Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2015 March 30

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

March 30

Major downloading problem

Hello,

Yesterday, I downloaded 'Adobe_CC_keygen_32and_64_bit_keygen_downloader' and another similar software that I deleted now as it was not functioning, ever since that time, my computer keeps on downloading things I'm unaware of. Everytime I view my 'data received' information after turning the internet on, it accelerates to 'Mbs' instantly without downloading or using the internet... I'm lost. I'm on pay as you go 'kbs' and its rinsing it out... How could I stop this downloading from occuring without my wish and will? Adobe CC is not installed yet...because two other software automatically downloaded themselves (noted below) without my wish and will...

Note: Two softwares also automatically installed/downloaded themselves without my choice, 1) 337 Gaming for Fun 'link shortcut' on my Desktop (deleted) and 2) SearchProtect from EULA&Privacy (can't find it in the control panel).

I need urgent help peeps, please, I can't use the internet because of this problem.

(SuperGirlsVibrator (talk) 03:42, 30 March 2015 (UTC))

Use System Restore to roll back to a time before you were infected. If that doesn't work, and you're not willing to factory reset your machine, you might have to ask someone at bleepingcomputer.com to talk you through the diagnosis and removal process.

In the future, don't download and run random crap from random web sites. People rename malware downloaders to XXX_keygen for every XXX imaginable and add stuff like "32 and 64 bit" and whatever other nonsense they think will convince gullible people to run it. -- BenRG (talk) 06:10, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, I know, well I was aware until someone gave me the software for free, I just couldn't resist... I do become an 'Idiot No:1' sometimes.

I was hopeful of my antivirus too, the 1st time (after/over a year) the antivirus did not protect me... Anyway, I don't usually 'System Restore', what I recall of it is, they eat 'disk space', not sure. I have to give the 'website' you stated ago, after a few days or a week, as soon as I run out of my internet's monthly 'timeline' date. Btw, thank you for the reminder! Need(ed) it... -- (SuperGirlsVibrator (talk) 19:29, 30 March 2015 (UTC))

Using System Restore won't cost any disk space. If you previously disabled it to save disk space then you won't be able to use it, but if you never did that, it will probably work. -- BenRG (talk) 20:46, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

I don’t know how to disable it to save disk space. I have used ‘system restore’ before a few times, after re-installing the ‘operating system’, I don’t seem to possess a drive in my ‘Computer’ folder, probably called ‘repository’ or something, neither a BIOS option that becomes available at the start up when you turn on the Computer.

I do find a hidden drive by entering into the ‘Computer Management’ window, after selecting one of its features i.e. ‘Disk management’ from its left pane-it is called ‘System Reserved’ drive, of 100Mb (65Mb free left).

What you stated, can you guide me please? I don’t want anything to be saved on disk. When I ‘system restore’ I mean to do a ‘system restore’ i.e. no matter how many times I do ‘system restore’ I want the same results i.e. ‘no disk space eaten’…

Note: Can I use ‘system restore’ option in the near future instead of uninstalling (Add/Remove programs/Programs and features) option? (This is a desire), I understand they do different things, but they do something quite similar as I recall.

Steps I’ve taken so far:

Entered Control Panel, Recovery, clicked and viewed the ‘Advanced recovery methods’ option–not adequate, clicked Open System Restore, selected the second option, nothing I found about the two software I stated above, ticked ‘Show more restore point’–only goes up to 24/03/2015–not adequate, clicked on ‘scan for affected programs', found no problem whatsoever. Clicked ‘Back’ button and selected the first option, clicked the 'Next' button, the software it selected does not have anything to do with the ones stated above…

(SuperGirlsVibrator (talk) 05:56, 31 March 2015 (UTC))

Adobe CC appears to be stuck in the pre-alpha stage of development. You should really be asking them, rather asking us to find a work around, or two or three or more for their problems. --Aspro (talk) 15:42, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Aspro, don't mind me correcting you.

I'm not asking for Adobe CC help in this post, I done it on the Xforce post which seems to be inappropriate... I'm staying away from it now, after the advice(s) others and yourself provided... The problem here I have is the Keygen I downloaded (I don't know whether it works or not as I did not install), it downloaded many other things along, automatically installed and fit them-self's into their positions... Now, Ben suggested restoring the system, I recalled it causing disturbances. After Ben given hope, I took some steps, yet recalled again that it will cause disturbances e.g., some programs might work and some might not... I stated the steps I took because it doesn't meet my restoring requirements. Don't save to disk space, I don't know how to do it... Some things are available in the 'Programs and features' option in the 'Control Panel' but they don't uninstall... I'm just confused. This issue is also draining my 'Kbs' like 'Mbs', like the way we use water for shower...

Like you stated in the 'Xforce' post, and Ben stated in this post, probably evil people tried to destroy my 'Computer' intentionally setting a trap naming 'keygen'...

Let me know if you guys can help me with a workaround.

Regards.

(SuperGirlsVibrator (talk) 18:51, 31 March 2015 (UTC))

Xforce

Anybody know where I could find this particular (or similar) software I've been searching for it for the last two days, I can't seem to find the downloadable link. -- (SuperGirlsVibrator (talk) 04:34, 30 March 2015 (UTC))

We cannot give information on illegal cracking software. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (もしもし！) 09:55, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Actually it's the other way around: legal advice is not allowed. ¡April Fools! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 07:19, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

-- (SuperGirlsVibrator (talk) 03:26, 2 April 2015 (UTC))

See: DMC Notice--Aspro (talk) 13:29, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Apology, I understand.

I thought it (well any) comes from the company, like the way for Microsoft Outlook, you know, the problem that people have, not wanting to use the internet's Calender with their phone...

How do cheat codes for games come then? Don't they make it while they are making the software?

(SuperGirlsVibrator (talk) 19:32, 30 March 2015 (UTC))

Yes, cheats exist mainly for debugging purposes. - ¡Ouch! (^{hurt me} / _{more pain}) 07:19, 1 April 2015 (UTC)

Acknowledged. Thank you. -- (SuperGirlsVibrator (talk) 03:26, 2 April 2015 (UTC))

Online converter for RAR

Dear All

I am looking for a online converter, that can to convert RAR files into Zip and is up to 1GB.

Thank you for your answers.

All the very best.--178.195.98.161 (talk) 11:50, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Programs like 7-zip will read RAR files (for most versions of Windows). Linux and MAC tools will be available as well. LongHairedFop (talk) 13:41, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Discover hosting, given a web-site

How can someone discover who is hosting a web-site given it's url? How can law enforcement serve papers to a hosting company, if a hosted web-site is infringing some law? Noopolo (talk) 12:05, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Reading this may help: The Best Online Tools To Know Everything About a Website. If you find a web site infringing your local laws then all you have to do is google for advice. There are lots of ways of reporting instances according to your geopolitical location. Example: [1].--Aspro (talk) 13:44, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

The WHOIS information for the domian may indicate who the site is registered to. A reverse DNS or WHOIS on the site's IP number will tell who owns the IP address range that the site is hosted on; they can then be asked to reveal site's the owner. Likewise the domain name registrar can be asked who owns the domain name. LongHairedFop (talk) 14:19, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Extended Unicode Characters in Serial Read of EEPROM

I'm trying to read the data off an EEPROM via the serial port, and store the data in a text file. The read seems successful (i.e. there is data in the file), but when I open the file, it contains mostly Unicode characters from the Latin-1 supplement (in particular, the ¥ and §). I didn't expect to see assembler mnemonics, but I thought I would at least see hexadecimal opcodes (e.g. 01, A4, BB, etc.); I'm worried that something went wrong with the data transmission, and I don't want to spend time trying to decipher a corrupted data file. So, when I read data like this, should I take the presence of these extended Unicode characters as a sign that something is wrong, or is this just how text editors display this type of data? Thanks. OldTimeNESter (talk) 12:06, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

If you think the EEPROM contains executable binary code, then that would be binary machine code, not ASCII assembly language. So surely you'd want to look at with a hex editor or hex dumper, not a text-mode text editor? -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 12:15, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

A hexdump will normally look something like this

0000000  54  68  65  20  71  75  69  63  6b  20  62  72  6f  77  6e  20          The quick brown    
0000010  66  6f  78  20  6a  75  6d  70  73  20  6f  76  65  72  20  74          fox jumps over t
0000020  68  65  20  6c  61  7a  79  20  64  6f  67  0a                          he lazy dog  \n
000002c

although the character representation may be suppressed. The first column is the offset, in hexadecimal. There are tools that will generate a hexdump from a binary file (I used od -tx1 -tc -A), but the EEPROM reading program may have an option to do it for you. LongHairedFop (talk) 14:06, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you for the responses. I took a closer look at the program that reads the data from the EEPROM. As far as I can tell, it should format the data as hexadecimal before printing, regardless of what the data is. It is also supposed to print a space between each byte. Since I'm not seeing this in the output, I suspect that the program never actually read any data from the EEPROM, and that the output I'm seeing is just the unfiltered serial port data formatted as Unicode. Even if I wired the EEPROM incorrectly, so that it returned garbage data, it should be printed as hexadecimal if it is printed at all. So, back to the designing board. OldTimeNESter (talk) 18:42, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

What kind of right do you buy, when you buy a domain?

From a legal perspective, is the ownership of a domain a copyright, a trade mark, or what kind of ownership is that? What do you own when you own a domain? Couldn't I and a group of people create a network, and instead of forwarding google.com to 8.8.8.8 forward it to another IP? After all, you are not paying me to associate your domain to a specific IP.Noopolo (talk) 12:13, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

The registrar, from whom you buy the domain, normally runs the DNS service for you (although you can use an alternative DNS provider, or host it yourself). Assuming you've bought example.com, in the DNS configuration, you can add any hostnames to it you wish. For example, you can add www.example.com and then map it to 91.198.174.192. LongHairedFop (talk) 12:27, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

But if I wanted to run a DNS service on my own server, and point web-sites like cnn.com to my own pages, who would block me from doing that, and under what legal grounds? And what would happen if lots of people became rough and started doing this, how can you force them to resolve cnn.com to the news page?--Noopolo (talk) 12:43, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Look up how DNS works (Name_server#Recursive_query). But basically, there are 13 root name servers. When someone asks for www.cnn.com, their PC asks their ISP to look it up.

• The ISP's DNS server then asks one of the root server for www.cnn.com's IP address. It replies "I don't know, but I know that ###.###.###.### handles .com. This answer is valid for 7 days".
• The ISP's DNS server then asks that machine the same question. It replies "I don't know, but I know that .cnn.com is handled by 204.74.108.238. This answer is valid for 7 days".
• The ISP's DNS server than asks 204.84.108.238 the same question, and is told "www.cnn.com is 185.31.19.249. This answer is authoritative, and is valid for 1 day"
• This answer is then passed back to your machine. All the replies are stored by your ISP's DNS server for later use.

Unless you can intercept these messages, then you cannot trick someone else trying to access www.cnn.com to visit your webserver instead. However man-in-the-middle attacks do exist, which DNSSEC and https attempt to mitigate. You can however, make your own DNS lookups go astray. LongHairedFop (talk) 12:58, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

The World Intellectual Property Organization deals with disputes over domain names. For example, if Chris N. Nickleson had registered cnn.com before Cable News Network had bought it, the Cable News Network could ask the WIPO to take the domain from Chris. As Chris has a legitimate right to cnn.com, he may (or may not) be able to keep it. LongHairedFop (talk) 13:14, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Let's phrase it this way: if you were my internet service provider, then I would be paying you to host correctly-configured domain name resolution servers. If you redirected my DNS queries elsewhere, you would not be fulfilling the terms of our service contract.

If you host a private network - no matter how large - you can configure your systems to send DNS queries anywhere you like - but when you charge service fees to clients who connect to your network, you ought to make sure that the terms of service match the actual service you provide.

Nimur (talk) 14:57, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

We have several pages on this topic:

• Domain hijacking
• Pharming
• DNS hijacking

--Guy Macon (talk) 23:52, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

USB port monitoring on Windows

Hi all,

i'm trying to reverse engineer the command protocol of mediatek's spflashtool. It works by the bootloader exposing a virtual COM port via USB... and I want to monitor what data is sent and recieved. However, portmon does not work at all under win7 x86, and usbpcap produces loads of "malformed packets", not to mention the overhead of the USB CDC protocol. I also tried using Process Explorer but it does not show any serial port-related entries, just access to the filesystem.

Can I somehow monitor all serial port communication in the system (especially, the COM port only exists for ~1 sec during bootloader start, so I cannot set up a filter in advance)? Googling does not help very much as SEO crapware floods everywhere... 89.15.239.140 (talk) 14:52, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Process Monitor (also from WinInternals) might give you some insight. LongHairedFop (talk) 15:00, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

I already tried Process Monitor, it unfortunately does not reveal anything except a couple of registry reads and filesystem operations on the target file :( Also, I tried looking into the dll with IDA Pro, but it's a hell of a beast to RE...89.15.239.140 (talk) 19:35, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

A bit of a long shot try. Try one of (1) Connecting via a USB 1.1 hub, which will slow down the comms, and might allow USBPcap to work. (2) Use another capture program. (3) Use a hardware capture device such as [2], but they are $1500 for USB 2.0, or $475 for USB1.1. LongHairedFop (talk) 12:49, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I don't have an USB1.1 hub (are these actually still sold?!), there are no usable capture programs to be found on Google (just loads of SEO bullsh.t), and I'm not ready to spend 4-figure sums on a hobby project :( 89.204.154.197 (talk) 19:52, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

[3] found usbmonitor and usbmonitorpro; they both look like real products. LongHairedFop (talk) 21:38, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

[4] claims to be a USB 1.1 hub. Its £2.99, the price of European delivery is not stated. LongHairedFop (talk) 21:45, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Tablet Coby Kyros Mid 8127

I have a tablet Coby Kyros MID 8127. It worked perfectly until a friend of mine opened it and now it doesnt turn on. I have tried to connect it to the PC and I have also tried to connect it like if I were going to charge it but it doesn´t do anything. So, I googled it and I found a video where they say that in this case I should re-install the firmware but I cant find the firmware for this model. Can anyone help me to find some link. Miss Bono ^{[hello, hello!]} 15:24, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Opened as in disassembled? Re-open it and look for loose connectors, and especially if the power button (the outside part) actually is connected to the power button on the PCB. 89.15.239.140 (talk) 19:38, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

I found the problem, I used a multimeter and I found out the battery was totally discharged. The only problem now is that I do not have a battery charger for the tablet, so I googled how to charge the Coby Kyros using the mini-usb port and I found a couple of videos. The problem is that I have to weld a copper wire to make a bridge between a connector and another. I can do it, my only concern is that this work for a short time and the tablet get ruined or something. Is there anyone who knows about electronics and can give me some advice? Thanks in advance. Miss Bono ^{[hello, hello!]} 13:43, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

New chargers are £8 http://www.tabletchargersandcases.co.uk/5v-mains-ac-adaptor-charger-for-coby-kyros-mid-8127-build-mid8127-tablet-pc-5574-p.asp], USB to barrel is £4.45. Or any generic 5V power adapter with the correct barrel connector and ampage (at least 2Amps) will work. LongHairedFop (talk) 14:14, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

ASP.NET compilation error: the same type is defined in two different DLLs

I have run to this error frequently at work. When deploying an ASP.NET web site on a test or production server under IIS on Windows, when I access an ASPX page containing an ASCX component, I get a compilation error message claiming that the type constituting the ASP.NET code-behind is defined in two separate DLLs under "Temporary ASP.NET files". This happens completely deterministically and can be reproduced each time.

No such thing happens on my own development computer where I use the IIS Express plug-in on Visual Studio to host the pages on the fly.

The only solution I have found on the Internet is to add the attribute batch="false" to the node <compilation> in web.config. This might have drawbacks like slower compilation times every time the site is modified, but so far it has been the only solution that works.

Does anyone have any idea why this is happening, and is there any better way to fix it? JIP | Talk 19:49, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

I ran into something like this a while back and this helped - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1757289/where-does-error-cs0433-type-x-already-exists-in-both-a-dll-and-b-dll-come , although it seems to come to the same conclusion (problem is able to be worked around but cause is unknown / guessed) Jdphenix (talk) 18:59, 31 March 2015 (UTC)