Someone on a local comcast.net machine:

$ traceroute 75.72.0.20
traceroute to 75.72.0.20 (75.72.0.20), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
...
11  te-0-3-0-5-ar01.roseville.mn.minn.comcast.net (68.86.91.186)  38.256 ms  49.556 ms  49.310 ms
12  te-0-1-0-0-ar01.crosstown.mn.minn.comcast.net (68.87.174.218)  72.147 ms  66.879 ms  73.369 ms
13  te-8-1-ur02.pillsbury.mn.minn.comcast.net (68.86.232.86)  70.672 ms  73.403 ms  75.239 ms
14  ge-4-1-0-ten01.pillsbury.mn.minn.comcast.net (68.85.164.206)  78.400 ms  76.518 ms  72.266 ms
15  c-75-72-0-20.hsd1.mn.comcast.net (75.72.0.20)  75.868 ms  80.111 ms  86.035 ms

Is attempting to use an old Microsoft FrontPage remote administration tool exploit to cause a buffer overflow and gain access to my server. This is what it looks like in the Apache log file:

0\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\
x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x9
0\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90\x90" 414 546 "-" "-"
75.72.0.20 - - [29/Mar/2010:15:15:47 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 11988 "-" "-"
75.72.0.20 - - [29/Mar/2010:15:16:18 -0500] "POST /_vti_bin/_vti_aut/fp30reg.dll HTTP/1.1" 404 20680 "-" "-"

This is a known problem and it would be considerably more annoying if I were running FrontPage and/or IIS. All it does on my machine is dump my Apache processes and drive my systems loads through the roof.Effectively a DOS attack.

One of the canonical remedies simply redirects the requests to microsoft.com:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)cmd.exe(.*)$ http://www.microsoft.com/
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)root.exe(.*)$ http://www.microsoft.com/
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/_vti_bin\/(.*)$ http://www.microsoft.com/
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/scripts\/\.\.(.*)$ http://www.microsoft.com/
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/_mem_bin\/(.*)$ http://www.microsoft.com/
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/msadc\/(.*)$ http://www.microsoft.com/
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/MSADC\/(.*)$ http://www.microsoft.com/
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/c\/winnt\/(.*)$ http://www.microsoft.com/
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/d\/winnt\/(.*)$ http://www.microsoft.com/
RedirectMatch permanent (.*)\/x90\/(.*)$ http://www.microsoft.com/
</IfModule>

There is humor in this, though the right thing to do would be a redirect to a local 404.html file. This should effectively stop the propagation of the exploit.

(See also: linuxquestions.com: security)

The multi-touch enabled display is a composite of 28 projectors with a total resolution of 7168 x 3072 pixels. It supports both physical and acoustic gestures to pan and zoom data sets of arbitrary size. It is driven by a 31-node ROCKs v4.x visualization cluster. Each node is a Dell Precision 370 workstations (Intel Pentium 4 EM64T at 3.2 GHz, 2 GB RAM, HyperThreading, NVIDIA Quadro FX 3400 with 256 MB VRAM on a PCI Express x16 bus).

Given the age of the ROCKs distro and the supporting compute hardware, this display must have been in place for a number of years.

(See also: Navigating 13.3 gigapixels on a 22 megapixel display wall)
(See also: YouTube: University of Tromsø wall Demonstration)
(See also: ROCKs Clusters)

This is not the latest from XKCD, but it is one of the best.

(See also: XKCD: Fields arranged by Purity)

Art created by Michael Paukner, based on this NASA graphic. Notice the distortion of the path caused by the projection.

Check out the rest of Michael’s work on Flikr.

(See also: Michael Paukner: Solar Eclipse Paths 2001 – 2025)
(See also: NASA: Solar Eclipse Paths)

(See also: Michael Paukner: visualization collection)

The organizers of the EMBO Workshop on Visualizing Biological Data (a conference I’m very sad to miss as it is occurring this week!) have been working with a group of scientists to prepare a series of reviews on visualizing biological data. These reviews have been published in a supplementary issue of Nature Methods (Volume 7 No 3 ppS1-S68). In addition to five reviews covering visualization of data from systems biology, genomics, 3D macromolecular structures, alignments and phylogenies, and image-data. The supplement also contains a commentary on future visualization.

I’m especially interested in functional network mapping, though at first pass there appears to be little new in that area. Perhaps it is left as an exercise for the reader.

(See also: EMBO Workshop on Visualizing Biological Data (VizBi))

(See also: Nature Methods: March 2010, Volume 7 No 3 ppS1-S68)
(See also: Supplement on visualizing biological data)
(See also: Visualizing biological data—now and in the future)
(See also: Visualizing genomes: techniques and challenges)
(See also: Visualization of multiple alignments, phylogenies and gene family evolution)
(See also: Visualization of image data from cells to organisms)
(See also: Visualization of macromolecular structures)
(See also: Visualization of omics data for systems biology)