Void's Forums

Hi All,

My wife was using my Linux box this evening while I was a my SyrlLUG meeting. She was surfing the net using Mozilla and had a rather strange message pop up. She was in a panic and called me at the meeting. It said "I have accepted provolone into my life." She was particularly concerned because she was connected to a https site and was transmitting some fairly sensitive data. Social Security numbers and all. When I got home I checked out the site we were connected to, and they are hosted by Akamai and running Linux, so they should be secure. I *think* that my machine is fairly secure.... but anyway, I googled the phrase and found that it is used in sig files by some apparently knowledgeable programmers and Linux folks.

Two questions:

1) Anyone have any idea what it means?

2) Any clue as to how it could have appeared on my computer?

It disappeared as soon as my wife moved the mouse, she said that it was a "funny looking" script with different colors. Any input apperciated.

TIA,

Jim

The phrase appears to have come from a "Zippy the Pinhead" comic strip (I've never heard of it):

http://www.zippythepinhead.com/

Here's where it mentions the phrase:

http://www.zippythepinhead.com/pages/aa ... dodah.html

As far as how your wife saw it I am a little confused as to the details. If you want help investigating that I would need a few more details like was it a browser popup or something else? What URL was she visiting when the popup occurred?

On a Google search I have also seen this phrase appear with spam from various drugs.

Voidmain,

Thanks for the reply. I'll give you what information I can, but it is sketchy. The web site was

http://fafsa.ed.gov

She was using Mozilla and was not clear on what type of a message it was. She did say that it disappeared when she moved the mouse and said that the font and font color used reminded her of "spam" ... whatever that means. I'm sure that the reason that you're confused by the details is that she was confused and didn't explain it all that clearly to me.

I'm running FC2, up to date and behind a hardware firewall, with all unnecessary ports closed and most (all?) unnecessary services shut down. The data was encrypted and the site was a "https" site.

I have my perl programming class tonight and won't likely get home until late, but I will give her a call before my class starts to see if she can give any better details or descriptions of what did happen. I can post that information, if there's anything worth posting, early this evening, maybe around 6:00 or so. The transaction (it's an application form that has to be completed for Federal Financial Aid for college students) appeared to go through successfully, but since it contained a lot of sensitive personal information, she's really worried about identity theft and all.

Thanks again!

Jim

It sounds very strange and I would think it would have had something to do with the server and not your client. It might be worth sending an email to the webmaster there (or other administrative address) and let them know what happened. Maybe they were cracked and if they were I am sure they would want to know about it. Of course things would be easier if you could reproduce it and better define it. :)

Voidmain,

MYSTERY SOLVED... I think. I just got off the phone with my wife. She said that it took up the full screen and was large black letters on a red background. As soon as she moved the mouse it disappeared. I wish she had explained this better last night, but she was in a panic and I was 30 miles from home talking to her on my cell phone.

I know that there are tons of screensavers and right now I would be willing to bet that that was one of them. I only have the default ones installed. Have you ever heard of or seen one like that? I only spend about half of my Linux time in X and usually don't hang around idle there long enough for a screensaver to kick on. But she had to look up a lot of information and all and may well have left X running idle long enough to kick a screensaver on.

Does that make any sense at all? I mean, I *think* my machine is fairly secure for a desktop box and they were running Linux boxes.

Jim

(feeling pretty darned stupid right now, and hoping I have good reason to)

Void Main wrote:The phrase appears to have come from a "Zippy the Pinhead" comic strip (I've never heard of it)

It is an indy strip, and it runs in smaller newspapers. The Boulder, Colorado paper, "The Colorado Daily" featured it, along with other strips like "Life in Hell", "Where the Buffalo Roam", "Rubes", and "Bizarro" (which has graduated to mainstream status).

Sadly, it isn't even funny.

Check your smaller local liberal papers.

dishawjp wrote:MYSTERY SOLVED... I think. I just got off the phone with my wife. She said that it took up the full screen and was large black letters on a red background. As soon as she moved the mouse it disappeared. I wish she had explained this better last night, but she was in a panic and I was 30 miles from home talking to her on my cell phone.

Heh heh heh!! That's funny! You have "fortune" installed don't you? I'll bet you have a screen saver set to call fortune as that is one of the phrases in the fortune database. :)

Hi Voidmain,

Yeah, in hindsight, it is pretty funny. Until I figured it out though, I wasn't laughing too hard.

I do have fortune installed. It wouldn't really be *nix without fortune, would it? It's too bad that there are some questions about the license on the fortune program which have caused Red Hat to exclude it from their recent releases.

I really don't know too much about the screensavers since I rarely leave the computer running in X unless I'm actively using it. I do spend quite a bit of time at init 3 using the virtual terminals. Gotta love that feature of Linux; six virtual terminals that you can switch between almost instantly and text large and clear enough for an old timer like me to read easily! If I expect to leave the computer for any length of time, I just shut the monitor down.

I do remember that after first installing FC2, there were issues with the nVIDIA driver and some of the openGL screensavers would cause X to hang bad. I think that once the updated drivers were available I played with the screensaver settings (shortened time for them to start and reduced time between switching screensavers) and let it run for a few hours just to make sure that there were no problems. I probably just never set it back to more "normal" settings. And that's probably why the screensaver kicked on for my wife and started all this.

Anyway, thanks for your interest and support.

Jim

hee hee hee!
yes this was a funny little mystery! i just now read this from top to bottom and it's like a little whodunnit where you have to figure out what's going on before they tell you the answer!

nice one.

as for zippy, yes i've heard of him, one single picture cartoon i have seen of him shows him about to walk through a doorway, and on the door is one of those signs with a stick man to show it is a gents toilet, but walking out of the door in the other direction is a big stick man... perhaps you had to be there...