Christmases as of late have seemed to arouse a lot of nostalgia (I’m guessing it’s the lack of turkey dinners). Anyhow, recently had the urge to listen to a couple of old favourites from my highschool years by KMFDM. KMFDM has a huge mass of songs that are kinda “meh”, but a surprisingly large collection of amazing songs as well. Youtube quality of course, but have a listen and consider downloading on iTunes or such:

Anarchy (God and the State remix)

Save Me:

I, like (I suppose) a lot of webdev people, haven’t been formally educated when it comes to tech stuff. I most struggle with server stuff, although I’m certainly getting better, and can *usually* figure stuff out, given enough time and perseverance. The latest issue is an example of something that, while not taking me too much time to figure out today, I could imagine myself a few years ago becoming frustrated and giving up on whatever project it was I had in mind. Being a reasonably benevolent global citizen, I’ve decided to share the solution.

The problem:
- want to install WordpressMU on local machine for dev purposes
- the WordpressMU installation page specifically states that you should use “localhost.localdomain” instead of simply “localhost” or “127.0.0.1″ as the “Server Address”
- WordpressMU doesn’t like port numbers in its URL/URI
- apache server (WAMP) was initially installed/configured to run on port 8080 instead of port 80

As far as the first bit, specific to WordpressMu in this case, I found a page on “maketecheasier.com” to be very useful, to summarise:

- run notepad as administrator and then open up the file “hosts” in “C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc” (you may have to select “all files” instead of “.txt files” or whatever in notepad in order to see the file).
- add lines “127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain” and, for example, “127.0.0.1 testblog1.localhost.localdomain” to the file (as many lines as needed for test blogs on your WordpressMU dev site), and save
- assuming that your WAMP server is configured to run on port 80, you should be good to go

Unfortunately, in my case, my WAMP server was configured to run on port 8080 instead, owing to that when I installed it, it complained and told me that port 80 was in use. I had had this issue before, and just assumed that this was a Windows specific issue – but this is incorrect. The culprit, in my cause, was Skype. I’ve actually blogged / researched about Skype recently for unrelated issues, but it turns out that Skype initially tries to work on port 80, and this apparently causes a conflict with a WAMP server running on port 80. The solution is pretty simple – turn of Skype before starting your WAMP server (you can turn it on after your WAMP server has started up), and all will be fine).

If you’ve already got some random configuration files for some other dev sites on your WAMP server configured with port 8080 instead of 80 (or no port) – don’t worry – you can just add another line in your httpd.conf file, something like:

# Listen: Allows you to bind Apache to specific IP addresses and/or
# ports, instead of the default. See also the
# directive.
#
# Change this to Listen on specific IP addresses as shown below to
# prevent Apache from glomming onto all bound IP addresses.
#
#Listen 12.34.56.78:80
Listen 8080
Listen 80

And there you have it. As usual – if this post helps you – please just take the time to leave a comment.

Cheers, and happy dev work

So, I was trying to download Skype the other day (from inside China) and I got silently redirected to the TOM Skype page (I wont link to it here because TOM Skype is malware) from the normal Skype domain name. My anti-virus browser plug-in started screaming “you’re at a malware site!” and this led me to do a bit of research about TOM Skype. Here are some interesting pages regarding the business partnership that TOM has with Skype:

• Nart Villeneuve’s blog post regarding his findings regarding TOM SKype
• Summary of findings regarding TOM Skype
• McAfee SiteAdvisor Page for skype.tom.com

There is a lot more information on the net about TOM Skype and how terrible it is – just use Google if you want to learn more. To quickly summarize the negative characteristics of TOM Skype, I’ve made a point form list:

• chat messages of TOM Skype users as well as others who are using non-TOM Skype and communicating with TOM Skype users are monitored and stored (possibly insecurely stored at that)
• advertisements (some not suitable for children) are displayed to TOM Skype users (no advertisements are currently present in the non-TOM version)
• there have been reports of trojans being bundled with the TOM Skype software

To make this all the more ridiculous, as of this writing, this is Skype’s privacy policy regarding the sharing of customer information:

Skype’s current privacy policy

This is quite ridiculous and is hugely contradictory to Skype’s promises of “safety and security”. Skype then has the gall to make amazingly disingenuous statements such as this:

https://support.skype.com/en-gb/faq/FA74/Does-Skype-contain-any-malware-or-spyware

Why is there no mention of TOM Skype?!?!? I was originally under the impression that only TOM-Skype compromised user privacy, but it seems that normal Skype is also not safe or secure. Here’s a nice little gem that I found in the privacy policy:

Your information may be stored and processed in any country in which Skype and its group companies maintain facilities, including outside of the EU. In this regard, or for purposes of sharing or disclosing data in accordance with this article 4, Skype reserves the right to transfer information outside of your country. By using Skype software, Skype’s websites or Skype products you consent to any such transfer of information outside of your country. As Skype continues to develop its business, Skype might sell or buy subsidiaries or business units. In such transactions as well as in the event Skype or substantially all of its assets are acquired by a third party, personal information of Skype users will generally be one of the transferred business assets. We reserve the right to include your personal information, collected as an asset, in any such transfer to a third party.

which, given the knowledge of TOM Skype, and then combined with:

Skype will retain your information for as long as is necessary to: (1) fulfil any of the Purposes (as defined in article 3 of this Privacy Policy) or (2) comply with applicable legislation, regulatory requests and relevant orders from competent courts.

there is basically no reason why anyone who has even a rudimentary desire for privacy to ever even consider using Skype. Basically, I’m pretty sure this means that, although Skype might not directly use your information or messaging history for nefarious purposes, they’re free to sell the information to subsidiaries (like TOM) that basically will use and store your information however they please. I’ve actually purchased “Skype credit” and now I’m going to send them an email requesting a log of any time my personal information or messages have been shared or stored, as I feel that I’m entitled to some level of customer service given that I’ve given money for my service (I’ll post transcripts – as I’m assuming they’ll refuse). I’m particularly disgusted with Skype, as in the past I’ve suggested to others to use Skype because it’s “secure”. Shame on this company for letting down its users.