ビックカメラ.com事件：パスワードの不正利用

Yes, it really happens, even with sales giants... I wonder what caused (not detailed) BicCamera to reset all passwords of all accounts, and return points to affected cards. This is big, but Japanese media is not taking too hard on them.

Here is the email notification I received earlier today:

お客様への重要なお知らせ

拝啓　いつも弊社インターネットショッピングサイト「ビックカメラドットコム」

（以下、「ドットコム」といいます）をご利用賜り心から御礼申し上げます。
さて、ドットコムトップページの平成22年11月22日付「インターネット
ショッピングサイトの再開予定について」でもお知らせしておりますが、
ドットコムで発生しましたネットショップ会員のＩＤ・パスワードの不正利用
の事案について、お客様には多大なるご迷惑、ご心配をお掛けいたし
ましたこと、深くお詫び申し上げます。
今般、第三者機関によるセキュリティ診断によりドットコムサイトの安全
性が確認されましたので11月24日の午後2時をもちましてサイトを再開
させていただく予定でございます。

つきましては、安全性確保の為、 現在ご使用いただいているドットコムの
アクセスパスワードについては全て変更させて頂きました。
会員の皆様には大変ご迷惑をおかけいたしますが、今回ご案内させて
いただきました新しいアクセスパスワードにてご利用をお願いします。

尚、当面の間はドットコムサイトでの一時的なポイント使用・ 会員登録
の変更停止措置をとり、段階的に使用・変更停止措置を解除させて
いただきます。ポイント加算は従来どおり行われますのでご安心くだ
さい。また、より一層の安全面を考慮し、クレジットカード情報の事前登録
のサービスは停止させていただきます。会員の皆様にはご不自由を
お掛けしますが、何卒ご理解のほどよろしくお願い申し上げます。

パスワード：*******

ビックカメラドットコムのパスワード等に関するお問い合わせ先
ビックカメラドットコムサポートセンター
フリーダイヤル：0120-301-097　 電話番号：03-5985-7000
（営業時間　10:00～20:00年中無休）
※フリーダイヤルのご利用は11月24日午後2時～開始致します。
ｅメール　　：support@cc.biccamera.com
ビックカメラドットコム　http://www.biccamera.com

The message seems original (and there is official note in their website), but the mail server used is a bit suspicious (siella.jp, weird).

Official info:
http://www.biccamera.co.jp/ir/info101122.html
http://www.biccamera.co.jp/ir/info101123.html
http://www.biccamera.co.jp/ir/news/pdf2010/20101115news.pdf

Symbolic links on Windows

 I can't deny that this is not something most users will ever need. Nevertheless, I thought worthy to comment about as some issues from original sources are still to be fixed, so this might help people stuck in the same kind of problems.

The symlinks (symbolic links) or junctions as more commonly called in Windows (actually this is NTFS's junction point), are simple files or directories that actually are localed in some place else. The only difference here from usual links you can create on your desktop, for example, is the fact that all software (most of them) use the link location as if it was the real file. This is very handy in cases you want to move specific directories or files into other drives on your computer. Although Windows do not officially added support for NTFS junctions, it has released some official tools to handle it.

A classic case here for me is the virtual machine. Trying to update the latest version of the iPad, I need to run a backup first, which takes nothing less than 10~20GB of my virtual hard drive (thank you iTunes - I am being sarcastic btw)... my solution here then is to simply create a new temporary virtual drive just for this task (don't ask me how long this takes).

Junction application

You need to install (my suggestion is to save the file into c:\Windows\system32\, which will make the command available anywhere from the command-line) the junction application from Microsoft SysInternals: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx

Do not follow the instructions of usage there, because they are incorrect (well, as far as this post date). I have sent a message to them to fix it, but only almighty knows when or if this is going to happen.

Junction commands

Creating

just go to the path where you want to create the junction (from command-line)

c:\> junction iTunes h:\iTunes

(here I am setting the real files of iTunes directory to be in H drive)

Note: The local iTunes file/directory is going to be created by the junction application, so DO NOT create a real file with the same name here in advance (as specified in official documentation).

Searching

c:\> junction -s

(this will search and list for all junctions available in C drive)

Removing

c:\> junction -d iTunes 

But...

The only bad side here is that this action really happens in the file system level, leaving Windows dumb to deal with them (in Windows Explorer, you will just see it as another directory like any other)... forgetting about what you did may give you some headaches later, so I usually write a README file to really remember me about something unusual I have done in that particular location.

Creating ISO images on Ubuntu

I couldn't hold myself... it is just THAT easy!

$> cat /dev/cdrom > ~/cd.iso

This will create an ISO image file for all contents on your CD device.

Now, if you want to create ISO with files/directories from your local conputer:

$> mkisofs -r -o file.iso /path/to/directory

Note: This is installed in Ubuntu by default.

Stupidly easy!


Source: http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Feisty/CDDVDBurning

Download Youtube Videos: The easy way

Once in a while I get to download Youtube videos here and there, but in most cases I am always targeting  some particular topic, and the result, as expected, is just so overwhelming (meaning, so many videos available, you don't know from where to start).

In many cases, though, you just have a bunch of small files that are not least important, but the pain to go over all of them page by page can become the reason for you not to watch them at all. Ok, if you have the time to stay in front of the computer and watch them in a batch, Youtube has features to help you on that.

In my case, however, I mostly want to check them out later, specially carrying the files on my mobile device (iPhone), so I can watch them whenever I have spare time.

So I was looking for some tools to ease my downloading pain (used to use the Easy Youtube Video Downloader, an add-on for Firefox, but it is still one-by-one kind of tool, which was still painful), I came across the youtube-dl script, which solved all my problems.

With very minimum command-line options, you are able to download all videos in specific format of any playlist, search results... really the kind of thing I was looking for!

Here is an example to download from a playlist (which I use a lot):

# from command-line (terminal)

./youtube-dl -m -o "%(title)s_%(id)s.%(ext)s" {link}

Notes:

• the original downloable file is downloaded as a simple file by default. To execute it such as above, you will need to give executable permissions to it: sudo chmod 755 youtube-dl
• the "-m" option is for "mp4" mobile formats
• the output name by default comes as an ID only, which is hard to track what was that video file about, so we can adjust its name such as my example above.
• the "link" can be either:
• a video link, such as  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5QIboyWscY
• a playlist link, such as http://www.youtube.com/user/AtGoogleTalks#p/c/B74595015191C796
• searches, etc...

See the youtube-dl main page for additional information.

Ubuntu, it has never been so easy

Not so much free time to write here recently, but I just wanted to share how easy things are getting with Ubuntu, and Linux in general. I can really forecast the moment when the whole idea of Linux = Geek will simply disappear, opening space for it to really scale in the market.

My post today talks about drivers, still one of the hard things to do in Linux (I mean, for "human beings").

I have two updates that surprised me with the simplicity.

1) Printers

This has always been a pain in the Linux world. First, you go buy a printer, and usually you focus on features and price, right? How about support and software? Only Windows, sometimes Mac (but still rare). When you decide to use a printer on Linux, you have to pray so that someone coded the driver for your hardware (the printer), and most of the time, there is none.

One big example is at my company, which uses Xerox network printers, with simply no support or drivers available. You can manage, with some work, to find similar drivers that will partially make it functional, but of course this is not enough (imagine if you are talking about migrating end-users to Linux... this is killer-feature). How do we solve the problem? Workaround by sending the data to a Windows machine that talks to the Xerox printer. At least it works.


At home I use HP (of course), which has people more interested in contributing to the open-source community, so you can find lots of drivers to install... but still, it was a matter of installing the driver, all that hard work... I had to do that until Ubuntu 9, very recent.

Today I had to use my printer again after a while (after iPhones and iPads, who needs paper?) so I had to install the drivers again... oops, I am lying. I didn't do a thing. Just went to:

 System > Administration > Printing

My printer just appeared there, so I added it, and that was it. All the pain, just gone. Really impressive.  If you need to use a printer in Ubuntu, try this first.

2) Web Cameras

This one here was never as hard as the printers, but lack of software for webcams were the problem, IMO. In the last couple of years, this has already changed considerably, but I never thought it would be so easy to do stuff with webcam in Linux.

So I bought this nice (and cheap) webcam with HD resolution, Buffalo BSW32K01H, and plugged it in. That is all. Even if Buffalo does not officially give support for drivers in Linux, webcams talk on a standard way to the computer, which makes it simple to give support to practically any webcam there is.

I wanted to test it out (usually use the Cheese application), but I wanted to provide a visualization through web. I ran into this post, that talks about he webcam-server, a very simple and interesting application which gives access to the camera through HTTP. Then, with a simple Java applet (already included in the package), you can build a simply surveillance system at home. I put it working and "streaming" to my mobile in less than 10 min (most of the time was spent reading the post, lol).

For my personal reference, I will leave a sample of what needs to be done:

 # install

 sudo apt-get install webcam-server

 # run it (and leave on background)

 webcam-server -v -g 640x480 -p 8081 -c Home-Cam &

 # access it

 firefox http://localhost:8081/

 # read the post if you want to implement a daemon mode (init.d)

 # and auto-refresh with java applet (also included in the man pages)