Simply add this filter under adblock options manual filter list:

meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:BannerLoader&banner=blackout&campaign=English+Wikipedia+Blackout&userlang=en&db=enwiki&sitename=Wikipedia&country=

Refresh and you are ready to rock.

Now that you’ve got your wikipedia back it is time to call your politicians and tell them to stop SOPA and PIPA before it destroys the internet!

We expect many more customers to become exposed as these records propagate and warn users not to send sensitive data (such as shipping, customer, or credit card information) to affected providers until this issue is resolved.

If you are an Internet Explorer user you can remove diginotar certificates using these instructions:

1. On the Tools menu of Internet Explorer, click Internet Options.
2. On the Content tab, click Certificates.
3. On the Trusted Root Certification Authorities tab, click the appropriate certificate, click Remove, and follow the instructions on your screen.
4. On the Intermediate Root Certification Authorities tab, click the appropriate certificate, click Remove, and then click Yes.
5. Click Close, click OK, and then restart Internet Explorer.

Sure, a single virus can be removed very quickly from a computer, but very very few computers are infected with only a single virus.

Many fly-by-night computer repair shops are happy to come to your dorm, home or business, show you the virus they found in 10 minutes and call the job done. Then two weeks later you are calling them back for another visit because your computer got infected again.

Rinse and Repeat.

While they might remove a virus in “between 1 and 4 hours” it is very rare that a thorough virus check can be completed in that little time. Sure, you can run an automated tool, find a virus and remove it, but what about the rest of the viruses, trojans and malware causing the underlying infection?

We understand you want your computer returned quickly, but we won’t let you waste time going back and forth from home to computer shop for the same infection. It isn’t fair to you!

We won’t guarantee you a virus free computer in under four hours, and we don’t try to remove a virus for $25 and send you on your way.

What we do is carefully check your machine using multiple methods to be sure your computer is completely free of malware, spyware, trojans, badware, adware, viruses, extortion ware and much more. Then we harden your computer with effective countermeasures to help protect you in the future.

It might take us overnight instead of an hour, but when we are done we have happy customers that have truly virus-free PCs.

Unauthorized Access
We apologize for the inconvenience, but you are not authorized to visit this page. If you believe this is an error, please contact your account manager.

and

Error: This Google account isn’t enabled for AdSense. Please sign up for an AdSense account.

If you are a Doubleclick for Publishers or Doubleclick for Small Business customer, this can be both frustrating and scary, since it tells you to contact yourself. “What happened to my account?” you may ask.  Searching the Google Support forum or contacting Doubleclick through their various contact forms yields no results, but don’t panic! we have a solution that might just get you back up and running again!

The problem seems to stem from the temporary accounts that were created during the transition failing to migrate, even after you get the message that the domain’s transition is complete and all conflicting accounts have been resolved.

While there is no definitive solution at this point, your best shot is to use the Google account recovery page and enter your temporary email address. This address is setup as username%domain.tld@gtempaccount.com, so for example if your email before was bob@corporation.net you would enter bob%corporation.net@gtempaccount.com. When prompted claim that you can in fact receive email at that address. You should in now receive a reset password to your normal email address which you can use with the @gtempaccount.com login to access adsense and doubleclick. This new password should not affect your Google Apps password at all. Once you are logged in to Doubleclick, you should be able to add your original email address back into the system.

Good luck, and let me know how it goes!

Update:

Apple has released security update 2011-003 which should remove most instances of this malware automatically. Details about the removal process provided by this security patch can be found here.

You should receive this update automatically the next time your computer checks for system software updates. In addition, Apple Support document HT4650 outlines Apple’s recommended removal method for these malicious programs if you still need to remove it manually for some reason.

While it is more of a trick than a virus, many users are reporting infections by malware known as “macdefender” or “macprotector.” This software currently requires an administrator username and password before it can be installed, and results in nude photos for pornagraphic website appearing on the user’s computer. This infection usually begins with a user visiting an infected website and being prompted that “To help protect your computer, Apple Web Security have detected Trojans and ready to remove them.” If you receive this prompt, you should immediately exit your browser and close any running programs that appear to be software installers like this one. If you have already fallen for this trick and installed the software, then you are already infected. Unfortunately, Apple support has been less than helpful with resolving this problem for clients, with their official policy being “Do not attempt to remove malware”. Users are directed to the app store, but not given any instructions on what to do. Fortunately, users have several options for removal. First option: Manual removal

Start in safe mode by turning off your computer completely.

1. Press the power button to turn the computer back on.
2. Immediately after you hear the startup tone, hold the Shift key. The Shift key should be held as soon as possible after the startup tone, but not before the tone!
3. Release the Shift key when the gray Apple icon appears.
4. Once the computer has booted up, click on Finder (it is the blue happy face icon in the Dock)
5. Select Applications from the left pane of the window that appears
6. Important: Follow this step carefully! Find MacDefender.app or MacProtector.app and click and hold the application (do not double-click!) While holding the click-button down drag the application to the trash can on the dock and release.
   

   MacDefender removal

7. Open the Trash Can and verify that the application is now in the trash, then close the Trash window
8. Click and hold the Trash icon on the dock. On the menu that appears select “Empty Trash”
9. On the prompt “Are you sure you want to permanently empty the items in the Trash?” select Empty Trash
10. Reboot your computer as you normally would.
11. Open your browser of choice and reset it. To do this in safari select Safari from the toolbar and click “reset safari”
12. To prevent this problem in the future with safari click Safari in the toolbar and select Preferences.
13. Under the general tab unselect the checkmark next to Open “Safe” files including movies, pictures, sounds, PDF and text documents, and disk images and other archives.
14. Congratulations, Everything should be back to normal!

To remove the program automatically, you have a few options for virus scanners that can detect this malware. Home Users: Sophos for Mac, which is available for home users for free from here can detect this software. Business Users: ClamXav is available free, and can be downloaded here. College Students: If you are a UF student, you are entitled to use McAfee VirusScan for Macintosh (Virex) through the University of Florida’s licensing. While connected to the UF network you can download the software here.

This is a story about IT, the cloud and all the great and terrible things that happen when the two come together.  In many ways cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) is a blessing for understaffed, overworked Information Technology departments who are expected to deliver the best technology has to offer with 100% uptime and no budget.  With the emergence of web enabled services from major vendors like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google the  age old question posed to IT professionals — is it free — can finally be answered with a resounding yes! (At least for the basic version).

But like many of our grandparents have said before, experience has taught that the old adage remains: you get what you pay for. Sure, the service might be free, but with no service level agreement (SLA) there is no recourse when there is an email outage such as the 6 our more outages that affected Google Mail in 2009.  But worry not end users! There are paid upgrades available that include an SLA guaranteeing 99.9% uptime as well as phone and email support for critical issues.  At $50 per user per year this sounds like a steal!

What exactly do they mean by uptime and critical?

It all looks great on paper; there is no need to maintain physical hardware assets, no IT employees to pay, and the cost is less than licensing alone for most standalone solutions! Unfortunately, these marketing guarantees look like vaporware when the data hits the router.

To illustrate the shortcomings in the cloud, let’s use a real life example. A not for profit customer we’ll call “Charity X” wanted to reduce overhead and improve services for their staff. After over a decade of handling email and services internally, they decided it was time to move to the cloud.  Fortunately for them, as a not for profit institution they qualified for the non-profit edition of google apps.  Great!

Here’s the benefits they sought:

1. We can reduce our bandwidth use by not handling email ourselves
2. Our server resources will be freed up and can be used for other purposes
3. We can provide better webmail for our employees.
4. We get access to shared resources such as contact management and documents that are ‘in the cloud‘

The reality though was that this change wasn’t as simple as they had expected. It wasn’t a matter of click migrate users.

That’s when Charity X called me.

I began with configuring their Google Apps account and going through the process of upgrading it to the non-profit edition. I migrated their user’s mail using the built in migration tools, and I synchronized the user accounts with Google Apps Directory Sync Tool (GADS).  And that is where the utilities fell short.  It appears that Google thought about the idea of users synchronizing their active directory passwords with Google Apps.  I emphasize thought, because apparently that is as far as Google got.  Want Single Sign On? Want Synchronized passwords using LDAP or AD? Time to turn to third party tools.  Okay, fair enough. Third party tools are available to do this, and they work. No harm, no foul. But a little more documentation on the subject wouldn’t hurt.

Then all hell broke loose. A handful of users could not login to their Google Accounts. So the hunt for the cause began.

Were they suspended? — No!

Were they using the wrong password — No!

Could I update their password — No?

Strangely I could not update their user accounts using the web interface.  Any change — password, nicknames, email routing, names — resulted in an unknown error #1000.

Okay, I thought. It says to try again later, but I should be able to update their password using GADS.

GADS FAIL — 1301 Entity does not exist!

The GADS logs indicated that the user does not exist. That was unexpected since I had just looked at the user’s information in the web interface and it most certainly did exist.

Ticket Time

Time for that support to kick in! Since this was a non-profit edition, support is included. So I clicked support and followed the routing questions. Google determined that this was not a ‘critical’ issue since the service was not down completely, and I can’t say I disagreed. Google said the only support option available is esupport.

I filled out the form, and was quickly greeted with a friendly email from one of their customer service representatives. The representative worked with me to quickly determine that this issue was beyond his level of expertise and escalated the ticket to a specialist.

So far so good.

I then waited for 3 days. I received inquiries from staff about when they could check their email. When would it be fixed? They had deadlines and important matters that needed to be dealt with in their inboxes.

I asked support, which responded that they “don’t know any workarounds at the moment.” The only possibility that we were able to come up with was to delete the account and recreate it – not a very good solution since all mail would be lost between the transition and the time the account could be recreated.

So we waited some more. The email could not even be forwarded for affected users — any changes to email routing resulted in an unknown error.

A week passed, so I posted to Google’s support forum hoping someone — anyone — would have a suggestion on how to fix or workaround the issue. User after user reported similar problems since Google’s transition of Apps users to Google Accounts, but there were no resolutions other than to wait for manual intervention by a Google employee.

Time keeps on ticking

After eight days of waiting I came to a solution on my own.

Since it appeared that the accounts were partially created (they appeared in the web interface and could receive email but could not be modified or access services) it appeared their had been an error in how the accounts were processed during creation. It seemed clear to me that the problem was an inconsistency in Google’s infrastructure. Removing the accounts would allow the systems to agree on the account’s status, but could they both be made to agree that the accounts existed?  Perhaps I could force Google to recreate the already existing accounts without losing the current data.

I attempted to rerun the transition to Google Accounts on the affected users manually, but despite the auto-fill recognizing their usernames, when I clicked next I was given an error that the accounts did not exist.

My next approach was to create new users with the same names using the dashboard. This time I was told there was an error because the accounts did exist. Clearly there were two separate systems being queried.

It occurred to me that I might be able to get more useful error messages by going to the command-line. So I installed Google Apps Manager, which is also known as GAM. GAM uses the Google Apps provisioning API to interact with the Google Apps account.

I ran a number of queries on accounts I knew were affected using GAM to see what happened.  While queries would return data about the username, nicknames, and whether they had agreed to the terms of service, the users could not be modified, returning the error “1301 entity does not exist”. So I tried to create the user again, which had an unexpected result.

ServerBusy(1001)

Strangely, I was told that the system was busy. So I waited and tried again.

EntityExists(1300)

As I suspected, it told me the account already existed. But out of curiosity, I tried to login.

It worked

For whatever reason, I was now able to login to the affected account. I tried another account.

ServerBusy(1001)

Thinking maybe this error meant more than it was letting on, I attempted to login to this second account before trying again. This account also now worked as expected.

I checked the dashboard and the web interface now worked as expected on these accounts as well.

While the response was strange, whatever happened on the server end appeared to correct this problem, so I ran a script that contained all affected users and resolved the problems on the remaining accounts.

The cloud needs shock absorbers

Charity X is now working merrily away using Google Apps, Docs, and other tools in the cloud, but the transition has made it clear to management that there isn’t a magic oven that you can just “set and forget” when it comes to IT. While there is still a great value and savings to be had in the cloud, this downtime is disconcerting as an IT administrator.  When I run my own systems, I know what is happening behind the scenes, and if things go wrong I know where to look for the answers.  With hosted services I am at the mercy of third parties to provide adequate documentation and timely support. Even if my work is not the cause of the problem, I am still expected to deliver solutions to my customers quickly. When I can’t look under the hood, I need partners that can resolve problems in hours — not weeks. Customer support means providing actual solutions. Simply acknowledging a problem is not enough.

When cloud providers are vying for access to lucrative contracts with state and federal agencies and large corporations it is important that they remember that each customer counts. When a user can’t access their email it might not be considered critical to Microsoft or Google, but it is a critical issue to that user.  A week of downtime is simply unacceptable to users, especially if the affected user happens to be a decision maker.

I look forward to cloud services that work like a magic oven, but for the foreseeable future I see only job security in the cloud.

Fortunately, there is a fix.  For those of you who need a quick and simple fix, I recommend using neo office 3.1, which does not experience these issues. For those of you who want to use the latest and greatest from openoffice.org or LibreOffice, there is a relatively simple fix.

First, you will need to make sure your office program is closed.

Next, go to finder and control+click your office program’s icon.  On the menu that appears, select “Show Package Contents”.

Then open the folders:

Contents > basis-link > ure-link > lib

You’re almost there! Only three more steps!

Now you need to move the files “libjvmfwk.dylib.3″ and “sunjavaplugin.dylib” to the trash.

Finally, download these replacement files: libjvmfwk.dylib.3 and sunjavaplugin.dylib and put them in the folder you just deleted the originals from.

Now when you restart Open Office/Libre Office select:

[Program Name] >Preferences > [Program Name] > Java

Select the radio button and click OK.

All done! Your program should now work correctly!

Mastercard has been the most recent victim of this attack, as the group 4chan has been confirmed to have brought their website down completely, and there are unconfirmed reports that payment processing has also been affected. Paypal and Amazon have also been attacked by a group calling itself Anonymous, but so far have been able to withstand the attacks.

Using ddos against a website is illegal in most countries, but it can be difficult to stop since it often involves thousands of computers that are typically across several international boundaries or on separate networks.

Fortunately our customers are given protection from this sort of attack. We use a variety of threat identification tools, redundancy, and connection throttling to ensure our websites work reliably. Our systems employ a content delivery network that separates our systems geographically, so that an attack from one area of the world does not affect web performance in another geographic zone. We also detect unusual activity such as large numbers of requests or unusual requests from computers and check each computer’s connection against a variety of databases to determine if it has a good or bad reputation online. If all else fails, we use a throttling mechanism that reduces the load on our servers by turning off non-essential services. We then offload content onto backup servers to handle the added load. We even keep regular backups on and offsite to get things back up and running in the case of a hardware failure or natural disaster.

There are some things money can’t buy, but secure reliable hosting can be found at GainesvilleComputer.com. When you use Gainesville Computer you can be confident your website will continue at peak performance even under the most stressful conditions the net has to offer!

A simple fix for this problem is to connect your  idevice to your computer and allow iTunes to open.

Next, select the the phone or ipod touch from the list of devices and click “Music”.

Play a song from the library and then re-sync.

Finally, click eject and disconnect your apple touch device from the computer.

Everything should now be back to normal!