Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2013 October 1

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October 1

copyright infringe of newspapers

Hi.. there are many apps available which fetches news articles from newspaper websites. for example 360news, news hunt, pulse etc. I want to know are these apps not infringing copyright of newspaper websites? I am also interested in developing a kind of these app, what legal aspect should I consider? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 223.196.80.4 (talk) 02:37, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

These kind of apps may be relying on fair use, in a way that Google News does. But see that article for some challenges Google News has had. Wikipedia can't give you legal advice about how much use you can make, if any, and still have that be "fair". -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 12:39, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Web page irregularity

At http://www.polishpod101.com/polish-word-lists/?page=4, the audio file for "X-ray of a chest" in number 87 says "The boss is blaming the worker". Is that a sign that the website has been hacked? Is the security of visitors at risk?
—Wavelength (talk) 02:57, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

It's more likely a bad joke of someone working on the site who isn't pleased with their boss (!) or it could just be a mistake. But in any case, as long as you don't download anything from the site or enter in sensitive information, you're fine (if it is hacked, which I personally don't think so.) --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 03:37, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

It's even more likely that the person who set up the page simply linked to the wrong audio file. Probably in one of the more advanced examples there is a cartoon of a boss blaming a worker. Looie496 (talk) 05:42, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Feedback sent to wordlist(at)innovativelanguage.com --CiaPan (talk) 08:00, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Excel function or formula to total items

Say that I have an Excel spreadsheet that looks something like this below.

Name	Average	Grade
John Smith	67	D
Jane Doe	91	A
Mary Jones	53	F
Carl Swanson	77	C
Ed Robinson	84	B
Lisa Adams	61	D
Frank Martin	98	A
Cheryl Graham	74	C
Steven Granger	52	F
Pamela Drake	88	B

Is there any easy function or formula in Excel that would count how many A's, how many B's, how many C's, etc.? Say that I want a chart that looks like the chart below. Is there a function or formula that I can put into the second column below that will total up the grades correctly?

Grade Range	Number of Students
Total Number of A's
Total Number of B's
Total Number of C's
Total Number of D's
Total Number of F's

Note that this would be a dynamic (not a static) spreadsheet, as the grades are constantly changing throughout the semester. So, I cannot simply "sort" the grade column and do a "count" function of the appropriate cell ranges. Nor do I want to constantly have to do a manual count and manually enter the totals.

Thanks! Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 14:26, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

I think you want to use countif. So, e.g. the count of Bs is =COUNTIF(C2:C200, "=B"), depending on what range the actual letter grades occupy. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 14:40, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Finlay is absolutely correct; just a couple of points: the equal sign by 'B' is not needed (though harmless) - the formula =COUNTIF(C2:C200, "B") would give the same result; secondly, the 2nd parameter could be replaced by a cell reference or formula giving the grade in question, so for example if 'Total Number of A's' is in cell A2, then to avoid hard-coding the grades you could put =COUNTIF($C$2:$C$200, MID(A1,17,1)) in B2 and copy it down (dollar signs on the source range to stop it being change by the copy). AndrewWTaylor (talk) 14:58, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks to you both. I will try this and see what happens. To AndrewWTaylor: I understood half of your above reply; the other half went completely over my head. (I should add that I am no Excel expert, by the way. I just know the basics of Excel.) Can you please clarify what you meant? I fully followed this part of your reply: "Finlay is absolutely correct; just a couple of points: the equal sign by 'B' is not needed (though harmless) - the formula =COUNTIF(C2:C200, "B") would give the same result;". Everything after that was completely lost on me. Can you please explain it in another way? I understand the use of dollar signs and the difference between absolute references versus relative references. I have no idea what you meant by "hard-coding the grades". And when you used the function "MID", I had no idea what that was all about. Please let me know. Thanks! Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 15:21, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

For ease of this discussion, let's say that my first chart above is Columns A, B, C, with Rows 1 through 11. My second chart above is Columns D and E, with Rows 1 through 6. In other words, on my spreadsheet, the second chart would be immediately to the right of the first chart. Thank you! Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 15:25, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Andrew is using the MID function to parse strings like Total Number of A's, extracting the 17th letter - the A - doing things like this makes sense if you had to handle lots of different grade letters (not just the usual five) and if you promised to never change the wording of the Total Number of A's cells. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 15:53, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Got it. Yes, that makes sense. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 17:38, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks to all. This worked out perfectly for me. And it was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks a lot. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 14:36, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

A much more flexible way of dealing with tabular information is by using Pivot tables. If you select all 3 columns, then in Excel chose the "Insert...Pivot table" menu option and clicked okay, it would bring up a new sheet containing a highlighted area and some boxes in the margin you can drag and drop (the boxes will be "Name", "Average" and "Grade"). If you drag and drop the "Grade" box into the "Row labels" as well as into the "Values" section (this might be slightly different depending on your version of Excel), then it will immediately pop up a count of the grades for you. Pivot tables are IMMENSELY powerful, just by dragging and dropping, you can obtain splits and sub-splits of data in almost any configuration. Also, as you update the file, you only have to hit the refresh button to update the pivot table with the new analysis. It doesn't only do counts of occurrences, it can do sums, averages etc. Cheers Zunaid 09:18, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Wow, thanks. I never heard of that. I will have to try it out. Thanks for the info! Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 13:48, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

Find out which online application is sending spam tweets from my account?

Hi all, I hardly ever use Twitter, but was recently informed that in the past couple days, my account has been retweeting spammy tweets. I believe it's unlikely that anyone has compromised my account (my long password is still the same, though I just changed it to be sure), but think that it's quite likely that one of the "applications" that has read-write privileges on my account has done this. The word "application" here seems to be a Twitter-jargon use of the word -- I'm referring here to sites such as Slate.com, which, if you choose to log in with your Twitter account, grant themselves read-write privileges, presumably so you can tweet from Slate about how great they are.

I can certainly revoke all privileges from all applications (they are only a handful, and they mostly seem benign, like Slate and Pintrest), but is there any way to know which one sent the tweet? I can't seem to find any metadata associated with the tweets that say this. Surely Twitter must know?

Thanks, — Sam 63.138.152.139 (talk) 16:01, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

They used to tell this to you, but they took that out of their official clients. The only way I've been able to figure this out is pretty complicated. Hopefully someone has a simpler way.

• Go to the Twitter API Console,
• Set "Service" dropdown to "Tweets/Statuses/show{id}.json"
• Set the auth dropdown to auth.
• Click on the template tab and input the id number of the bad tweet. (You can find it at the end of the URL of that particular tweet.)
• Click the "Send" button.
• In the results panel, the "Source" field will tell you the app used.

For example, by putting in tweet id 385090824079290368, I learn that this tweet was made using TweetDeck.

There must be an easier way. APL (talk) 17:44, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Huh, the spammy tweets were retweets, and I can't seem to get the id of *my* retweet. Getting the message details only shows the id of the original tweet, which doesn't help. Hmmmm... Thanks anyway. — Sam 63.138.152.139 (talk) 16:37, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

csrss.exe?

When I google "csrss.exe" I find this page, which says

csrss.exe is a process which is registered as a trojan. This Trojan allows attackers to access your computer from remote locations, stealing passwords, Internet banking and personal data. This process is a security risk and should be removed from your system. We strongly recommend that you run a FREE registry scan to identify csrss.exe related errors.

I also find this page, which says:

This is the user-mode portion of the Win32 subsystem (with Win32.sys being the kernel-mode portion). Csrss stands forclient/server run-time subsystem and is an essential subsystem that must be running at all times. Csrss is responsible for console windows, creating and/or deleting threads, and some parts of the 16-bit virtual MS-DOS environment.

and this page and this page, which says:

This is the user-mode portion of the Win32 subsystem; Win32.sys is the kernel-mode portion. Csrss stands for Client/Server Run-Time Subsystem, and is an essential subsystem that must be running at all times.

The first page seems to say csrss.exe is malware; the others say it's essential. Can someone resolve the seeming conflict? Is the first page a fraud? Michael Hardy (talk) 20:11, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

It's an essential part of Windows. As Client/Server Runtime Subsystem says "some virus hoax emails claim that csrss.exe is a virus". But you also get cases where a file with the same name (but different location) as an import system file really is some kind of malware. I know nothing about the first page you cite, but note that there are some dodgy websites which claim to do scans for malware which in fact do the opposite, infecting you with even more. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 20:20, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

For more on what Finlay mentioned about those sketchy sites which claim to be "helping you get rid of malware" (and similar tactics), see Rogue security software and Scareware. These things are nasty. --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 02:52, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

The text on the first web page is boilerplate with "csrss.exe" placed in the blanks. There are thousands of other autogenerated pages on that site with the same text. They're just trying to hijack web searches and get you to download their software. -- BenRG (talk) 20:02, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

By a strange coincidence, I had a telephone call just this afternoon from a scammer in India who showed me the copy of csrss.exe on my computer that lacked the Microsoft label and so (according to him) it was malware. He also directed me to a different website that explained about the "csrss malware". He then wanted me to give him access to my computer so that he could help me remove this malware. I strung him along for a while (because I wasn't busy and I wanted to know how the scam worked), but he wasn't giving anything away except his location, and he wasn't very pleased when I refused to give him access. He wanted me to go to www.ammyy.com which is a (possibly genuine) remote access website, though if they are a genuine company, I wonder why they paid Namecheap.com to hide their details when they registered the domain name. Unfortunately, I don't have a virtual machine, and I didn't want to risk my computer by allowing remote access, so I couldn't find his IP address. In the past, I've been puzzled to see several copies of csrss running. How do I find out which software called each one? Dbfirs 18:51, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

Hmmm... I remember I was reading a lot about RATs and such here last year, and IIRC there was a page that mentioned this exact scam, all the way down to getting people to install Ammyy. Odd because that article is a redirect to Comparison of remote desktop software, yet there is no information to be found on it at that page. I'm positive it was on there around this time last year, however I could not locate the edit which removed it. Strange. --.Yellow1996.^(ЬMИED¡) 19:03, 5 October 2013 (UTC)