Museum-quality finds!

Ever found something that a museum thinks could be worthy of preservation?

Ever find it in a museum?

This amused me somewhat!

After a heads up from a contributor about a surviving interactive demonstration of Prestel, I made some enquiries with the Science Museum in London. It turns out that yes, they have it, but apparently it "has not been placed on the Science Museum inventory". I read that to mean that it's not an exhibit as such, merely a display item, much like the introductions and signage you see all over the place. And as such, could be removed and destroyed at any time, as a similar item already has been! It might only be luck that it's still there..

I've voiced my concerns, and they are being raised with the appropriate people. In the meantime, I'm hoping for some technical data about it, and maybe a copy of the database. Let's try and preserve this!

Top 5 hit!

I've just discovered I had a hit with a programme I wrote! :)

Back in late 1986 I sold something called "The Beeb Editor" to Micronet for their telesoftware downloads. For my Viewdata site I've been processing the Autumn 1989 edition of LogOn magazine, sent out to all Micronet Members, and just discovered it was number 4 in the top BBC downloads. 3 years later. I obviously missed this first time around.

I've actually still got the contract in my file (in my mum's name, for some reason, but signed by me,) but I have not got a clue what the program actually was any more. I'll have to have a good search through my discs to find a copy and see.. Worse, I don't recall receiving any payments for it, either..

Some data located, and CSS, argh!

Not quite the mother-lode, but it seems that at least one former Prestel IP has retained a significant amount of data from their service, plus portions and snapshots from various other bits of Prestel. There is only the relatively minor issue of arranging to get the data off a variety of formats of obsolete media now. More info when I'm in a position to detail it...

A couple more "no information has been kept" responses to the FoI requests...

And I wish I knew more about CSS - I just can't persuade a new part of the website to look like the old part.. sigh...

Only the echoes remain

As anybody who is reading this knows, I've been putting together a website at www.viewdata.org.uk to celebrate the heyday of Viewdata in the UK, especially Prestel. Prestel was invented by the GPO back in the 1970s, and launched in 1979, to encourage use of the telephone system, and was basically a dial-up computer network that allowed individual companies to publish information and offer interactive services. Name something you can do on the Internet today, and it's likely someone was doing it on Prestel in the 1980s. All on a teletext-style screen!

Last week, armed with the Prestel Directory, October 1983, I launched myself at What Do They Know? with the intent of eliciting any remaining information from the many public bodies that had had a presence on Prestel.

I only got two pages into the directory, somewhere in the "B"s, and found a dozen people to write to. So I did. It's only been three days, out of the twenty they are allowed, but so far four of them have indicated that they have nothing remaining.

Unfortunately, this seems fairly typical. I've not yet found anybody or any company that still has a copy of their pages, apart from myself. For a publishing effort that would have taken much time, many people, and several thousand pounds of investment, it's amazing that every public body that has so far replied hasn't got a single scrap of paper remaining about what they did at the time. I'm still amazed that there's no trace left anywhere of data and software from Prestel itself.

I learned yesterday too that an archive of the Music Link site from Prestel survived to late 2001, before being ruined while outside the control of the owner.

Sometimes it feels like a whole piece of our history has been snipped out of the timeline. Just like a bad Science Fiction film, where somebody made a mistake, and travelled back in time to correct it, changed the future, but left echoes behind of what should-have-been. All I can find are the echoes and none of the substance..

Viruses...what a time waster!

For the last few days, I've been working on another website. It's been fun, writing code that people actually seem to be impressed by.

Yesterday, I woke up, opened up the laptop, started to play, and found myself looking at a "Windows security centre" screen and a prompt to install a "Windows Malware" program. Hmm. Now I'm not quite that gullible, so try to just close the windows, but it still pops up an installation dialogue and runs through something too quickly for me to catch and kill it in Task Manager,

So...I've been infected with a virus. It knocked out the AVG anti-virus I had on here, and seemed to block access to several websites that dealt with virus issues. Trend Micros' one-shot "housecall" did run, and spotted four "FakeAV" Trojans, and deleted them, but didn't manage to cure the problem, and indeed got knocked out when I tried to run a full scan rather than the quick one.

In the end I only managed to get rid of it using the f-secure emergency boot disc.. That's a nifty little disc that boots into and runs Linux from memory, and then can scan the NTFS disc partitions where Windows lives. All it can do is rename the infected files, rather than move them anywhere else, but that's usually enough, and it was.

Of course, making the disc was a story in itself.. Suffice to say that my wife's nifty little Dell XPS laptop white elephant couldn't even burn a CDR reliably, so I ended up using an old Acer that mostly these days tends to run software from Fisher Price for the little one!

So, after spending nearly five hours getting rid of the thing, and another three trying to re-install some anti-virus software (AVG failed to reinstall, even after uninstalling it, so I ended up with Avast) I set about looking for how on earth I had been infected in the first place.

Now I use Opera as my browser, and it usualy just opens up all the tabs I had open in the previous session. So I fire that up, and the new AV pops up a "website blocked" warning message. OK... I've got close on 40 tabs open, which one is it. And why? I thought Opera was fairly resilient to attacks. I'd been suspecting the old copy of IE6 that I had fired up for the first time in ages the previous day, to access the courtservice government website, that doesn't like Opera. So I close all the tabs that I didn't need any more, all those I'd run across when looking for something else, that sort of thing, leaving just things like my email, the bank, the stuff I was working on, etc. Close Opera and reload it - same warning. The bad website it's referring to is rokobon.com, so I start doing a view-source on each page in turn, looking for the reference.

And I find it - on my own viewdata.org.uk website!! There's an Iframe link added to the end of the index.php page! WTF?! Has somebody hacked my FTP password? Is there a bug in the CMS that allows injection of code?

I've not looked into it too closely, but at one point I remember seeing an Adobe Acrobat warning that the document I was trying to open was written in a later version than I had installed, so might not work properly. I thought it odd at the time, as I'd not tried to open any documents, and the warning box didn't give an option to cancel the load. I suspect now that this was where the issue was - something somehow added the iframe to my page, which then included a PDF of some sort in a hidden window. This took advantage of a vulnerability in Acrobat to fire off the virus code. So Opera itself was not at fault.. At least I can press F12, turn off plugins, and carry on browsing safely.

So I check my other sites. They all have the malicious code added. That lets off the CMS, but when a simple place-holder website that has nothing more than an index.html page with a single JPEG image has been infected, then there's something else at work. I check the access logs for that site - it gets maybe one or two visits from search engines a day, and that's all it has. However the virus got there, it wasn't via an HTTP connection. It has to be server-side. Drat. This is confirmed when I look up and visit several other random web sites that are hosted on the same machine, and absolutely nothing to do with me. Everybody has the same code on their website.

I logged it with my hosting co's Tech Support, and they seem to know about it, and say they are removing the codes. But eight hours later they have still not fixed the issue. So please be careful if you visit any of my websites. (This blog is safe, as the subdomain is hosted elsewhere.) I tried removing the code manually last night, but it came back..

There's something to be learned from this. Don't just keep your browser up to date with all the security patches. Anything that provides it with a plugin is vulnerable, too. Time to go update Acrobat..

And try and work out how to catch up on a completely wasted day..

Making old data visible, easily!!

Many years ago I was heavily involved in the viewdata industry - working for Micronet 800 and then producing software for other Prestel ISPs, running my own viewdata BBS, etc. I therefore accumulated rather a lot of viewdata pages, and managed to recover these from an old backup a few years ago.

As part of a separate project, Vewdata.org.uk I wanted to display these images. As they were saved using a BBC Micro, I loaded them up in a BBC Micro Emulator, under Windows, took a screen capture, pasted that into Photo Editor, cropped it, saved it out as a GIF, and finally uploaded it to the web server. I then had to add the image to whichever gallery it belonged in. As you can guess, this is fairly labour intensive, and gave rather variable results.

Being a firm believer in "let the computer" do the work, I started this side project to condense all this into as little work as possible. What I wanted to acheive was to reduce the steps to: 1. Upload original saved screen file to the web server. 2. End.

I think this has now achieved this, and more so! There are currently two scripts in the suite - vl.php (viewdata lister) will scan a given directory and construct a web page bsaed on the files it finds. vv.php is used as an image source for each file, and this reads the files and constructs a PNG or animated GIF, as appropriate, and returns it to the client.

As a side-benefit of having the original save file available, it's also possible to provide a text-only version of the frames! I hope this will make things more search-engine friendly.

You can find the files here.

At the time of writing, you can find a sample page here that shows the results that can be acheived for a random selection of pages from Prestel, Teletext and some LAN based services.

Please add any comments or suggestions below.

Slurp

Fancy a free cuppa?
http://www.twinings.co.uk/free-tea/

I tried some Assam last time they published this offer - I'm not a great tea drinker, preferring a nice coffee, but it was OK. This one is for the more herbal type teas, so it'll be something new.. Pity they are so expensive compared to a box of PG !