | crontab
    
    #setup reset script on desktop
 touch $resetscript
    echo "#! /bin/bash" >>$resetscript
    echo "checkfile="$setupdir"/"$checkscript >>$resetscript
    echo "touch $""checkfile" >>$resetscript
    chmod +x $resetscript
    echo "setup complete"
    
}


#main script starts here

checkifexpired

if [ "$1" == "setup" ]
then 
    setupdm
elif [ "$1" == "test" ]
then
    #send test email to yourself
    emailto=$emailfrom
    emailsubject="TEST: "$emailsubject
    sendemail
 
elif [ "$1" == "reset" ]
then
 touch $BASH_SOURCE
elif [ $expired -eq 1 ]
then
    #send the email, and disable the script from running
    sendemail
    chmod -x $BASH_SOURCE
else exit
fi

Go wild.
Part two will cover the fact that not everybody leaves their desktop on for months at a time and suggest several overly-elaborate ways to trigger the reset while running it on a remote machine.

iPad hanger v0.1

INGREDIENTS:

• One wire coat hanger. (30c)
• Your bare hands. (free?)
• One tablet computer. ($150-$1000)

TIME REQUIRED:
About 3 minutes, but it really depends on how quickly you can bend stuff.


METHOD:

1. Take the coathanger and bend it into a vague rectangle. 
2. Make a few extra bends in it to stop the iPad falling out the bottom
3. Make a slight concave bend towards the top. This is just to make the iPad lean backwards so it's more structurally stable if you knock it.
4. Just look at these pictures.

I know my lighting and camera work sucks. Pro cameras are wasted on coat hangers.

If  you use fancy tools like 'pliers' you can probably make it way more attractive to look at.

RESULT:

You now have a flexible, mouldable tablet stand that works surprisingly well and can hang off damn near anything in your vicinity. If you're in a room doing something, chances are you can hang your iPad somewhere.

Watch TV while cooking!

Use the Verge Collection Map while driving!

Also a great way to keep up with facebook on the drive to work. 

And of course, look up recipes in the shower.

For demonstration purposes only. You should use a ziploc bag when actually showering with an iPad.

Entirely seriously though; I have half a dozen home made and bought tablet stands at home and at work. The coathanger now gets more use than all of them, cost a grand total of 30c, and can be quickly remodelled on the fly to fit whatever you need it to do.

This is also just the prototype. With a pair of pliers and a ruler you can hide that metal bar at the base, even up the bends on either side, and do pretty much whatever else you can imagine. It's weirdly stable and I haven't managed to knock it loose once (despite my clumsy showering technique).

Make one. 

Ghetto PowerShell fix via admin shares and an infinite loop

At the office, most of our work is done with one major government agency. To work with them, we have to use their in-house database system. It's slow, it's troublesome, and it tends to be down for 'unplanned maintenance' quite regularly.

The most annoying feature is that they will silently push out updates to the client software about once a week. It downloads the new version in the background, and then removes the old version when it's next launched. Lately this has been going wrong: about a third of the time, on any computer running windows 7 64-bit, it deletes the old version before it downloads the new version properly. This will continue on every computer multiple times a day until the next update is pushed about a week later, whereupon it will all play nice again.

There are two solutions to this:

• Reinstall the software daily (it will correctly download the older version once, and then fail when it later tries to upgrade)
• Manually copy over the files to the correct directory on each computer.

Option 2 is the much faster option, and so we have

The initial fix:

param([string]$targetName = "8200-01")

robocopy "C:\fixess\data" "\\$targetname\c$\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Government\Program\201207030908" /MIR /E /V /R:2 /W:2 /fp /eta  /A-:SH

exit

When a computer wasn't working, I called that script (fixcomputer.ps1 computernamehere), it'd copy the files over to that computer with the magic of admin shares, and everybody was happy....until I wanted to take a few days off and had to come up with a slightly more robust option.


The updated fix (click here for a prettier version)

$computerlist="computer01","computer02","computer03","computer04","computer05","computer06","computer07","computer08","computer09","computer10","computer11","computer12","computer13","computer14","computer15" #list of computer names that need fixing
$sourcedir="C:\fixess\data"
$targetdir="c$\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Government\Program\201207030908"
$count=0 #counting the number of loops for no useful reason
$wait=60 #how many seconds to wait between runs

Write-host "$(Get-Date) Script started"

While($true)
{
  foreach ($computer in $computerlist)
  {
  #if the computer is on and the directory doesn't exist, 
      #silently copy the files over
   if ((test-path "\\$computer\c$") -and -not (test-path "\\$computer\$targetdir"))
   {
      robocopy "$sourcedir" "\\$computer\$targetdir" /MIR /E /R:0 /W:1 /NJH /NJS /NDL /NC /NS /NP /NFL /A-:SH
      Write-host "$(Get-Date) Fixed: $computer on pass $count"
   }
  }
  $count++

  #Every 20 loops, post an update just so I know it's still running
  if ($count%20 -eq 0) { Write-host "$(Get-Date) Don't worry, the script is still running" }

  #Have a break before running the script again.
  Start-Sleep -s $wait

}



How it works:

• We start an infinite while loop to wrap everything in
• Cycle through each computer in the list provided at the start
• Check whether they're accessible and the files have been deleted, and copy over the data if so
• Every 20 loops, post a reassuring message just so I know the script hasn't died
• Finally, wait a little while. There's no sense running this script constantly, but I've never been a big fan of task scheduler as an alternative to cron.

What it looks like:

In summary:

Let's be honest, this is a complete hack job. It's an ugly fix to get around a bug in one unpleasant piece of software. It's slow, inflexible, and wouldn't scale up to hundreds of computers without some major changes. 

Despite that it works, keeps users happy, and lets me take time off despite the best efforts of the government. I'm calling it a win.

Update:
And here's what a slightly-modified version looks like after two weeks chugging away on its own.

Corporate Desktop Support using msra and batch files.

Reasoning:

I was getting tired of spending valuable minutes of my time walking around, so decided it was time to set up remote assistance for my office. There are plenty of options already out there like iTALC and TeamViewer but I had a few requirements:

• Entirely local. The aim was to support machines on the internal network so there's no need to rely on external hardware/software.
• We don't need most of the features. No asset management, and no 'background spying' on a users desktop and habits. This will do one thing: access computers remotely
• As simple as possible.

All our hardware is tagged, so it turns out it's pretty easy to offer basic remote support with one Astoundingly-Simple batch file and a few changes to group policy.

The Batch File:

SET /P target="Target Computer/IP:"
msra.exe /offerra %target%


That's all you need at a basic level - type in the computer name and it launches the remote assistance tool.

Here's the slightly-expanded version I'm using:

@echo off
set logfile=%appdata%\assistancelog.log
SET /P target="Target Computer/IP:"


nslookup %target%
wmic /node:"%target%" ComputerSystem Get UserName
echo Offering assistance to %target% at %date% %time% >> "%logfile%"


msra.exe /offerra %target%






This is what it does:

• Requests the network name of the computer from you. If all your machines are tagged you'll have no problems.
• Grabs the network address of the computer and the username of whoever is logged in
• Writes to a log file - nothing fancy, just the computer name and time
• Launches Windows Remote Assistance pointed at the target computer

The Group Policy Change: 

A quick overview of the change you need to make:

All nice and simple, just changing a few settings and adding the users/security groups you wish to have access.

Additionally, you may wish to add these:

This just punches a couple of holes in the firewall for both Remote Desktop and wmic. While I set mine to allow localsubnet you can easily lock yours to a specific IP range instead. Apply the policy to all the company computers and you're done.


Usage:
Run the batch file as and you get this:

The user gets a popup requesting access to their computer, and when they accept you get remote access. simple, supported, and done entirely using the software baked into windows.



Notes:

• This doesn't really work for terminal servers. Enable session shadowing on the server to get the same effect.
• This was tested and used shortly after we finished migrating to Windows 7/2008. It probably wont work out-of-the-box if you've got XP machines mixed in.
• It is possible to do this in reverse, with a user running a batch file that requests assistance from tech support. It's a bit trickier to set up if you want to minimise user options, but it works.

It's time to admit I have a problem

You know you're an addict when you've used a phone seven times as long as it's even existed.

It's true: I've been using this iPhone 3G continuously since the 6th of October, 1987.

The Countryman part 2 - Retrofuture edition

Part 1 is here.

Let's start off with my new favourite-ever article:

CATTLE. HOVERCRAFT. CATTLEHOVERCRAFT. 

In 1961, rural Western Australia was just a few years away from replacing a bunch of cattle trucks with HOVERCRAFT. This is about the most retro-futuristic thing you could do to livestock farming without putting it on the moon. 

I imagine the trials for this would have been awkward when they realised the ground tends to have a lot of inconveniently-placed rocks and trees. 

I draw your attention to the byline for this article: In 1961, the government was asking farmers to volunteer up a portion of their crops to support the 1962 Perth Commonwealth Games. Just 50 years ago farmers were expected to support the government rather than the government bailing out farmers.

These last three need no commentary, they're just some ads you probably don't see too often.

The Countryman, November 9th 1961

I was visiting the parents recently, and found a copy of The Countryman from November 9th, 1961 lying around. For those who don't know, The Countryman is a rural paper from Western Australia.

I'll post the fun entries later, but first this.

Transcript Below, you don't have to read all that tiny writing.

Some context:

•  Aboriginals didn't get the vote until 1967, a good six years after this. 
• A pickaninny is a black child
• Pollard is apparently just bran with a bit of flour. 
• There are other contemporary reports covering the same material, which agree on the main facts.
• A gallon is some archaic measure of liquids, equal to about 4.5 litres

I'm not really sure what to make of it. The whole structure and tone of this article just confuses me.

Either way, the article itself is more interesting than my rambling so here's a transcript.

Native outlaws terrorised East Kimberley in 1907
by Doug Moore

At the Red Butte on Texas Downs station one night the stockmen were watching cattle held in an old yard - this was a necessity when the yards were old as the wire could easily be broken.

After doing a spell on watch, the native, Major, came into the camp, but was ordered to do another watch by the man in charge, Kelly. Major Resented it and cleared out with two other natives.

This incident, in 1907, started the three natives on a brief career of murder amid the wild ranges of East Kimberley when this region was real "frontier land".

The natives took two rifles and ammunition, and picking up their gins at Texas station they went up the Osmond-River to Growlers Gully where a bushman known as Scotty had his camp. 
There they stole half a bag of flour and camped near Mt. John.

When Scotty returned to his camp he noticed that the flour was missing and saw the native tracks. He put strychnine in the remaining bag of flour, left it in the same place, and went away again.

But Major was not to be caught as easily as that. Later, from his tracks, it was discovered that he had looked through the flour and had found the poison in it. He and his two companions then waited close by and when Scotty returned they shot him dead. They took more firearms and ammunition and escaped back into the ranges.

The next we heard of them they were on Black Gin Creek off Moonlight Valley where they murdered two white men named Jordie and Kettle.

After this every stock rider and prospector went about full-armed and on the lookout for the murderers. The country was in a state of alarm.

All the mustering camps kept a careful watch at night and took no chances. At mistake Creek when the cook was on watch one night he woke up Tom Cole to tell him there was a black object near the campfire which was some distance away. Tom snatched up his rifle and fired two shots at it, but on investigation it turned out to be the beef bucket, and it had two holes in it. That was good shooting.

By this time the mounted police from Wyndham, Turkey Creek and Halls Creek were on the outlaws' tracks and kept them moving.

While the natives stayed in the Carr Boyd Range they had good cover but were short of tucker. One of their pickaninnies was found half-eaten at a campfire about the Osborne cattle camp. Mick Nevlin who was camped there at the time showed me the remains.

Some time afterwards they left the range and made over to Mistake Creek. I was at the Fourteen Mile camp one night when they stole my rifle from alongside my mosquito net in which I was sleeping.

A few days later the three boys - Major, Nipper and Dibby were surrounded by the police at the Nine-Mile Hill. They put up a big fight, and the hills echoed to the crash of rifle fire, but they were eventually all shot.

The policy recovered my rifle and it is now in the police museum in Perth. Some years ago I tried to get it back, but because I was unable to give its number they refused to let me have it. 

Two years before this episode my mate and I had camped near the Wild Dog police station on our way to Ord River station with thirty heavily-loaded pack mules.

The police outpost was between the Behn-river and the Negri and consisted of a tin shanty with a few tent flys and a bough shed- also a couple of big trees to chain native prisoners to, as was the custom then.

The station was manned by two mounted constables, McKenna and Thompson (who was later murdered by natives with George Shoesmith on the Canning Track), and after fixing up camp we strolled over to see the police noticing at the same time that they had about 15 natives chained around a tree. The natives were to be taken into Wyndham to be tried for cattle killing.

That night they kept up a big corroboree, singing and tapping but when daylight came it was discovered that there were only six old gins singing and tapping sticks. The bucks had chopped their chains during the night and had all cleared out into the ranges.

You can imagine the uproar at the station. But those troopers were equal to such things; and by riding hard and fast, and by good tracking on the part of their boys; all the escapees were eventually rounded up at the Fourteen-Mile junction of the Ord River, and eventually taken to Wyndham. 

About this time another constable was also bringing a big mob of natives into Wyndham, charged with cattle killing. He was being paid so much a head to feed them on the way down - a walk of 250 miles in dog-chains in single file behind the constables horse.

After careful consideration, he decided to feed them on pollard and water. None of them could speak English, all were naked, and this diet soon extended their stomachs.

After every feed he used to smack his own stomach and say "Good fella tucker" until they all did the same and could repeat this.

In court at Wyndham, the old Magistrate looked at them and said, sure enough, "Good fella tucker?" The natives all clapped their hands to their bulging stomachs and chorused "Good fella tucker." The magistrate was satisfied, much to the constables delight.

Another incident I can recall was a spearing affray at Ord River station one night in 1907 between the Turner-river and Ord-River natives. 

An Afghan camel team had arrived at the station with a big load from Wyndham. They had with them a  Turner River native. One night the Turner river native was caught stealing in the station camp and was followed and speared by Big Tommy and the Ord Boy.

The incident was forgotten until a week later when one night there was a terrible row in the camp. Gins came running up to the homestead in the dark singing out "Blackfellow bin spear 'em boy all about. Come Quick."

Going down with a hurricane lamp I saw four natives stretched out with spears through their bodies. 

The Turner River natives had avenged the death of their tribesman.

One of these things is not like the other

If a contractor doesn't proof read their word documents, of course you can trust them to replace and configure the servers which your company vitally needs. Those little details never hurt anybody.

Broken things: iPod Classic

Somebody brought me an iPod with the timeless White Screen Of Death. That used to be pretty common and is easily fixed by reloading the firmware.

It worked, I turned it on, and things got a bit weird.

Somewhere along the way, about half the letters in every bit of text in the firmware vanished. Some shorter words had the misfortune to disappear altogether.

I have no idea why this happened. The firmware copy was fine, the loading process was fine, and if it was general corruption we'd be seeing a lot more than just missing letters.

Sadly, reloading the same firmware a second time gave me a perfectly-working iPod. Sometimes things are more fun half-broken than working.

Obscene Automated Tour Guides

I went to a rather nice museum a few weeks ago - it was quite new and focussed on doing everything in as modern a way as possible. In keeping with that, they'd replaced the tour guides with iPod touches that ran a custom app.

The app itself was pretty great. It identified nearby exhibits (via unique bluetooth transmitters, I'm guessing) and let you rate how you felt about them. You could read through some extra information if you wanted, and sometimes see related audio or video clips.

As an added bonus, you could leave the app and access the normal iPhone tools. I wasn't the first person to realise this.

These guys were able to deploy an advanced location-aware custom app, but don't have anybody who understands iPhone restrictions, the iPhone Configuration Tool, or old-fashioned Kiosk Mode. It didn't even throw any errors when I added a throwaway email account.

This wasn't just a recent problem - a lot of the contacts had been added over 6 months before, so they aren't even being wiped regularly. I can only assume the guys who made the app are long gone while the staff just update exhibit information on a local server.

To end with, here's some more detail about those gentlemanly prior patrons of the museum.

Symantec Endpoint, just stop this

More like SEMENtec endpoint amirite

Emails where you blatantly contradict yourself and render the message pointless, registering multiple computers under the same name due to a quirk in the installation, arbitrarily alerting me that half the computers are 'OUT OF DATE' because you don't like how some optional settings are configured...just stop.

You're pretty thorough at picking up viruses and shit, but this needy attention-seeking behaviour has got to stop. Every machine is up to-the-minute with updates and functioning perfectly, so why all the fuss? Just take a few deep breaths and calm down.

I didn't even know they had a firefox port

To the one guy out there actually using BeOS/Haiku, I salute you. I hope you found what you were looking for.

 I'm guessing not though.

WHAT IS THIS

Seriously, WHAT DOES THIS BUTTON DO.

It's on a keyboard I got long ago, from the mid to late nineties - you know, buttons for every function you don't need a hardware button for.

The button does nothing. It doesn't bring coffee, it doesn't open up a coffee-related webpage, it doesn't try to start a coffee machine, it does  nothing at all.

I MUST KNOW.

Vodafone Australia Leaking Private Picture messages?

Over the weekend, one of our users had a pretty strange event happen. The basic chain of events went like this:

• The user receives an (expected) MMS message to their work and personal phones at the same time. Both these numbers are on vodafone.
• The user immediately starts receiving dozens of other MMS messages from numbers they don't recognise.
• After 10 minutes, the user turns off both phones.When they're turned back on, the messages have stopped.

While they'd been wiped off the personal phone, I got to have a look at the work phone this morning. The MMSes had all arrived at her email address which makes things a bit easier to analyse.

From this we can see:

• These were, beyond a doubt, not intended for her. The only thread even linking all the recipients (and senders) is that they're australian.
•  The messages all came through vodafones servers.
• The messages all have a send time approximately that of the receive. That doesn't necessarily mean that this was essentially a live capture of their MMS traffic, but it seems likely.
• A quick look at some messages shows a high incidence of people from WA. That could mean it was a WA-only issue, or it could be due to the time difference between us and the Eastern States.
• These are real MMSes. They are not spam, they were sent by real people who did not expect them to be made public.

 Here's a good example of the kind of thing that was leaked.
.

A student card. To go with his phone number, they gave us the high school, full name, date of birth, and some photo ID of a minor. Believe me when I say that this was far from the most personal piece of information there.

Most worryingly, Somebody has mentioned to me since then that a friend of theirs had the same thing happen yesterday - hundreds of PXTs being misdirected to his phone. He thought it was some kind of spam and changed his number, which is a shame.

I'd love to find somebody else who had this happen and still has some messages. With some more data we can work out a few more details:

• The time period. It was about 10 minutes for this case, but that may have just been the tail end - it could have been going for weeks in the right conditions.
• The trigger. I'm guessing it was 'receiving or sending a PXT message', but again I need more data.
•  Whether the same messages were sent to everybody. Everybody getting the same stream of messages is a much smaller problem than everybody receiving separate streams

With all of that, we can work out the scale of what happened here, and hopefully notify some of the customers who unexpectedly had their personal messages made public.

I should also mention:  I've contacted vodafone about this (via the authorised partner we deal with), but I haven't heard back yet. I'm very interested to hear their response.