Personal Website of Yakov Shafranovich

Nabu Press = BiblioBazaar

For the past year or so, I have noticed a lot of new public domain books appearing in Amazon under Nabu Press. They seem to have no website and their books do not have any contact information, and I have gotten many inquiries from people thinking that my site, PublicDomainReprints.org is actually Nabu Press (we are not). Yet, they keep pumping out public domain reprints to a tune of over 600,000 titles so far.

I took some time to check various state corporation databases and actually managed to find who Nabu Press is. They are … BiblioBazaar / BiblioLife, a company started by former BookSurge partners after they sold their POD company to Amazon. It is no surprise that they print their POD books through Amazon.

How do I know this – take a look at the SC filing for Nabu Press LLC. The registered agent is for Nabu is:

ERIKA V. HARRISON
18-A CAROLINA
CHARLESTON, SC 29403

A search of the same site, reveals that only two other corporations have the same registered agent – BIBLIOBAZAAR II, LLC and BIBLIOLABS, LLC. BiblioLabs is part of BiblioBazaar as stated on their website.

So the final word is that Nabu Press is actually part of BiblioBazaar. HOWEVER, why did they NOT mention this on their website, and especially in the list of their imprints here? Could it be for legal reasons?

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Tags: publicdomainreprints, publicdomainreprints.org —

ARF Gets IESG Approval

The ARF draft passed IESG approval and is on its way to becoming a formal RFC. Background here and here.

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Abuse Reporting Format Passed IETF WG Last Call

The abuse reporting format I originally created in conjunction with ASRG and bunch of ISPs (that eventually morphed into MAAWG) has finally passed the Last Call in the IETF’s MARF working group. That means that it is now going to be going to the IESG for review and hopefully on its way to become an official Internet standard after almost five years.

This standard covers the way ISPs report spam and other abuse messages to each other and is currently in used by companies like AOL, Yahoo, etc. Becoming an official IETF standard is a big deal since it will finally put into final shape what this standard looks like.

Congratulations to the MARF co-chairs for leading the process and all of the participants.

My document repository will be updated some time tonight with the new information as well as all of the drafts.

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McAfee charging money for fixing a problem they caused

A friend of my has McAfee antivirus installed on his computer from the college he is attending (Towson University). Earlier today his computer started rebooting because of a faulty McAfee update that has crippled computers worldwide.

So he called McAfee’s customer service and guess what? They can fix the problem for a low fee of $90!!!!! They did not tell him to go online and lookup the instructions, or send him to Towson’s helpdesk since it is a corporate version – instead they are looking to make a quick buck because of a problem they themselves have caused.

This is shameful and they should be investigated.

UPDATE: McAfee posted that they will reimburse their customers for “reasonable expenses” incurred in fixing their computers. No details just yet.

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Tags: mcafee —

New IETF WG for ARF

After almost five years of work, the IETF finally chartered a new working group called MARF that will focusing on standardizing the Abuse Reporting Format that I first proposed back in 2005. This format is used between ISPs to facilitate automated reporting of spam activity.

The first draft as written by me in the beginning of 2005 after I left ASRG. The draft bounced back and forth over the last few years among an informal group of people at a mailing list maintained by Dave Crocker at MIPA. A large number of the list members were also members of MAAWG (of which I never formally participated but had the pleasure of speaking at their first conference in DC).

As I ran out of time, others have taken over the editing of the draft until the current editor, Murray Kucheraway took over. He has been very helpful in pushing for IETF standardization. A funny thing happened along the way as well – big ISPs started using the format – first AOL, then Yahoo and Microsoft.

This year, the IETF finally chartered a new working group which will now hopefully standardize this format and set it in a fixed version, so it can be used even more widely. Along with this, there is possibility of expanding different parts or uses of it as well.

A word of thanks goes out to all of the people that made this happen.

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When Too Many USB Devices Can Be a Bad Thing

Just a strange problem I ran into recently with a client. They were using a Windows XP computer with multiple USB devices. Somewhere after about 300 inserts and removes, Windows gave the following error message

The system has reached the maxium size allowed for the system part of the registry. Additional storage requests will be ignored.

Once that happens, all kinds of weird behavior starts to occur beginning with the fact that USB devices no longer work. The cause of this is due to the fact that every time a USB device is inserted, it creates registry entries. Apparently, with storage devices like Flash drives it is even worth, since there may be multiple devices – one for the drive, one for the actual physical key, and possibly a bridge as well. While Windows XP is not supposed to have such limits, it does occur, especially on systems using the “3GB” switch for bootup.

The solution – download the VxScrub utility from Veritas/Symantec which will clean out your registry from any old entries.

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Tags: windows —

Solution to Rootkit Infected Windows Machines

In the recent few month I have come more and more across personal laptops and desktops infected with various rootkits. The standard solution is to wipe the OS and reinstall. Recently an alternative may be a rescue CD with the antivirus software on it which is used to boot the computer and scan the filesystem directly.  Of course, this assumes that hackers have not modified the OS with non-standard malware.

The best one so far that I found is BitDefender’s RescueCD which can be downloaded here. A nice feature is that if you plugin a network cable, the CD will download the latest virus definitions before scanning.

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Tags: rootkits, security, windows —

How to Create CD-ROM Partitions on USB Flash Drives

Many recent flash drives such as Sandisk Cruzer come built in with a read-only CDROM-like partition which appears as a CD-ROM on the computer, and a second writable partition. It seems that this is something not done via software but must have support in hardware since presenting a device as a CD-ROM requires providing a different USB device flag. The tools are chipset specific and require a compatible flash drive/controller. Some more technical details appear here.

You can check this Russian site for full instructions and tools, or use this tool.

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Tags: cdrom, flash, usb —

Getting Flash to Work in Opera 9.64 and Ubuntu

The easiest way is to install the standard Debian 5.0 package instead of the Ubuntu-specific package. Full instructions can be found in Ubuntu Forums.

For the technical among you – there seems to be an issue with the statically linked package for Ubuntu. The dynamic package for Debian seems to work better.

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Tags: flash, opera, ubuntu —

Charlie the Groundhog

Charlie the Groundhog

Originally uploaded by netwizard

A groundhog has been attacking our garden for the past few weeks. After a call to the exterminator he has been finally caught. You can see it in the picture waiting to be transported out of the city.

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