Recently I'm getting a rash of E-mails with garbage characters...
From: "Electronic Design Update" To: snipped-for-privacy@analog-innovations.com Reply-To: "Penton Design Engineering & Sourcing" Date: 19 Feb 2015 10:40:03 -0500 Subject: Special Edition: How to get data sheet values from your SAR ADC Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
WTF? ...Jim Thompson
with garbage characters...
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cial Edition: How to get data sheet values from your SAR
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...Jim Thompson
>
Oh-oh. They are coming. They are definitely coming! Time to dig in, load the Winchester and make a stand :-)
This morning I had my own comeuppance. McAfee (came pre-loaded with new PC) decided to replace all the links in received emails with their own (!) links. Without asking my approval. IMHO messing with other people's mail border on illegal behavior. What are these guys thinking? Or, are they thinking at all? Time to ditch it, I guess.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
I don't run any virus protection on my main desktop and laptop systems. They all run the Linux OS, which by default doesn't run ANY script, executable, screensaver or other possibly malicious code with out specific action from you. Never had a problem with it in almost
20 years, now! I also have a web/mail/DNS/etc. server directly on the net, running Linux, and it has resisted all manner of attacks for quite some time. (About 8-10 years ago the server did get hacked a couple times, before I figured out how to make it more secure.)One of my kids got a laptop with Windows 8, and it was totally trashed in less than 6 months.
Jon
most of the time the problem is in front of the keyboard, if people mindlessly answer yes to any website that wants to install something, no amount of antivirus is going to save them
-Lasse
Many times (like in my case) the numerous problems are in front of keyboards at OS manufacturers and anti-virus software makers. So obviously it is necessary again to turn automatic updates off and inspect anything and everything before letting them, update. A sad state of affairs.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
sad indeed, I know I',m never going to buy a Lenovo computer
I use ms security essentials all other antivirus seems to make more trouble than they prevent
Mcafee himself (he is batshit crazy:) ) know Mcafee antivirus is crap
-Lasse
It is another language like Chinese, Arabic, etc expressed with 2 bytes(characters) per glyph. I thought most people knew this; been around for a fair number of years.
Recently I'm getting a rash of E-mails with garbage chara cters...
tions.com
rcing"
Edition: How to get data sheet values from your SAR
ADC
ming! Time to dig in, load
stand :-)
cAfee (came pre-loaded with new
e all the links in received emails with their own
links. Without asking my approval. IMHO messing with oth er people's
these guys thinking? Or, are
ime to ditch it, I guess.
I got a new PC with Mcafee t oo... I'm not sure how long it will last. Last PC I inst alled AVG. Do you have a favorite?
George H.
Yes... Linux.
AVG quit working a long time ago. No explanation, nothing.
No but I want to look at Malwarebytes (the paid version). One of the major advantages is that it keeps supporting XP.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
7 PM UTC-5, Joerg wrote:
ails with garbage characters...
tronic Design Update"
Penton Design Engineering & Sourcing"
:40:03 -0500
data sheet values from your SAR
-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
ng. They are definitely coming! Time to dig in, load
ning I had my own comeuppance. McAfee (came pre-loaded wi th new
ived emails with their own
g my approval. IMHO messing with other people's
l border on illegal behavior. What are these guys thinkin g? Or, are
I guess.
sure how long it will last.
ZoneAlarm antivirus, Ma lwarebytes antimalware, NoScript and AdBlockerPlus for Fi refox on my last three machines and on my new(ish) touchs creen laptop with Win 8.1. No infections since I started using that combo. All are free versions.
The guys th at rate antivirus progs tend to ding ZoneAlarm as a resou rce hog (scan during startup and memory use during normal operation means delays of a minute or so getting on line from pressing power on and slightly slower everything), but my new laptop has so much more memory and is so much faster than my previous machines that don't I notice it a ny more.
Mark L. Fergerson
Zinc oxide works nicely for diaper rash. Maybe it will also work for email rash?
Ok, that means it was probably part of a MIME attachment.
The problem is that you didn't supply the entire header, so I can't tell what was happening. Your news reader also posted "8-bit clean" text, which loses the info in the unprintable characters. I tried feeding it to a hex editor (HxD Hex Editor) and converting the mess into various encoding formats to see if anything intelligent can be extracted. Nope. My initial guess(tm) is that part of the MIME attachment was missing, and what you're seeing is the encoded graphics payload, which looks like garbage.
If you really want to know what's inside, forward the original message to me (address in signature) including the entire header and I'll see what I can excavate.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Sent. Thanks! ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Got it.
What you sent me is only 3.76 Kbytes big, which suggests that it was incomplete, truncated, malformed, mis-sent, butchered, or various combinations of the aforementioned. The message header looks much like the Machine Design junk mail I currently receive from the same publisher, so I'll assume that it's authentic despite the (optional) SPF authentication failure. No sign of spoofing or hijacking.
The header includes the line: MIME-Version: 1.0 which suggests that the message should have been in MIME attachment format, which is lacking. There's no sign of the required headers, separators, or encoded content which usually look like this: Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="aaaabbbbccccddddeeeeffffgggg-etc"
I again tried to decode the binary content, but because you sent it as a TXT file showing "8-bit clean" instead of forwarding the original binary, I can't extract any intelligence. It's possible that the tiny
3.76 KByte file size is the result of your email programs TXT conversion, where it hit an EOF character, and truncated the message. Sorry, but no luck.On the possibility that it may have been an alien communication, I printed the message and placed it on my Ouija board for decoding. After about 15 minutes of aimless wandering, the following text slowly began to appear: "Greetings citizens of planet Earth. We come in peace and have much to offer your civilization ..." where it abruptly ended. It might be interesting if you could find the missing rest of the message. Try forwarding the original.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Sno-o-ort ;-)
I'll look for the message directly in the mbx file. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Don't fall for it! IT'S A COOKBOOK!!!
Any sufficiently advanced alien visitors are indistinguishable from magicians, cannibals, resource exploiters, imperialists, and slavers. You have only to look at our own history for 2000 years of recorded examples.
I can see the logic in cannibalism. If someone in the tribe is successful at some task, and achieves general acclaim from the tribe, the proper thing for the tribe to do in his honor is to kill him and eat him so that the entire tribe may share in his good fortune. This tends to be somewhat of a counter incentive to being successful and might explain why it took mankind so long to achieve civilization. Actually, we still practice a downsized form of cannibalism, where the tribe eats everything except the individual. It's called taxation.
Had Jim's email really been a message from an off world civilization, it's highly likely that it would have been 100% spam, advertising, or encrypted garbage.
Pretend you're in orbit in your flying saucer, and are trying to decode ATSC, DVB, ISDB, DMB, DTMB, HD Radio, etc digital audio and TV. Without the relevant documentation, you don't have a chance. Actually, even with the relevant documentation, it's quite difficult. Of course, once you're able to reverse engineer the standards and decode the transmissions, you'll only find political programming, talking heads, bad drama, talk radio, Home Shopping Network, begging for dollars, sermons, re-runs, and irritating advertising. Would you even want to meet the inhabitants of a planet that considers this manner of junk to be the highest form of entertainment and education? Might as well turn around and go back home.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
You just stated the problem with socialism; eat the productive.
Well, you have a problem. After took a look at the 2nd mess you sent me. This time it was 12.9 KBytes long and showed a conglomeration of two different message headers from Electronic Design, with some binary gibberish mixed in between. You can see for yourself by opening it in Wordpad or other text editor. Rather than leap to my usual premature and wrong conclusion, I put the problem aside, and went off and did something different.
Upon returning to the problem 3 hrs later, I deduced that what you either have is a disk drive in need of running CHKDSK or Eudora has gone insane and scrambled your mailbox (MBX file). I suspect the former because some (but not all) of the transitions between message and binary garbage occur at 4KByte cluster boundaries. Also, the binary junk decodes into something resembling a DLL file. So, what you're looking at is a mangled FAT (file allocation table).
I'm not going to recommend any specific procedure on how to recover. Eventually, you will need to run CHKSK /F to fix the problem, which will probably need to be run on bootup with the OS not loaded. The potential for scrambling the contents of your drive is always there and I don't want to take the responsibility without a proper backup.
I suggest an image backup using Acronis 2014 (not 2015) booted from a CD disk or other disk imaging software. Also make a backup of your Eudora directory. The MBX files may be trashed, but it's better than nothing.
Run a program that checks the S.M.A.R.T. disk drive data to be sure that the drive isn't in the process of meeting its maker. I use Speedfan and DiskCheckup. Speedfan produces a human readable report that will tell you if your drive it kaput.
Run Belarc Advisor and print the resulting 5-10 pages. The report includes most everything you'll need to know about your machine to recover, should the drive be trashed beyond recovery, including the activation codes and serial numbers of licensed software which you've probably forgotten.
Finally, run CHKDSK /F or right click on the disk drive icon, select properties -> Tools -> Error Checking. It will complain that it needs a reboot to run. Do it and hope for the best.
Hopefully this will turn out to be just a minor hiccup resulting in only the loss of a few email message. However, I would treat it as an indication of potentially more serious problems, thus the multiple backups.
Good luck.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
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