Random thought on smart appliances

Smart home "white box" appliances, appliances which are not handheld, have no business being wifi connected. They should be 10/1000 Mbps ethernet or canbus.

Sophisticated Google Phishing Attack

There appears to be a high quality account takeover attacks, targeting Google Gmail accounts where the bad actor tries to initiate a password reset on the victim. 

In order to facilitate the attack, they're using Google Cloud Monitoring to send the victim a convincing email from the google.com domain such that it passes Gmail's SPF email checks.

The attacker first phones the victim, claiming that they're checking about a primary phone number change or something. They then send the alert email above to "authenticate* themselves before they initiate a password change where they ask the user to complete the verification check on their device. They will tell the user what number to confirm. After the victim does that, it's game over.

Anyways, I hope no one I know falls victim to this attack.

Of grading and sky zombies

In the wake of that that had occurred in the University of Oklahoma where the teacher and teacher's aid were strongly disciplined for grading a student poorly for not completing the assignment, one would imagine that it would create an effective moratorium against free form essays assignments and encourage multiple-guess answers … or has it?

I'd like to propose a possible solution:

1. Students hand in their essay.

2. Every student is given 3-5 essays from other students to grade and they're given a guide as how to grade.

3. The teachers and teacher's aid grade the grading as a high quality grading indicates understanding of the topic and students are assigned a weighted average of the grade that other students had assigned.

This way, the teachers and teacher's assistants are never actually directly grading the assignment.

The student's essays were judged by their peers.

Slideshare support email does not work

 As of today, 18th November 2025, examining the slideshare website for support info reveals the following:

I composed an email to the address indicated and I received the following bounce:

That was unhelpful. I guess that whomever's task it is to answer support emails for Slideshare are having an easy time with no work to do...

Lots of SSH login attempts

 Got a lot of login attempts via ssh on a machine...

WhatIsMyIP.com Whois Lookup Report for: 121.165.204.105 
% [whois.apnic.net]
% Whois data copyright terms    http://www.apnic.net/db/dbcopyright.html

% Information related to '121.160.0.0 - 121.191.255.255'

% Abuse contact for '121.160.0.0 - 121.191.255.255' is 'irt@nic.or.kr'

inetnum:        121.160.0.0 - 121.191.255.255
netname:        KORNET
descr:          Korea Telecom
admin-c:        IM667-AP
tech-c:         IM667-AP
country:        KR
status:         ALLOCATED PORTABLE
mnt-by:         MNT-KRNIC-AP
mnt-irt:        IRT-KRNIC-KR
last-modified:  2017-02-03T02:22:01Z
source:         APNIC

irt:            IRT-KRNIC-KR
address:        9, Jinheung-gil, Naju-si, Jeollanam-do
e-mail:         irt@nic.or.kr
abuse-mailbox:  irt@nic.or.kr
admin-c:        IM574-AP
tech-c:         IM574-AP
auth:           # Filtered
remarks:        irt@nic.or.kr was validated on 2020-04-09
mnt-by:         MNT-KRNIC-AP
last-modified:  2025-09-04T01:00:01Z
source:         APNIC

person:         IP Manager
address:        Gyeonggi-do Bundang-gu, Seongnam-si Buljeong-ro 90
country:        KR
phone:          +82-2-500-6630
e-mail:         kornet_ip@kt.com
nic-hdl:        IM667-AP
mnt-by:         MNT-KRNIC-AP
last-modified:  2017-03-28T06:37:04Z
source:         APNIC

% Information related to '121.160.0.0 - 121.191.255.255'

inetnum:        121.160.0.0 - 121.191.255.255
netname:        KORNET-KR
descr:          Korea Telecom
country:        KR
admin-c:        IA9-KR
tech-c:         IM9-KR
status:         ALLOCATED PORTABLE
mnt-by:         MNT-KRNIC-AP
mnt-irt:        IRT-KRNIC-KR
changed:        hostmaster@nic.or.kr 20240912
remarks:        This information has been partially mirrored by APNIC from
remarks:        KRNIC. To obtain more specific information, please use the
remarks:        KRNIC whois server at whois.kisa.or.kr.
source:         KRNIC

person:         IP Manager
address:        Gyeonggi-do Bundang-gu, Seongnam-si Buljeong-ro 90
address:        KT Head Office
country:        KR
phone:          +82-2-500-6630
e-mail:         kornet_ip@kt.com
nic-hdl:        IA9-KR
mnt-by:         MNT-KRNIC-AP
changed:        hostmaster@nic.or.kr 20240912
remarks:        This information has been partially mirrored by APNIC from
remarks:        KRNIC. To obtain more specific information, please use the
remarks:        KRNIC whois server at whois.kisa.or.kr.
source:         KRNIC

person:         IP Manager
address:        Gyeonggi-do Bundang-gu, Seongnam-si Buljeong-ro 90
address:        KT Head Office
country:        KR
phone:          +82-2-500-6630
e-mail:         kornet_ip@kt.com
nic-hdl:        IM9-KR
mnt-by:         MNT-KRNIC-AP
changed:        hostmaster@nic.or.kr 20240912
remarks:        This information has been partially mirrored by APNIC from
remarks:        KRNIC. To obtain more specific information, please use the
remarks:        KRNIC whois server at whois.kisa.or.kr.
source:         KRNIC

% This query was served by the APNIC Whois Service version 1.88.34 (WHOIS-US2)



Tool URL: https://www.whatismyip.com/ip-whois-lookup/

Deleted by moderator: Britain has narrow and twisty rural roads whereas Canada has straight and wide rural roads, but...

Q: Britain has narrow and twisty rural roads whereas Canada has straight and wide rural roads, but Britain still has a much lower road traffic accident rate compared to Canada. What can we infer based on the above statement?

A: I am aware that most people are reductionist and like to resolve the one prime thing responsible for the phenomenon bit in reality, multiple things play a part. I shall attempt to be brief in my answer:

The UK driving licence is not trivial and in addition to the theory test, there is a practical component that is at least 40 minutes of driving.

People naturally drive more cautiously and are more aware of their surroundings when the road looks more dangerous. A great example of this would be roundabouts: They look more dangerous than a junction guarded by traffic lights but they're made safe by the drivers being cautious and more aware.

Straight and wide roads invite drivers to pay less attention to the road. They also invite drivers to drive faster. More speed and less attention would naturally result in more road traffic accidents, including single vehicle events where the vehicle enjoys a detour from the road.

Long straight roads are not good for human drivers. They may be great for autonomous vehicles but human boredom should be considered for roads intended for humans. As to why new roads in the UK are rarely straight, it's again because of multiple factors. Sure, an absolutely straight road would be the shortest road but it may not be the cheapest to construct and it may not be safest for human drivers.

Java 25 First Impressions

About the most interesting thing in Java 25 is JEP 505 Structured Concurrency. It can clean up a lot of complex code where formerly, one had to jump through hoops to clean up on failure. It looks like it should work very well with the virtual threads that are already introduced. To properly leverage it, it does mean that engineers will need to be more careful around InterruptedException and don't just eat it as was commonplace before. JEP 513 is a 'meh' thing which can help but there was perfectly adequate workarounds using static methods to validate constructor arguments and more. Meanwhile JEP 495 feels kinda pointless.

Innoventions INN-8668

 Because it is a current topic, I have decided to disassemble my RAMCHECK device for my first time.

The device looks like this:

and the serial number is 016698

And with the cover removed:

And exposing the motherboard below:

I dumped the firmware:

• INN8668-2_40-odd.bin
• INN868-2_40-even.bin