Yahoo Says: “Sorry you can’t sign in, but do you have a Credit Card?

Interestingly enough, after a Vista crash on my work laptop, I rebooted to what I thought was a normal Windows session. I opened my Yahoo messenger, clicked the sign in button and was unsuccessful at signing in. Naturally, one tends to click the “Try again” method, and Yahoo signed in fine.

Then, out of the blue up pops Firefox with a Yahoo page saying “Sorry That You’re Having Trouble Signing In”.

Trouble? I look to my status bar; Yahoo seems to have signed in without a problem. Just to make sure, I opened the messenger and saw all my on-line contacts.

That seemed odd.

So, I returned to the Firefox session, meaning to close the browser when something very interesting was also written on the page. It asked to “verify my identity” and then gave me the option to do so using a Credit Card.

A Credit Card?

Even more interestingly, the Firefox NoScript addon had blocked a script from Akamai. There’s Akamai again, tho this time I’m sure they’re just hosting Yahoo’s content and not trying to ping my computer programs.

The page seems legit, Firefox did not warn me about possible spoofing. But seeing as how I signed in fine and somehow got a failure to sign in screen, something has definately gotten mixed up in the mix.

This had been the first time EVER had I ever been prompted to prove my identity with a credit card. That’s what all those “What’s your favorite pet” password retrieval questions are for.

In any case, Yahoo may also nibble my bum if it thinks I’m going to reveal credit card activity to them.

See the Vista’s and Not Much More …

… with Windows Vista

Would you believe me if I told you I DESPISE Windows Vista? Would you believe me even more if I told you I would rather pull my own head off than work with Windows Vista?  I imagine there are more than a handful of savvy computer users taken for quite the loop when Windows Vista ended up in their care.

I’m seriously gonna tar-and-feather someone from IT for making me switch to this god awful excuse for an operating system.

I’m a developer. To me, Windows XP was the ultimate platform; stable, reliable, relatively easy to recover from the dreaded ‘This program is not responding’ dilemma whenever something took more than 5 seconds to open.

Upon returning from mat leave, my computer decided that it would eat a few dozen HDD sectors, some of which were underlying some very important operating system files; The inevitable was around the corner. And after about the third time reinstalling Visual Studio because of corrupted templates, IT agreed to just ghost the machine and let me start over.

The catch? ‘The powers that be’, which tend to not always be the powers with the most technical knowledge, had decided the ENTIRE office was to move to Windows Vista.

I think I must have been on massive amounts of coffee when I agreed to be their guinea pig. After all “Toronto made the move and haven’t had any problems.” Looking back, this should have been the first red flag.

So, I drank the Vista kool-aid. It was cool and refreshing, and I saw visions of sugar plums dancing in my brain… for about ten minutes, until I realized that all the absolutely unnecessary bells and whistles completely bogged down the computer to the point of useless insanity. Honestly, were the designers on crack when they decided that an operating system that needed a monopoly on nearly an entire gigabyte of RAM was a good idea!? Is the iPod and iMac really putting that much pressure on The Company to produce something that will dazzle the senses of the corporate big-shots, or are they trying to single-handedly render the developers of the world completely comatose?

As I said before, I’m a developer. Give me Visual Studio, Firefox and a command line and I’m happy. I don’t need no fancy translucent windows or 3D window scrolling (apparently I don’t need no fancy English skills either). Once I loaded everything onto the computer that I need to develop the programming flavor of the month (Which is MOSS 2007), the computer ground to an unbelievable halt. Heck, I think my dinky little 333 MHz that I use as a file server at home ran swifter than this laptop which has now officially become a brick.

But hey! It has nifty 3-D scrolling screens and translucent menu bar thingies. So it’s a purdy brick.

Nibble my bum, Microsoft.

Akamai Technologies: Leave Me Alone!

I’m a good little web user, at least I think so. I mind my P’s and Q’s, stay away from downloading movies and music that will earn me attention from the MPAA and RIAA, and I steer clear of the sometimes questionable content available on the interwebs.

So, I was surprised one day to boot my home computer and immediately receive several dozen firewall alerts that an IP claiming to be “i2.microsoft.com” was attempting to access my VPC (Virtual PC).

For a moment, I entertained the thought of allowing the connection; being an almost brand new install of the VPC client, I thought it may have been standard procedure to check back with Microsoft for software updates.

But then the IP seemed a bit strange. I knew Microsoft usually operated in the high 190’s to low 200’s of the IP subnet, with the occasional bounce into the mid 60’s. But this IP started with 72.246.x.x. Intrigued, I ran a WHOIS and was surprised to come up with the following listing masquerading as a Microsoft connection:

OrgName: Akamai Technologies
OrgID: AKAMAI
Address: 8 Cambridge Center
City: Cambridge
StateProv: MA
PostalCode: 02142
Country: US

NetRange: 72.246.0.0 – 72.247.255.255
CIDR: 72.246.0.0/15
NetName: AKAMAI-ARIN-1
NetHandle: NET-72-246-0-0-1
Parent: NET-72-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: ACCESS.AKAMAI.COM
NameServer: YA.AKAMAI.COM
Comment:
RegDate: 2005-03-14
Updated: 2007-03-14

RNOCHandle: NF81-ARIN
RNOCName: Freedman, Noam
RNOCPhone: +1-617-938-3130
RNOCEmail: noam+arin@akamai.com

OrgTechHandle: NF81-ARIN
OrgTechName: Freedman, Noam
OrgTechPhone: +1-617-938-3130
OrgTechEmail: noam+arin@akamai.com

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-10-14 19:10

Seeing as how ARIN said the entry was updated the very day I got these connection attempts, I was fairly certain in my information.

So then that leads me to one question: who the heck are Akamai and why would they need to be sending connection requests to my VPC??

After a bit of research, it seems that Akamai is some sort of hosting and “internet content caching” company, who will host and server such things as massive amounts of pictures or applications for heavy traffic sites such as Yahoo and, in this case, Microsoft. What exactly constitutes “internet content caching” is beyond me, but it sounds too much like keeping records you really should not be keeping.

I apparently was not alone in wondering why Akamai was giving my firewall tizzies; Ask Leo had a somewhat similar incidence posted to their site.

When a site is “Akamaized”, requests for certain content go through different servers instead of the host site you’re connecting to. You the user end up playing the middle man as your browser does an about-face and begins pulling content from other servers besides the site you’re visiting. Usually, this happens seamlessly behind the scenes; but in some cases, an unexpected connection termination in whatever process Akamai uses to have you download content fails and you or someone unfortunate enough to snag your IP address begin to be bombarded with phony connection attempts and activity vaguely reminiscent of port scanning and network mapping.

Akamai still makes press after all these allegations, with news of Windows Updates hosted by them turning around and sending encrypted connection attempts back to client machines, and vulnerabilities that allow hackers to take over and control an Akamai Manager suite.

So, is Akamai just in trying to connect to my VPC? Whether they are or are not well within their rights to randomly access network services on my computer (which I highly doubt), I don’t want anyone I’ve never heard of and never done business with in my computer.

So, leave me alone, Akamai! Go do your “market research” on someone else’s computer.