Friday, 29 February 2008 at 10:26
As the topic line suggests,
this causes me great mental anguish this morning.
Warning: Do not read while drinking anything. You will probably spray your beverage through your nostrils, which will only prolong the agony.
Monday, 25 February 2008 at 16:13
It has long been a piece of grassroots wisdom that when the power to your computer goes dead, you're up a certain creek without a means of propulsion: Whatever you were doing at the time had gone to the great bit bucket in the sky, and unless you'd just saved your work you could kiss your next couple of hours goodbye while reconstructing everything. However, from a technical standpoint this isn't actually true. Modern-day
DRAM can actually hold usable data for a finite but non-zero period of time after the main power's been cut off. This has actually been known since the late 1970's to computer scientists, but no one had actually tried to do anything with this (that anyone's talking about, anyway - you know how governments are). Last Thursday, however, a group of researchers
published a number of practical, implemented attacks against disk-based encryption systems by taking advantage of this phenomenon. Specifically, they were able to extract cryptographic keys from the memories of computers, reconstruct them if they had decayed, and use them to gain access to disk volumes created by Microsoft
BitLocker (built into some versions of Windows Vista), Mac OSX's
FileVault, the
dm-crypt subsystem of the Linux kernel, and the cross-platform disk encryption system
Truecrypt.
Beneath the cut, things start getting technical. If you're not interested in going that far off the map, please understand that when an attacker gets hold of the hardware all bets are off because they can do pretty much whatever they want to it. If you're using disk-based crypto and you cut the power to your machine,
a sufficiently prepared attacker can probably extract the keys from the memory modules and use them to decrypt your data. You can't use crypto to protect a storage medium in use because, to be able to access the information the keys have to be kept in memory somehow. The best advice I can give you is don't let anyone decide that you're a big enough target to warrant such an attack - don't give anyone a reason to kick your door down and dunk your DIMMs in liquid nitrogen. For most people at home who don't do anything more sensitive than check their Gmail and $website{$social_network}, chances are this won't apply to you.
Okay. Here there be dragons.
More under the cut...
Monday, 25 February 2008 at 14:11
Last Friday seemed to be the day of the ice storm that wasn't really. That morning, sure, the cars were coated with ice (as I discovered at the same instant that I found I had no gloves with me) and the roads were wet, but in truth they really weren't as bad as everyone made them out to be. I had little difficulty making it in to work that day, and even less trouble returning home that evening. For this reason, I find it quite strange that so many offices in NOVA were understaffed that day, but then again what do I know? However, the weather was certainly poor enough to strand Fuscia, a good friend of Lyssa and myself, in the DC area on Friday night. Rather than leave her to camp out at BWI (which, even though
it's possible doesn't mean that it's fun) she caught the Metro out to the apartment and we gave Fuscia crash space for the evening. We wound up driving out to Minerva (on route 50 west in NOVA) for a late Indian dinner and then returned home for the evening to relax and catch up on the last few episodes of
Torchwood (though we had to stop before the latest because all of us were tired and wanted to catch a couple of hours of sleep). Hasufin stopped in for a couple of hours that evening, also, and the four of us geeked out until the wee hours of the morning, when we really did have to call it quits for the night.
The company that Fuscia works for was kind enough to arrange a train ticket to get her home, but the train was to leave Union Station at noon on Saturday, so we found ourselves getting up around 0800 on Saturday morning to get everything packed up and ready to go. With a few hours to kill, we hit up the Dominion Deli for coffee and a sit-down breakfast, and then a fast trip to the local Metro station to speed her on her way. That done, Lyssa and I had a couple of hours to kill before meeting up with the rest of the Mad Scientist Coffee Klatsch, which we decided to spend at home. Unfortunately, a minor problem that had been plaguing Lyssa for a couple of days had worsened and the afternoon was spent at the office of our local physician waiting to get Lyssa checked out. Specifically, Lyssa did most of the waiting while I was stuck in traffic in between errands, which ate up the entire afternoon. Thankfully, we managed to get everything taken care of and made it in plenty of time to Mika's birthday dinner at Outback Steakhouse a little after 1900 EST5EDT.
One of the errands I ran that afternoon was a trip to Tyson's Corner Mall to pick up a fountain pen for Mika to help feed her writing addiction, a gift which was very well received that night.
More under the cut...
Friday, 22 February 2008 at 15:22
A major problem faced by data forensics professionals and law enforcement was how to confiscate computer systems without running the risk of damaging or losing access to information. It's all well and good if you seize a machine running full-disk encryption while it's online because, by definition, the disk is being transparently decrypted so that the machine can operate. Once you power it down, however, all bets are off because the machine won't boot back up without someone supplying a passphrase to the disk encryption system, and no one with anything shady in mind is going to give up their passphrases and incriminate themselves. It may not be feasible to gather electronic evidence from the running machine on-site due to the volume of data at hand, however, so this begs the question of how to move the whole shebang back to the forensics lab without actually cutting the power.
Enter Hotplug.
Hotplug is essentially a cut-over device which lets you connect an alternate source of power (such as an uninterruptible power supply) to a machine being seized that takes advantage of the fact that each power outlet in a multiple-outlet unit does not have an isolated power feed. You connect Hotplug to an unused outlet on a power strip (assuming that the box is plugged into one) so that you can then unplug the entire surge suppressor from the wall and move the system without it going offline (watch the "basic use" video, it's pretty cool), or you can use an attachment that fits over the electrical plug like a sleeve and supply electricity that way. There are even attachments that allow an S&S team to connect the Hotplug device to a spare outlet in a wall jack to supply power while the rest of the outlet is removed from the wall and physically disconnected from the power main. Or, if you're feeling particularly hardcore, you can cut the insulation on the power cable and patch Hotplug directly into the computer's power supply. Regardless of how the S&S team goes about it, they've got a live machine on AC power that can be carted away.
This certainly ups the ante for people who run servers that have encrypted file systems. Before, if a box was being seized, the team had to hope that they got lucky and found a logged in session (preferably with admin privileges) on a machine because this meant that the encrypted datastore could be accessed. If the machine was powered down somehow, the keys would be lost from memory and they'd be up a certain creek without a paddle, unless they happened to get hold of the passphrase somehow. There have also been cases in the past where a suspect had rigged up a power kill switch, so that when the door was kicked in all of the machines in a particular room went offline. While this is undoubtedly suspicious to law enforcement and the court, one of the nice things about cryptographic systems is that often they make it difficult to tell what is encrypted data and what is junk. A suspect could claim that the power coincidentally happened to go out and corrupted the contents of the drives in a machine, and there would be little way to prove otherwise. Now an active machine can be taken right to a lab and data extraction can begin.
I give this device about a year before it really penetrates the law enforcement and data forensics communities - the price starts at $500us, and good UPSes tend to start around $100us, so the barrier to entry is not so much the cost as it is word getting around about Hotplug.
ObDisclaimer: I don't work for Wiebetech, nor do I get any money from them. I find this device very interesting and potentially useful.
Friday, 22 February 2008 at 10:37
Earlier this week the information security community collectively slapped its forehead as computer magazine C't published the results of its security analysis of the
the Easy Nova Data Box PRO-25UE RFID, an external hard drive that was advertised as transparently encrypting stored data at the drive level using the
AES cryptosystem and a 128-bit key (an algorithm and keysize which the NSA has blessed as worthy of encrypting information carrying a security classification of SECRET or lower, incidentally). A key fob containing an RFID chip is used to unlock the drive and provide access to the encrypted data. Because all of the crypto is implemented in hardware, it is possible to plug the drive into just about any computer on the planet without having to install any specialized drivers.
How can I put this succinctly?
They were lying through their teeth.
C't Magazine popped the hard drive (a regular hard drive that you can buy on the open market) out of the external housing, hooked it up to a regular IDE-to-USB interface cable, and started poking around at the hardware level with some basic analysis tools. First of all, the drive was filled with zeroes before it was formatted, which is actually good security practice under certain circumstances, but it also makes it possible to determine just how much encrypted data is on the drive by looking for where the noise ends and the zeroes begin. More encrypted data means that you have more data to analyze (and thus, use against the cryptosystem). Secondly, it is an axiom of crypto that encrypted data should look as much like noise as possible, not only to make it difficult to locate encrypted data among background noise (though this is more of a helpful side effect than a deliberate feature) but to eliminate patterns in the stored data (because patterns found in encrypted data can be used to draw conclusions about the algorithm and the key used, information that can potentially be leveraged to decrypt the data). Analyzing the amount of randomness in the data on the test drive showed that there was actually very little randomness - in fact, a repeating pattern emerged immediately. The conclusion drawn from this finding is that AES was not, in fact, used to encrypt the drive, but instead a
logical exclusive OR, which is
trivial to break (scroll down to section 8.2, "How do I break a Vigenere (repeated-key) cipher?") as implemented.
Because the file system on the drive that has been encrypted was
FAT-32, the data structures on disk are known and well documented, so the researchers were essentially able to look at the disk and say "Wow, that looks something like a BIOS parameter block/file allocation table/data region header. I know what that looks like when it isn't encrypted, so I can XOR the encrypted version with what I know the unencrypted version looks like and get the encryption key they used." Due to a quirk in FAT-32, disk sector 67 will almost always consist of all zeroes - known plaintext, shake shake shake, and they had the key. As it turns out, they used the same key for every block on the drive, so when they decrypted a single 512-byte block on the drive they were able to decrypt the rest of the drive in one fell swoop.
When confronted about this, Easy Nova backpedaled fast enough to break the sound barrier - as it turns out, they only use AES to encrypt the unique identification code of the RFID chip in hardware memory and not the data on the drive. Also, as it turns out, there are another half-dozen or so models that use the same 'encryption' hardware as Easy Nova's, and are probably also used in this manner (i.e., incorrectly).
Thursday, 21 February 2008 at 21:39
I haven't been writing about the beginning of the presidential campaign season because I've been busy with other things, but I thought that this should be spread around a bit more widely... Barack Obama's security detail ordered on-duty police officers at a rally in Dallas, Texas
to stop searching attendees for weapons as they filed in.
You read that correctly, the were told to
stop looking for weapons. D.W. Lawrence, Deputy Police Chief of Dallas went on the record as saying that the order 'apparently' came down from the US Secret Service because they wanted to "speed up the long lines outside."
The local Secret Service field office refused comment. There's been no word yet on whether or not any other rallies in Texas also had no one keeping an eye out.
Does this strike anyone else as being just a little bit strange? I don't think that anyone has to pontificate at length on why it's a bad idea to deliberately take down levels of one's defensive perimeter.
It seems that I'll have to keep a closer eye on the election trail this time 'round, and I'll definitely be breaking out the shortwave radio scanners again...
Tuesday, 19 February 2008 at 22:32
Linux distribution successfully used:
Gentoo Linux 2007.0
Currently running kernel: sys-kernel/vanilla-sources v2.6.24.1
I'll put everything else behind the cut because it'll take up a few pages...
More under the cut...
Monday, 18 February 2008 at 15:25
On Friday the 15th I turned 30.
I know that I didn't make a big deal out of it, and that wasn't out of any shame or wanting to keep things low-key as it was I've been really busy lately and didn't have time to post about it anywhere. The company I work for has pulled me from fieldwork for at least the next couple of months after what happened in Tuscaloosa. I've been moved to another project much closer to home and I spent all day Friday in the field with my cow-orkers getting stuff set up and running for that. By the time I got home that evening it was well after 1800 EST5EDT. Lyssa had made a fine dinner for me (oven roasted jerk-rubbed chicken breast) and then we set out for the grocery store to pick up a couple of things. We'd put out the all-call a few days earlier for people to come over and hang out on Friday night, but time and plans being what they were only a few people were able to respond. Hasufin, Mika, and Jason came over to spend the evening, and we wound up sitting around talking until about 2230 EST5EDT or so. I was worn out from my medication and unfortunately wound up going to bed around 2300 local time, only to sleep clear through until 1000 the next morning.
Last week, my physician put me on prednisone for the damage to my middle ears. It's great for reducing swelling and breaking up blood clots, but it's got a couple of side effects that I'm not too keen on. First of all, you're supposed to take it as early as possible in the day because it tends to make people jittery, equivelant to four or five cups of coffee for a normal person. Second of all, it makes you very tired once the initial jitteriness passes (though that could very well have been my immune system). Third, it messes with your sense of taste. Prednisone tablets taste nasty right out of the bottle, but I find that they also change how you perceive tastes, so that everything tastes bitter until you've metabolized the last dose. No amount of rinsing, swallowing, or drinking other stuff will get the taste out of your mouth, and believe me, I've been trying. I'm on the last third of my prescription (three days of three tablets per day, three days of two tablets, and three days of one tablet per day) so the effect seems to be lessening.
I spent Saturday with Lyssa and Laurelinde in downtown Washington, DC, wandering around DuPont Circle. If you've never been down there it's sort of like the South Side of Pittsburgh, only a bit more upper class. In addition to your usual music and book shops you'll find the store of the Human Rights Council, various and sundry street buskers and people hawking street-level newspapers, cafe's, and suchlike. The three of us, after getting off the Metro (backed up by delays because the powers that be decided to perform maintenance on some of the tracks and stations) prowled around the main drag of the Circle, peering in and out of stores and generally getting re-aquainted with one of our old haunts from years gone by. We stopped in at Lambda Rising to see what new wares they had on their shelves (not much, actually, though some of the pins are quite humorous) and eventually settled in at Kramer's Afterwords Cafe' to nose the books a bit (not much sprang to eye, I fear) and have dinner.
More under the cut...
Friday, 15 February 2008 at 09:39
For crying out loud... yesterday afternoon around 1500 CST6CDT, a former sociology grad student of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois dramatically stepped from behind one of the curtains in an ocean sciences lecture hall
and opened fire with a shotgun. The gunman is thought to have loosed something like twenty rounds of ammunition, killing six students and
wounding another fifteen before turning a weapon upon himself. Students ran for their lives or took cover wherever they could, even behind a transparency projector if it happened to be nearby. Shortly after the carnage began the school went into lockdown - Nexxus6, a good friend of mine who happened to be within distance of the campus took
this photograph of helicopters moving into position to cover the incident. It's thought that they're news helicopters rather than police aircraft. Between the racket caused by a shotgun going off and the near-omnipresence of cellphones these days, someone probably called the police who set things in motion. Unfortunately the police arrived there too late to stop them shooter - by 1614 CST6CDT, it was all over. By the time he shot himself, he hadn't even fired all of the ammunition he was carrying.
It's happened again. It's happened again, and I can't figure out why in the hell it keeps happening.
What would drive someone to buy a couple of guns, walk into a building on a college campus, and start randomly shooting at people? What in all the worlds would make something think that this is reasonable and actionable? How could someone lose basic respect for sapient life and steal it from so many people indiscriminantly?
I'm not going to make any gradschool jokes, this is neither the time nor the place to do so. People are dead and lives are shattered as a result of this madness.
I'm sorry.
Friday, 15 February 2008 at 09:15
Scientists working in the burgeoning field of nanotechnology at Brookhaven National Laboratory have announced another breakthrough in molecular technology:
They figured out how to use DNA to guide the construction of crystals on the molecular scale. It goes a little something like this: Because the nucleotides that link together to create DNA (adenine, thiamine, guanine, and cytosine) have regions with different patterns of electrical charges, individual molecules are attracted to one another and can stick together, rather like complimentary pieces of velcro. Moreover, each nucleotide has more than one region which can create a bond - this is how other parts of those molecules stick to the sugar/phosphate scaffoldings that give DNA its shape. In other words, think of them like double-ended Lego bricks: One end sticks to the "business end" of another Lego brick, while the other end attaches itself to the framework. However, the properties of these links make it possible to tow whatever other molecules they stick to around in a solution and guide them into specific three-dimensional arrangements.
What the researchers at Brookhaven did was attach small bits of DNA that have exposed complimentary bonding groups to nanoparticles (particles of matter on the scale of billionths of a meter in diameter) of gold and then dropped them into a solution. The bits of DNA attached to each particle were attracted to bits of DNA on other nanoparticles that happened to match up and hooked together, which dragged the nanoparticles into a particular position. Repeat this process again, and again, and again, millions of times. The samples were then heated and allowed to cool, very much like the processing of
annealing metals in a foundry, which gave the nanomaterial an opportunity to reshuffle its structure a bit and find more stable arrangements of nanoparticles. The net result: The establishment of ordered crystals of matter on a scale heretofore unvisited. Interestingly, the structure of the crystals isn't very dense at all - of the total volume of space that they take up, only about 5% of it is taken up by the nanoparticles, and another 5% or so is taken up by the bits of DNA used to manipulate them. The rest is empty space, which will no doubt be put to practical use in the near future once the process is refined and made practical (in a large-scale application sense).
In theory, you could start tucking nanoparticles of other materals (or possibly single atoms) into those empty spaces in the nanocrystals. For example, you could use this technique to construct lenses. Or circuitry (come on, you knew I was going to go there.) It would be possible to give such crystals exacting patterns of magnetic or electrical attractions to engineer other properties. It should even be possible to construct parts of mechanisms, like
geartrains or
simple gear pairs that could be incorporated into more complex nanotech. This is possible because the nanocrystals are sensitive to minute changes in heat which cause their structures to shift and become more manipulable in other ways, and we all know how different patterns of atoms in molecules are attracted to one another and attach as a result.
Friday, 15 February 2008 at 08:39
It would appear that the
confiscation and analysis of personal electronics at the US border is intensifiying and that people are starting to get up in arms about it. It's more than just laptops that US ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) are spiriting away (for up to two weeks at a time, which defeats the purpose of trying to fly anywhere): Cellular phones are being meddled with and sometimes data is erased (for one reason or another; I tend to lean toward
Hanlon's Razor to explain this), corporate laptops are being taken away from travelers unless the log into the machines so that data (sometimes proprietary corporate data) can be copied for unknown reasons (perhaps ICE took some of the tales of
the books of the ships to heart), and from time to time travelers are given a choice: Either fork over the laptop or they don't get on the plane at all. The
EFF and the Asian Law Caucus have gotten involved by filing a lawsuit against to government to find out what the hell's up with this. As it turns out, the government is starting to equate data files with information printed on hardcopy, and is treating them in an identical manner.
The lawsuits filed have uncovered
some of the parameters of these searches. First and foremost, US ICE does not require probable cause to copy data from an electronic device. If it looks interesting to them, they're legally permitted to take it from you. They can copy the data from just about anything that they think might be able to hold data, from the hard drive of your notebook computer to your
wristwatch to your cellular telephone. Whether or not they try any forensics techniques on the storage media is unknown because the owners of the devices aren't there when all of this is done (but there are
tools out there that are
readily available and
work quite well). However, it is known that they try to extract the history data from the web browsers installed (
here are instructions for erasing your web browser history if you feel this is none of anyone's business), they go through the contact lists and call histories of cellular telephones (so make sure that you don't know anyone whose name might be on
In reaction to this, some security conscious companies are refusing to let anyone travel with business-related information - instead, they are issuing laptops containing only a VPN client, and all work is done remotely.
I've already ranted long and loud about this time and again - one of these days I should sit down and write a guide or something to keeping the important data private so that even if someone does decide to start poking around in your portable, they won't find anything useful.
Thursday, 14 February 2008 at 15:23
Last week an article broke in the LA TImes that the insurance company Blue Cross of California
was asking doctors to report medical conditions to them that could be used as grounds to cancel customers' insurance. It is true that under certain circumstances insurance companies are legally permitted to terminate insurance contracts if the customer doesn't report certain pre-existing medical conditions on the forms, but this particular arm of Blue Cross was fined last year for cutting people left and right from their rolls, to begin with. Since the California Medial Association, the public, and the government of the state of California found out about the letter that BC of CA sent to all of those doctors, however,
they swiftly reversed their position on the matter and stopped asking for the information.. not that they got much of it, anyway. You see, there's this little thing called patient-doctor confidentiality: Doctors aren't allowed to discuss or release specifics of their patients' cases with anyone they aren't asking for help (and even then they're strictly limited in what they can and can't say). Most interesting of all, it wasn't anyone on their rolls through Medicare, Medicaid, or corporate insurance policies that they were asking about.. it was people who have to pay their insurance premiums out of pocket, people who are least likely to have the time or energy to fight dreck like this because they're too busy working as 1099's.
This is something of a hot-button topic for me because
I've fought many a time with insurance companies just to get basic procedures covered, let alone finding insurance the premiums of which didn't require Lyssa and I to live like hermits.
Thursday, 14 February 2008 at 15:04
Near the city of Panama City, Florida, 14-year old high school student Dakota Gates has been incarcerated in juvenile detention for 21 days following his arrest because administrators of his school are afraid that he was planning to come to school one day and start shooting the place up. Their reason?
A note he wrote in a cipher inspired by an anime series by himself and some of his friends. A 'school resource officer' (I guess that's what they're calling the armed guards these days) found the note, sounded the alarm, and picked out the weird kid of the school who's been identified by his family as 'offbeat' and 'gothic' (okay.. fair enough, these days). Apparently, Dakota is a fan of the series
Naruto, an action-comedy series about an adolescent ninja in training... what bearing this has on the case, I've no idea. It seems to have been part of a game that the students were playing - information's a bit sketchy because the investigation is still on-going, though vague mention of such and Dakota's friends was made in the article. My hypothesis is that such messages have something to do with plotlines in the series, and that the kids were goofing around somewhere within spitting distance of that idea, but I really don't know.
School officials contacted the FBI, who returned their call and told them that the note was 'an elaborate code' outlining plans to attack the school. The administration of the school is hunting down other students who may have been involved in this matter for disciplinary action.
Interestingly, the contents of the note have been nowhere disclosed, at least at this time.
Frankly, without knowing what was in the note, I can't say if the school's administrators are on crack or not. Given the school shootings that have occurred since 1999 or thereabouts, they might have had real cause to worry, though offhand I don't know of anyone would would go to the lengths of developing (or finding) a substitution cipher to conceal their plans. In their position, I would be more inclined to think that some of the students were playing around with simple cryptosystems, and would have gone to the instructors teaching comp.sci classes to ask if they'd happened to have mentioned encryption or ciphers in class in the past couple of weeks. Then again, my personal approach to things is to not call in the big guns until the simpler possible solutions have all been explored.
Time will eventually tell.
Wednesday, 13 February 2008 at 09:22
Well, I'm mostly up and around these days. I'm writing this from my office at work, after braving the ice storm that's buried DC under sheets and sheets of the slick, shiny, scaly ice that's been causing automobile crashes and knocking out power and traffic lights for the past day or so. It started late on Monday night, I'm given to understand (I'd been to the doctor's office earlier in the day and it was actually pretty nice on Monday afternoon), slacked off a bit yesterday, and then really hit us hard last night. I discovered this during my attempt to get to the drugstore last night, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
My physician uncovered the reason that my ears were so badly plugged up on Monday, along with the reasons that my sense of balance had been screwed up and the intermittent pain. A quick peek inside my ears showed that there had been quite a bit of fluid buildup due to the damage my middle ears had sustained. As near as we could reconstruct from the events of last week, the irritation to the mucus membranes due to the cold/flu/whatever the hell it was, plus the rapid and frequent changes in air pressure, on top of having stopped up
eustachian tubes (and probably the violent hacking cough I've had ever since Friday) resulted in pinprick hemorrhages breaking out in my middle ears. What my doctor saw in there was not pus or cloudy interstital fluid (which you'd see as a result of an ear infection) but blood. My physician put me on prednisone to take the swelling down, and help my body break up the blood clots, which has done a great deal of good since Monday afternoon, let me tell you. Unfortunately it's done nothing for the hacking cough that's kept both Lyssa and I up all night for the past few days.
This closes the loop in time neatly by bringing us back to last night at the height of the ice storm. I didn't know that my car was iced over when the coughing fit started that nearly knocked me flat. So, I got dressed, headed outside, prised the driver's side door open, and turned the engine over to warm up. I then grabbed the ice scraper out of the back seat and set about clearing the windscreen and windows, and it dawned on me that I was eventually doing more coughing than scraping. In fact, I found myself doubled over one or twice last night. I guess it was pretty bad because my downstairs neighbors heard me and came out to investigate. They were kind enough to drive me to CVS so I could consult with the pharmacist on duty and find a cough suppressant that wouldn't cross-react with the prednisone I'm on and then drove me home. On the way, we exchanged phone numbers - if I need any help, they promised, I can call them.
I'm going to leave them a thank-you note for last night. They really saved my bacon.
This brings things back up to this morning, and wraps up a post neatly, and just after I finished my morning coffee. Neat, that.
Sunday, 10 February 2008 at 22:11
As I'd feared on Friday, whatever the hell it was that knocked me down while I was in Alabama has largely left my sinuses (thank the gods), but retreated into my inner ears. I lost all hearing in my left ear about two hours ago, and whenever I move my head I can feel fluid gurgling around in there (which hurts like a bitch, let me tell you).
I've already found a general practitioner that takes my insurance in the area; I'll be making an appointment as soon as I get up tomorrow morning, which I fear will be early, early, early. I've already taken Monday and Tuesday off as sick days from work.
Can you tell that I hate ear infections?
I've had far too many of them over the years - between the ages of eleven and, oh, fourteen or therabouts, I averaged three or four every year, usually shortly after or in conjunction with cases of strep throat. It got to the point where peering into my ear canals and swabbing the back of my throat was little more than a formality for my GP back home because those were the only reasons he ever saw me. With the other hand, I swear the man was already writing up a prescription for amoxicillin and whatever those ear drops were (gods, it's been too long). I've had so many ear infections over the years that I have a little hearing damage from them, truth be told. Not so much that I can't tell what's going on around me or that I have to read lips, but a little bit of tinnitus overlaying everything I hear, from the sound of air conditioning to the relative silence at night when I'm trying to go to sleep. I've gotten used to it in the decade and some and can compensate for it (I can still listen to
touch tones, for example, and tell you what numbers were dialed), but it's still there.
Okay. Enough ranting. Everything I need is already in place.
Saturday, 09 February 2008 at 17:03
I'm back from Tuscaloosa, though worse for wear. It seems that my remarks about the Chinese restaurant we visited on Tuesday were unfounded, and for this I formally apologize. I really don't think that we ate cat while we were there, and it wasn't their food that made me sick.
I've either contracted a cold that's taken years to study my immune system and figure out the best way to take it out, or I've caught the latest edition of the plague that makes its rounds between November and February every year. Either way, it sucks light years beyond anything that's happened in the past year or so. Congestion and coughing set in by Wednesday afternoon; by late Wednesday night I kept waking up every twenty minutes or so as the fever would fluctuate in one direction or another. By Thursday morning I was able to stay on site just long enough to do what I had to do before one of my teammates (hi, Brent) drove me back to the hotel to dose myself with whatever medication I could get my hands on and sleep.
I feel sorry for the housekeeping staff at the hotel. My room smelled horribly of 'sick' by the time I left on Friday afternoon. You know what I mean - that rotten-sweet-medicinal scent that seems to leak from your pores when your immune system takes off the gloves and starts fighting dirty.
I spent the next seven hours or so (probably a bit less - my sense of time is completely screwed) in the back of a land leviathan driving from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham, where I sat reading a book for the next couple of hours and dreading a pair of plane flights back home. I neglected to mention earlier the head congestion, which the changes in air pressure forced into my inner ears. Thankfully, the fluid has drained from my ears, relieving both the pain of something moving around where nothing should be and making it possible to hear again. Hasufin, who was nice enough to pick me up at Dulles last night, picked up for me a box of sinus rinse, which consists of a squeeze bottle and pre-measured packets of salts for flushing... stuff.. out of one's nasal cavities. Unfortunately, the instructions stated specifically that it should not be used when one's ears are plugged up.
I discovered why I couldn't get to sleep last night - the Theraflu I took after getting off the plane was Theraflu
Daytime, which includes stimulants to keep the user from getting drowsy. When you take it at 2300 local time, however, this presents a problem. A very
special problem.
Right now, I'm running another fever, sweating like it's going out of style, coughing up things that only H.P. Lovecraft has imagined to date, and wondering when I gave anyone permission to take a jackhammer to my frontal and ethmoid sinus cavities. Thankfully, my boss was able to get me off the duty team roster next week, so I won't be flying out again on Monday.
As one would expect, this puts Valentine's Day and birthday plans into something of a grey area. Lyssa and I have preliminary plans laid out that will work, assuming that I can kick this viral nasty in the next couple of days.
My mom sent me
a hardback edition of the Principia Discordia
for my birthday. Does she know me, or does she know me?
Off to take a shower and sleep some more.
Wednesday, 06 February 2008 at 01:34
Well, not so much. I was hoping to riff off of a famous
Red Dwarf quote or two to make this post more entertaining, but after a few revisions it's just not coming together the way I'd hoped, so I'll spare your delicate sensibilities and optics the horror and push on.
As the title to this post suggests, I'm in the heart of Alabama on assignment. Granted, it's not too bad... the people down here are quite friendly, and the stereotypical southern hospitality isn't a stereotype, it's a way of life. People down here are so nice, polite, and helpful that you could cut it with a knife and spread it on your toast in the morning. That part's been very enjoyable, and has made the fact that we're in the middle of nowhere with only a bunch of truckstops serving as bastions of civilization.
It took until tonight to get net.access. Once again we arrived at our hotel and found ourselves solidly in the third form of death because the local wireless access points were down and the gateway router was utterly hosed. My network ninja spidey sense tells me that you're not supposed to see router communication traffic for IP address blocks nowhere the hell near the ones assigned to the hotel's net.connection. As near as I can tell, the local router got some bad updates from someplace and decided to pretend that it was an octopus on
ketamine for a while. I guess someone with access to the right wiring closet at the hotel cycled the power on everything, and we've be up and running ever since we got back to the hotel tonight.
For lunch today my intrepid team of field techies (referred to in certain circles as the
A-Team) stopped at a little chinese smorg called the Hong Kong King Buffet (1434 McFarland Boulevard East; Tuscaloosa, Alabama; 35401). $8us or so will get you all you can eat at the three-row buffet in the middle of the restaurant, but either I've been eating well enough lately to develop a sense of taste or maybe there's something a bit off about this place, but something seems amiss. All was well for the first four or five hours, but then a few of us started feeling a little queasy. I was one of the last to feel it, but believe you me, things are not only a bit off at that restaurant, but in my stomach at the moment. E-, one of our policy juggernauts, never made it back downstairs for dinner after we got off-site. In fact, none of us have seen him since he started complaining about feeling ill.
I feel that any further commentary on this restaurant is best supplied by
the character of Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd when she describes her competition and business practices:
More under the cut...
Wednesday, 06 February 2008 at 00:31
Friday, 01 February 2008 at 11:32
If you tell someone a way to test something that does not require large-scale reconstruction of a system and is reversible... they'll ignore you and trash their system to reinstall everything.
Friday, 01 February 2008 at 10:52
(ObDisclaimer: I work for these guys.)
Developers at
The Prometheus Group recently announced a new open source project on their forums,
a web-based interface for YUM that will make it easy to add, remove, and update packages on servers running Redhat-like distributions of Linux. The GUI will be implemented in
PHP and
Python, and will make use of the
RPM modules already present in
Fedora Core,
Redhat, and like distros. To make it more attractive to sysadmins (who usually have too much to do and too little time to do it all) the web interface is designed to integrate with
Plesk, a web-based control panel for Linux machines developed with web hosting providers in mind. Right now, the
YUM web GUI is known to function on Redhat Enterprise Linux 4, and
CentOS 4 and 5, with other distributions on the way.
At this time the project is actively looking for other developers to contribute to the project, so if you're interested hit the forums and leave a message.
Friday, 01 February 2008 at 09:37
I feel ever so much safer now that
the TSA is requiring travelers at some airports to dump each and every electronic device they're carrying into those damned grey bins for examination. So far commenters on this article
over at Boing Boing have reported undergoing this at San Francisco, O'Hare, Milwaukee, San Antonio, Phoenix, and Richmond. As one would expect, this makes me not a bit apprehensive about my flight on Monday morning for another field assignment. The amount of hardware I carry in my field kit is considerable, which makes me feel not a bit like a sitting duck.
One commenter suggested putting all of your cables into large zip lock bags to make it easier. Personally, I use a mesh zippercase, which I somehow don't think they'll particularly understand. I might wind up going to the surplus store to get one of those mesh camping bags, like someone else suggested.
What really concerns me is the possibility of someone walking up and grabbing my laptop while I'm trying to make my way through security - as we all know
thefts are
up at airports ever since they started making people turn themselves inside out.
Interestingly, the TSA
now has a blog through which you can communicate with them. Whether or not they'll actually listen to anyone remains to be seen; I'm suspecting that something similar to what happened to the blog that Sunrocket set up about a year before they tanked ("Everyday Hogwash", if you remember) will take place (which is that everyone will complain about the organization that set it up, which will promptly start pretending that it never happened). Either that, or it'll turn into an
astroturf campaign. If nothing else, it's a curiosity worth a read before it gets hammered flat by trolls.
