Filemakerdave Tidbits

Saturday, November 14, 2009

You know it's the season

Posted via web from Filemakerdave's Blog

Friday, November 13, 2009

Twitter API Wiki / HTTP Response Codes and Errors

<< Back to Twitter API Documentation

HTTP Status Codes

The Twitter API attempts to return appropriate HTTP status codes for every request. It is possible to surpress response codes for the REST API.

200 OK: Success!

304 Not Modified: There was no new data to return.

400 Bad Request: The request was invalid. An accompanying error message will explain why. This is the status code will be returned during rate limiting.

401 Not Authorized: Authentication credentials were missing or incorrect.

403 Forbidden: The request is understood, but it has been refused. An accompanying error message will explain why. This code is used when requests are being denied due to update limits.

404 Not Found: The URI requested is invalid or the resource requested, such as a user, does not exists.

406 Not Acceptable: Returned by the Search API when an invalid format is specified in the request.

500 Internal Server Error: Something is broken. Please post to the group so the Twitter team can investigate.

502 Bad Gateway: Twitter is down or being upgraded.

503 Service Unavailable: The Twitter servers are up, but overloaded with requests. Try again later. The search and trend methods use this to indicate when you are being rate limited.

Error Messages

When the Twitter API returns error messages, it does so in your requested format. For example, an error from an XML method might look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<hash>

<request>/direct_messages/destroy/456.xml</request>

<error>No direct message with that ID found.</error>

</hash>

<< Back to Twitter API Documentation

via apiwiki.twitter.com

Posted via web from Filemakerdave's Blog

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Mac OS X 10.5 unable to login after update

A quick note on a clients system that pickup up BankerFox.A and Nuqel.E trojans plus a bunch of porn pop ups.

These were very clever trojans, disabling just about anything you need to run to remove them. The also ran in memory, so once you removed them, they wrote themselves back into the system.

After numerous tries of the different posts out there on the internet, the following is what I found that work for this client.

There are post that tells you to use the Spy Hunter package, they may work but you have to pay for the software.

All of the posts that I found on the internet as of Nov 10/2009 did not work, I tried a number of them.

The free solution that I used to remove was as follows.

I used SmitFraudFix v2.423 (WinXP, Win2K), (http://siri.geekstogo.com/SmitfraudFix.php) and the free home edition of
Avast 4.8 ( http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html )

Put the system in to safe mode and run SmithFraudFix. Run the Avast 4.8 after, it will detect the trojan in memory and ask to do a restart to do a memory scan on startup. Ok this and let it do the scan. Once it finds the trojans, do a delete.

Once is it finished, it will restart. Instead of letting it restart in regular mode so that it can continue with a regular scan. Power the system down before it restarts. Restart it back into safe mode and do another full scan with Avast.

Monday, November 9, 2009

Battle of the anti-virus: What is the best software?

Battle of the anti-virus: What is the best software?

Posted on 06.11.2009

AV-Comparatives.org recently released the results of a malware removal tests with which they evaluated 16 anti-virus software solutions:
Avast Professional Edition 4.8
AVG Anti-Virus 8.5
AVIRA AntiVir Premium 9.0
BitDefender Anti-Virus 2010
eScan Anti-Virus 10.0
ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4.0
F-Secure AntiVirus 2010
G DATA AntiVirus 2010
Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010
Kingsoft AntiVirus 9
McAfee VirusScan Plus 2009
Microsoft Security Essentials 1.0
Norman Antivirus & Anti-Spyware 7.10
Sophos Anti-Virus 7.6
Symantec Norton Anti-Virus 2010
Trustport Antivirus 2009.
The test focused only on the malware removal/cleaning capabilities, therefore all used samples were samples that the tested antivirus products were able to detect. The main question was if the products are able to successfully remove malware
from an already infected/compromised system. The test report was aimed to typical home users. A further question was if the products are able to remove what they are able to detect.
Based on a scoring system that evaluated malware and leftovers removal capabilities, these were the results:

"None of the products performed “very good” in malware removal or removal of leftovers, based on those 10 samples. eScan, Symantec and Microsoft (MSE) were the only products to be good in removal of malware AND removal of leftovers", says the report. "Some products do not remove all registry entries on purpose (as long as they do not have any visible side effect for the user), e.g. if that helps to prevent reinfection by the same malware. Furthermore, in some cases it is not possible to know if the registry values (or the hosts file) were modified by the malware or by the user itself (or third-party utilities used by the user)."
To see which malware sample were used and why, and how the particular anti-virus solutions behaved, go here.