Cryptome taken offline without reason.

Monday 30 April 2007 at 7:35 pm Cryptome is one of the longest-running websites on the Net for information related to personal privacy, whistleblowing and other sorts of information that make the people we're supposed to trust look bad. On 28 April 2007 John Young recieved a notice from his hosting company that Cryptome's plug would be pulled due to a violation of their terms of service agreement. It should be noted that this has happened many times since the site opened in 1999, and each time Verio has accepted Young's explanation for why a particular document was available. This time, they're accepting no reason at all and just terminating the site on 4 May 2007.

Now, let's see what might have caused it... a list of over three thousand US troops who've died in Iraq, with only a fraction of them ever mentioned by the press? The announcement of the creation of an NSA training facility outside of San Antonio, Texas? The Coast Guard getting screwed by a contractor? those are just from the past two weeks...

The map is not the territory, but this one folds up the same way.

Monday 30 April 2007 at 3:06 pm Researchers from the University of Nevada and IBM's Almaden Research Lab have used the BlueGene L supercomputer to run a heretofore unprecedented simulation of about one-half of a mouse's brain. It's not easy to keep an organic brain going outside of a living body so they did the next best thing, which was write a program that emulates the organic brain as closely as they could. This isn't as easy as it sounds because neural networks more advanced than those of worms have so many interacting factors that taking them all into account is a gargantuan task. It is also all of those factors that, when you stack them up, go into making brains what they are.
More under the cut...

"We'll make sure they get paid, even though they don't work for us..."

Monday 30 April 2007 at 11:51 am A couple of weeks ago, the RIAA managed to get a law passed that requires royalties to be paid to them for all music streamed across the Net, regardless of the reason or origin of the music. If you listen to the audio stream coming from a local commercial radio station's website, they're paying the RIAA royalties for the privilege (then again, chances are they're getting paid by the RIAA to only play certain songs - this has been known for years but no one's been in a position to do anything about it). If you read the fine print, though, the law is written in such a way that they get to collect royalties for bands who aren't signed to the RIAA, too. This includes indie bands who aren't signed at all and make their work available on their websites as well as musicians who make their music available under the Creative Commons license, such as the artists over at Podsafe Audio.

So.. the RIAA has created an organization that collects royalties for all musical artists on the Net, whether or not they're signed under the RIAA. We have to trust that they'll give the correct amount of money to the right people... maybe I'm being a little parochial, but when I was a kid we called this a protection racket.

Time to make some noise, people. Contact your representatives by phone, snail-mail, or e-mail, and tell them that this isn't right.

It's taken years of campaigning, but it's finally happened.

Friday 27 April 2007 at 7:33 pm The United States military has finally conceded after all these years - the pentacle has now been approved for the headstones of veterans who are also neopagans. The familiar circled five-pointed star joins the ranks of thirty-eight other philosophical and religious sigils, including the crucifix, the happy human of Secular Humanists, and the Star of David.

Interestingly, they've been taking their sweet old time on this - they approved the happy human and the insignia of the Sikhs in mere weeks.

There's something very _Snow Crash_ about this.

Friday 27 April 2007 at 12:23 pm Some call it spam, others call it laughable, but some people are very spooked about what you can find on someone with a simple Google search: E-mailed extortion threats demanding thousands of dollars to buy off a purported hitman with a contract. The scam goes down like this: J. Random Net.Scammer e-mails a likely target and claims to be an assassin that was paid to take them down. They're being kind enough to demand a couple of grand from them to not pull the trigger. Often the threats include some personal information, like the name of a spouse or children or a photograph of one's house (which you can pull off of the websites of county assessors' offices around the country without difficulty). If you try to get into it with the scammers, they might e-mail you back and try to scare you more.

Do yourselves a favour: Ignore them. If you're good at tracking down the senders of those messages, then you might want to consider doing so and contacting the ISPs of the senders (or the police local to the senders because technically this falls under the heading of 'terroristic threats').

Lives lost are lives lost, regardless of the side.

Friday 27 April 2007 at 12:10 pm I've been covering the Virginia Tech massacre from last week off and on for a while - just the highlights because things are at the point where just about everyone is saying more or less the same thing, just with slightly different words. Something jumped out at me last night before I went to bed, though: Controversy has been stirred up at VT because student Katelynn Johnson placed a thirty-third stone in the memorial, for shooter Seung-Hui Cho. All hell broke loose as a result, and understandably so, but Johnson was undeterred; in a letter to the school newspaper, she stated "We did not lose only 32 students and faculty members that day; we lost 33 lives."

She's right. Regardless of what Cho did, he was a living being. A person yoked with problems worse than most who lost the battle with himself and did something horrible. Compassion does not mean supporting or condoning someone or their actions.

I know, I know, I should post more.

Friday 27 April 2007 at 12:25 am I've been busy.

And now, better pictures of Lyssa's engagement ring.

That's something that I never thought I'd do.

Wednesday 25 April 2007 at 10:32 pm I proposed to Lyssa Heartsong tonight around 1930 EST5EDT.

We're getting married. We don't know when yet, nor do we have any solid plans, but we're getting married. Here's the timeline as it's been unfolding:

About a year ago, as I mentioned on an earlier revision of my website, Lyssa and I picked out her engagement and wedding rings. Jared's had a nice wedding pair with a kite stone mounting that Lyssa fell in love with, and I'd bought a deep blue sapphire that would fit. At my request, they kept it in their vault for security reasons. About two months ago, the jewelers told me that they no longer carried the setting, so I quietly had them start fabricating one for me. I've kept it under wraps ever since then. I'm sneaky like that, sometimes to my detriment.

I picked it up from Jared's about three weeks ago, and I've been sitting on it, quietly preparing for this moment. Not that I knew exactly when I'd propose to her, but I had a fair to middling idea mixed in with a bunch of scenarios that were unworkable because they were too far off, or required too much preparation to be feasible. As much as I'd have liked to propose at Dragoncon during the Cruxshadows concert immediately after they played Dragonfly, that's in September, which is too long a wait (to say nothing of trying to find a hotel for D*C less than a year in advance). On top of all of that, my time travel-fu is tied up with work right now...

I've been making preparations to propose to her, but with the crazy amounts of stress we've been under lately, I decided to pop the question tonight, out of left field, with no preparation at all.

Lyssa said 'yes'.

This week is going to get better no matter what.

Wednesday 25 April 2007 at 9:41 pm
"Lyssa Heartsong.. will you marry me?"

Pictures from Persephone's Ball 2007.

Wednesday 25 April 2007 at 9:32 pm
More under the cut...

Sakura desu!

Wednesday 25 April 2007 at 9:20 pm

It's amazing, the stuff you find in downtown DC...

Wednesday 25 April 2007 at 9:15 pm It looks like these were invented a few centuries too late.

Targetted attacks.

Wednesday 25 April 2007 at 3:05 pm It seems that The Bad Guys (for some value of Bad Guys) are now carefully choosing their targets, and are also carefully choosing personnel who work at those targets and are e-mailing trojan horses, in the form of MS Office documents to those people in the hope that they'll open the bad files and run the exploits. The nature of the payload isn't clear in the article - it sounds like the trojans open connections to systems that the attackers control, and the attackers tunnel back through into the target networks. The scary thing is that the targets include various federal agencies, defense contactors, and (it is said) a couple of nuclear power research facilities... moreover, the attacks are coming from overseas (no surprise, really), usually China or Taiwan. The attacks come at a rate of a couple per site per week - these guys are persistent, I'll give them that.

While this isn't a 0-day technique (the theory's been around for years), this is the first time that it's been recorded as happening as part of a planned, deliberate attack against a major site. Usually you hear about it being part of a last-ditch attack against a small company, sometimes in the guise of what might be considered industrial espionage.

There just aren't enough hours in the day.

Wednesday 25 April 2007 at 2:50 pm I haven't been posting much lately because I've been too busy to sit and write anything coherent, save for a quick blurb a few mornings ago. Things are, to be honest, going mad at work, which has been taking up a good twelve to fourteen hours every day. On top of all of this, my offline life is also going crazy for various reasons, and rather than spend nights online I'm taking care of business, so to speak. As one would expect, this combination of things takes a lot out of you. When I do manage to get some sleep, I tend to sleep until Lyssa wakes me up in the morning, whenever that happens to be.
More under the cut...

SMTP servers and emergencies.

Monday 23 April 2007 at 08:31 am When you need them the most, your local SMTP server will crash and you'll have no way of bringing it back online without a lengthy trip to the facility to flip the power switch.

Goddammit, I hate my lives.

Even gamers stationed overseas need dice^wlove.

Sunday 22 April 2007 at 8:11 pm The troops stationed overseas aren't having a fun time of their hitch in Iraq, let's be honest. They do everything they can to keep their spirits high and burnout rates low, but it's hard having something for everyone. You've got your football games, softball games, even dodgeball games.. but now they have a gaming convention. On 9 June 2007 at Camp Adder, the US military forces in Iraq will have their own con, dubbed ZigguratCon. It looks like they'll be heavy on the D&D, but a few other publishers have stepped up to the plate and are donating books and dice to the cause, but it's just not enough.

If any gamers out there are interested in donating anything to help, there is contact information in the article.

It's no surprise that this didn't hit the evening news.

Sunday 22 April 2007 at 6:51 pm Last weekend the results of an interesting study were quietly released to the newswires without a press release or advisory notice, which pretty much guarantees that it'll be skipped over for bigger headlines. A study over the past few years to determine whether or not sex education programs that push abstinence over smart sex and birth control shows absolutely no noticable change in teenage sex or birth rates. The results of the study echo those of earlier abstinence-or-intelligence studies from the 1980's and 1990's, but it seems that history is doomed to repeat itself.

Two famous RPG magazines will cease publication in September of 2007.

Friday 20 April 2007 at 11:40 am Two of the most famous RPG magazines, Dungeon and Dragon (about Dungeons and Dragons, unsurprisingly) will cease publication in September because more and more gamers are turning to the Net for news and articles about gaming.

Subscribers with issues left in their subscriptions will have a couple of options to get their money's worth. First of all, they can opt for back issues on a one-for-one basis. They can also get refunds, credit at paizo.com's online store, or convert to a subscription to Pathfinder, which is a monthly perfect bound magazine of adventures for OGL-compatible RPGs.

The final print issues will contain special articles commemorating the longest-running gaming magazines in history.

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Blackberry network outage causes widespread panic.

Friday 20 April 2007 at 10:29 am As you've probably heard on the Net, or maybe on the major news shows (I don't know, seeing as how I don't watch television unless you put a glass of bourbon in my hand and a gun to my head), the network underlying RIM's Blackberry PDAs was offline for a while, which left many people without mobile instant message and e-mail traffic for about a day. Now, I can see how this can be an inconvenience when you're on the Metro or at the store and you need to be on call for something, but if this article is to be believed (and I'm honestly not too sure if it should be) there were people freaking out because their Blackberries weren't working. You'd think that there'd suddenly been a run on heroin or something - one person started taking apart their Blackberry to see if there was anything that they could fix; another was quoted as talking about her "Blackberry brothers and sisters."

Let me see if I've got this straight: The Blackberry is now a life support system for a sizable group of people in the United States these days. Without it, people can't stay in touch or keep their lives organized.

I think that people grossly underestimate the benefits of jacking out once in a while. Maybe I'm being a little bit old-fashioned about this, or maybe I'm just glad that I'm not on 24x7 call anymore, but let's take things down to brass tacks. The Blackberry is a PDA that lets you read the news and check your e-mail. It's not a ventilator that breathes for you. It's not an artificial heart. It's not a SCUBA tank. It's a chunk of plastic with a CPU, some RAM, and an LCD display. The world isn't going to end if you can't check your e-mail. Your life will not come to a close if you can't glance at an RSS feed. You will not become like Richard Mayhew in Neverwhere if your cellphone can't connect to the grid. It won't kill you to stop sending two-line e-mails for a day and go for a walk down the street.

Speaking of geekdom, these are downright Airwolf.

Thursday 19 April 2007 at 11:36 pm The thirty-two nerdiest tattoos on the face of the planet (due to one of the images about halfway through, consider this post not safe for work).

The Voynich Manuscript is now on Flickr.

Thursday 19 April 2007 at 09:20 am Depending on whom you talk to, the Voynich Manuscript is either one of the strangest books on the face of the planet, the key to the secrets of the universe, an elaborate puzzle by Dr. John Dee/Abdul al-Hazred/the Comte de Saint Germain/$other_mystical_figure, or a brilliant hoax. The text of the book is utterly incomprehensible - if it's a cypher, it's a damned good one. Many cryptographers and puzzle freaks over the years have tried and failed to decode it, though they've discovered a few interesting things. Current thought has it that the script was created from scratch by whomever penned the text specifically for this project. Textual analysis shows that the text itself contains patterns suggestive of the presence of a language. If it does, then it's very likely that the language is either fictitious as well or gibberish that happens to contain a high amount of entropy, in the cryptographic sense. This isn't as difficult task as one would think - software exists today that can generate nonsense words that have patterns similar to those found in spoken and written languages.

The book is also notable for the unusual hand-drawn illustrations that it contains. The book is roughly broken down into six chapters, one reminiscent of herbalists' manuals found in the 15th and 16th centuries, unusual astronomical and astrological diagrams, what appear to be maps or cosmological diagrams, and other images that look useful at first glance, but don't actually refer to anything that any modern scientist or biologist has ever seen.

The Yale Library has high-resolution scans available for download, but they're in an unusual graphics format that nobody (not even Microsoft) uses, so an enterprising individual converted the files into JPGs and posted them on Flickr as a photostream.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Oracle sure took its sweet old time patching this...

Thursday 19 April 2007 at 08:48 am Oracle is best known for its database system, which many thousands of companies make use of in some capacity or another. It's big, it's bad, it's complex, but it's also got some amazing features, like clustering and replication that many other databases (open source and otherwise) can't hold a candle to, assuming that you understand it well enough to make it work. It's a complex beast, no two ways about it. That complexity, however, is no excuse for them taking two years to patch a security vulnerability in Oracle 10. It's a cross-site scripting bug in the enterprise search subsystem, and XSS is a pretty common class of bug these days, but what gets my goat is that it was discovered around 5 April 2005 and reported to Oracle, but Oracle didn't actually release a security alert until 17 April 2007. Now, maybe I'm flying off the handle just a little bit. I've not even finished my first cup of coffee of the day. But finding out that a bug has gone unpatched for two years makes my blood boil just a little bit.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Wednesday 18 April 2007 at 12:26 pm Cody Webb, age fifteen, was arrested last month for making a bomb threat to his school's information line. He spent twelve days in juvenile detention for the act. There's just one problem: He didn't call in a bomb threat. As authorities figured out later, the school's automatic message recording system automatically changed its internal clock to take into account Daylight Savings Time. Therefore, the timestamps of all calls received after the changeover were one hour off from those before the changeover. When they pulled the call records, they accidentally went too far back and pulled Cody's telephone call from the Caller ID records.

On top of all of this, the voice that placed the bomb threat sounded nothing like Cody, but that didn't deter principal Kathy Charlton from proclaiming Webb the culprit and calling the police. When reason attempted to prevail, she was quoted as saying "Well, why should we believe you? You're a criminal. Criminals lie all the time."

When last I checked, suspects were innocent until proven guilty, regardless of their age.

Is adolescence really a mental illness?

Wednesday 18 April 2007 at 12:08 pm A study of over five thousand adolescents by the US Food and Drug Administration has determined that treating teenagers with antidepressants like Prozac, Celexa, and Serzone is much more safe than previously thought, and that the long-range benefits outweight the short term side effects, such as suicidal mania. The study was performed using the data from the original studies back in 2004 along with data from eleven other studies that were either unavailable or not considered in the final breakdown. The study just released shows that antidepressants seem to work the best on anxiety disorder and the least on depression itself (which is counter-intuitive, if you think about it).
More under the cut...

Beauty may only be skin-deep, but asshole is to the bone.

Tuesday 17 April 2007 at 8:47 pm You know Fred Phelps, whose church/immediate family protests the funerals of fallen US soldiers, homosexuals, and even Mister Rogers (no, I'm not making this stuff up)?

They're going to protest at the funerals of fallen Virginia Tech students.

Right about now, I am so enraged at the thought that I am going to end this entry before I say something that will get me in trouble.

The Virginia Tech massacre - aftermath.

Tuesday 17 April 2007 at 1:51 pm More information's come to light with regard to the massacre on the Virginia Tech campus yesterday. They think that they've figured out who the shooter was, a twenty-three year old English major named Cho Seung-Hui. He was reportedly a loner, and they're having a difficult time finding any information on him as a result. They're going through his schoolwork at this time (he was an English major, after all, so they've got stuff from composition classes and the like to analyze); they found a number of rants and missives about various sorts of people in his dorm room written during the time before the shootings yesterday. It's also known that he was depressed, possibly disturbed, possibly on antidepressant drugs.

Interestingly, Professor Carolyn Rude (chairwoman, VT English Department) stated that analyzing someone's writing isn't a sure way of figuring out what's going on in their head, because sometimes writing is creative, and sometimes it's a portent. One is not necessarily the other.

The reason I say that they think they know he was responsible for both sets of shootings is because there isn't much in the way of eyewitness account putting him at the first shooting outside of the dorm. They are certain that the same gun was used in both sets of shootings, and that Cho's fingerprints were on all of the guns used, so the evidence is very strong, but no official announcement has been made. They also know that Cho bought a Glock pistol in March of 2007, so the evidence is that much stronger.

Classes are cancelled for the rest of the week, and students are leaving campus in droves.
More under the cut...

A new Windows worm crawls the net.

Tuesday 17 April 2007 at 10:23 am A couple of days ago, Microsoft released a security bulletin regarding a vulnerability in the DNS server component of Windows Server 2000 and 2003. In it, a remote attacker can cause the DNS server system service to spawn a shell that one can then connect to and execute commands because there is a bug in the RPC (Remote Procedure Call) interface. Ordinarily, Windows is designed to be operated from the GUI that we all know and love, but if you open a command shell, there's an excellent suite of command line utilities that can perform the same operations, usually much faster. There is also a third way of controlling system services remotely (RPC), which is a way of calling the administrative functions of a daemon or service remotely with a management client of some kind. At any rate, a security researcher read the security advisory and put together exploit code for the vulnerability, which isn't actually out of the ordinary for the information security community. An exploit of some kind has to be written to prove that the vulnerability is both real and exploitable, and they are legitimately used to test one's machines for the presence or absence of the bug. On the other hand, those utilities can also be used to remotely compromise systems, which is what people usually think of them.
More under the cut...

Weekend in review: Persephone's Ball 2007.

Monday 16 April 2007 at 10:34 pm A couple of weeks ago Lyssa and I hooked up with House Eclipse to buy seats at a second table at Persephone's Ball 2007, the annual fundraising dinner held by the Open Hearth Foundation in their effort to set up a community center for the pagan community of the Washington, DC metropolitan area. They've been at this for almost ten years now; I've been keeping my eye on it for about five but this is the first time that I've ever participated in one of their functions. We weren't sure what our schedule was going to be like on Saturday because we'd spent just about the entire day running errands, and the fine details of transportation hadn't yet been figured out, but we got back home with just enough time to get ready before everyone started arriving.

Persephone's Ball is a masquerade ball, something that attracted Lyssa and I almost immediately to the idea because you don't see many of them these days, and moreover we love an excuse to get dressed up. To that end, we donned our Sunday's best on Saturday afternoon and got ourselves ready to see and be seen, and possibly to make a couple of new friends in the community. Jason was the first to arrive, and opted for facepaint instead of wearing a mask. Lyssa had also opted to use makeup in lieu of wearing a mask that night. I wore my black leather half-mask and one of my prosthetic contact lenses on Saturday night. Hasufin had a small black eye mask that night, and Mika had none, though the red velvet dress she wore was most impressive.

Jason wound up driving Hasufin, Mika, Lyssa, and myself up to Maryland to the hotel at which the Ball was being held this year. Due to the rain and traffic, what promised to be a jaunt to Silver Spring turned into an hour-long trek. The rest of House Eclipse met up with us at the hotel, having run into similar problems en route.
More under the cut...

EDIT: Thirty-three confirmed dead at Virginia Tech.

Monday 16 April 2007 at 1:14 pm Just an hour or two ago, an unidentified gunman opened fire on the campus of Virginia Tech, killing twenty and wounding more. The gunman was also shot and killed, but it hasn't been announced yet if it was at his own hand or not. The shootings started at Norris Hall, which is the engineering building of the college. The campus is in lockdown at this time, and is expected to remain so well into tomorrow. Other shootings were reported near one of the dorms.

As it turns out, security forces locked down the campus for a time so the shooter crossed the campus to the other side and started shooting again, I'm guessing from the dorms to the engineering building, were the situation ended with the shooter's death.

If any of my readers happen to go to Virginia Tech, or are near there today, please comment on this post, if only to say that you're all right.

EDIT: Thirty-three people are confirmed dead.

More tales from the dentist's chair.

Monday 16 April 2007 at 11:17 am I was privileged to open my week with another trip to the dentist's chair for a routine workup, a checkout, and my bi-yearly (I think that's right - twice every year) cleaning which had taken a back seat to my last root canal. Much of the morning was taken up with bitewing x-rays and many long minutes spent under a water spike, which uses a thin stream of water moving under very high pressure to remove buildup and tartar from one's teeth in all those places that toothbrushes never quite seem to hit on a daily basis. While it wasn't uncomfortable, per se, I can name a couple of things off the top of my head that I'd much rather have done to me, most of them involving the implantation of semiconductors or insertion of nonconductive micro-particles of pigment just beneath the skin.
More under the cut...

Packets... in... SPAAAAAAAACCCEEEE!!!!!

Friday 13 April 2007 at 3:39 pm The United States military is planning to launch a communications satellite that is a dedicated Internet router by the year 2009. The way the Net works right now, some communications satellites are involved in handling net.traffic but there are two major differences from how they want to start doing it: First of all, net.traffic goes from the ground up to a comsat and then is retransmitted to another downlink on the ground; the IRIS project will route traffic from comsat to comsat, something that hasn't been done before. Secondly, traffic is transmitted on fixed communications channels; the IRIS satellites (designed by Cisco and Intelsat (a company whose works were just in the news for other reasons)) will pick whichever frequencies in whichever bands are least heavily loaded at the moment, which is much more efficient. The router will probably implement Quality of Service for handling voice and video traffic, and will have IP multicasting support (which I don't think will be turned on all the time due to how much bandwidth that would use).

The project will have a three year testing phase, after which it'll be opened to commercial net.traffic.

I just hope that they set a password on the 'enable' account before it goes live.

Sanitation, anyone?

Friday 13 April 2007 at 1:01 pm If you are in a bathroom and there are fluids of some kind exiting your body, you should not simultaneously be eating or drinking.

Unauthorized use of communications satellites for propaganda bombing.

Friday 13 April 2007 at 09:51 am The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, also known as the Tamil Tigers, is a group of rebels active in the country of Sri Lanka who demand the formation of a separate state for the Tamil majority in the northern and eastern regions of Sri Lanka, or a terrorist group, depending on who you talk to about them. They're pretty nasty customers as sepratist movements go, even having separate strike and black ops teams. They also have an unusual degree of technological sophistication - they have their own television station, a bank, a customs service, and it's been discovered that they can zip satellite feeds to inject their own media. As near as anyone can tell they've figured out how to authenticate to an Intelsat and are using it (by way of an unused transponder channel) to broadcast their own television and radio content, which gives their media unit much wider coverage than before. Intelsat says that reconfiguring the comsat is going to take time because it's a very delicate task.

Not surprisingly, the US government is worried that Al Quaida is going to attack the United States with the same technology, sort of like they were worried that hackers could move satellites around with their BBSes back in the 1980's. Maybe they've got their own space program and they're converting comsats into orbital mind control lasers or something...

"A feast for fire and a feast for water; a feast for life and a greater feast for death!" -Liber AL, II:41

Thursday 12 April 2007 at 9:50 pm Helen, of Helen and Rialian, discovered about two hours ago that her mother was killed in an automobile accident earlier tonight.

Rialian's left Colorado and is headed back to Maryland as fast as possible. He's expected late tomorrow night.

I'm so sorry, Helen... we're all here for you.

Turbotax web application security vulnerability.

Thursday 12 April 2007 at 4:08 pm A customer of the Turbo Tax web application discovered by accident that it is possible to look at tax information belonging to other customers who happen to share your last name by attempting to view past tax filings. By 'tax information' I mean everything, from Social Security Numbers to bank account numbers and routing codes.

Here's hoping they audited the code in that web app and fixed it before anyone else had a chance to discover the bug, and take advantage of it.

They've finally caught on that e-mail is recorded in perpetuity...

Thursday 12 April 2007 at 11:38 am ...but the Republican party has been caught using off the record communications to plan things for the past couple of years, and that makes the keepers of the archives sit up and take notice. Spokespeople for the White House have stated that thousands of e-mails were lost and cannot be retrieved because they didn't go through the proper channels but instead used unauthorized, unsecured laptop computers and e-mail servers that did not archive messages sent or received, in violation of federal law. Now that Congress is probing the firings of eight federal attorneys and looking for relevant communications, they aren't finding any; in fact, Karl Rove sent about 95% of his e-mail through the unauthorized network, or that's what investigators are saying. So far, forensics efforts haven't produced anything, or if they have they aren't talking.
More under the cut...

So it goes.

Thursday 12 April 2007 at 08:57 am The literary world is diminished somewhat , whose works were rife with social commentary and lines that gave conservative high school English teachers fits since the publication of Slaughterhouse Five, the story of a war veteran whose timeline comes loose and snarls itself around parts of history that it wouldn't otherwise be touching.

Vonnegut got his start in journalism, but wound up writing fiction when it didn't pan out in Chicago in the late 1940's. His early stories didn't get much press time but were lauded by reviewers and critics as fascinating science fiction, the genre with which he is still associated. Slaughterhouse Five put him on the map in 1969 by hitting the bestseller list of the New York Times. Two years later, Harvard appointed Vonnegut to teach creative writing and the University of Chicago granted him his MA, after the submission of an earlier text (Cat's Cradle) as his thesis.

Vonnegut died last night following complications of head injuries he suffered after falling in his home last week. The literary world will indeed miss him.

At long last, it seems to be over.

Wednesday 11 April 2007 at 4:12 pm At least, until I go in for a routine cleaning next Monday.

I left work early today to clean up a little before driving out to the dentist's office to have the temporary crown removed from the molar from hell and have the permanant one cemented into place. It's taken about two weeks to fabricate the crown, so I've had a lot of time to get used to the temp. A temp which was even better than the one that had to be cut away, incidentally, because the last one had been damaged during installation. Dr. Nguyen took the needle to me yet again, this time to do a couple of skin-pops of the gum around the molar because he'd have to do some stretching and scraping to fit the appliance properly in place.

From start to finish the installation process took less than a half hour. A few minor adjustments had to be made to the crown with a rotary file, but it fits quite nicely, and most importantly I seem to have a normal bite once again, or as normal as my screwed up jaw structure will allow. The cement is curing as I write this, and I can just feel the novocaine wearing off. There doesn't seem to be any pain from the worksite, which one would expect of a tooth that didn't have any sensory nerves in it.

I'd call this a success, one that I've been awaiting for weeks.

Next up: Another molar, hopefully in better shape than the last one.

Let's try another utility, and while I'm at it, I'll post something interesting.

Wednesday 11 April 2007 at 09:31 am

Let's see how the Gnome blogging panelapp works...

In West Chester, Pennsylvania someone has taken it upon themselves to show drive-in movies from a 16mm projector mounted in a BMW sidecar, with audio courtesy of a short-range AM transmitter. John Young, the guy behind the scheme, gets permission for the locations ahead of time though he keeps them secret until just before the showings. The trick is that you have to find another AM transmitter called the MacGuffin and figure out what frequency it's transmitting on - write down the password it's transmitting , enter it on the website, and it'll tell you where to go and at what time.

The idea is that he'll show a movie appropriate to the venue, such as Caddyshack on a golf course, Max Max on a freeway underpass, stuff like that.

So let's try something different...

Wednesday 11 April 2007 at 08:28 am In an earlier entry I pontificated about a number of things, among them not feeling very comfortable using a web browser for some weird-reason to write posts, as I much prefer a dedicated application of some kind.

Sure, it feels weird, but I'm one of those folks who uses the right tool for the right job - I don't use a screwdriver as a can opener, nor do I use a hammer to perform brain surgery (because I don't work helpdesk anymore). So, I've decided to try out a couple of dedicated applications to see if it makes a difference.

That, and I'm cutting my caffeine intake so that I can concentrate more strongly on what I'm doing.
More under the cut...

This says a lot about life these days.

Monday 09 April 2007 at 3:30 pm A semi-common sight in DC are street musicians, people who stand on street corners or sit just inside the entrances of Metrorail stations and play instruments of one sort or another. Every once in a while you'll see one within spitting distance of an office building, something that has become a bit more rare since 9/11 since physical security has become such a big deal in this country. Most people don't even stop to listen to them because they're too busy doing what they need to do to keep their lives running smoothly, which seems to consist of running to meetings, running from meetings, and sitting in cubicle gulags or offices (if you're lucky) hammering away at a keyboard.

What is a world-famous musician camped out in the middle of DC and played amazingly complex violin pieces for everyone walking by on their way to or from work?
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Easter weekend 2007 in review, or, "I can't believe we made that much ham!"

Monday 09 April 2007 at 2:34 pm Easter weekend is always a busy one. Either we're getting ready to head back to Pennsylvania to spend the day with one or both families, cleaning, cooking, or getting ready to have people over for dinner. As it turned out, we accomplished most of the tasks on that list, as well as a couple that weren't, all in preparation for Grant and his girlfriend to come over on Sunday afternoon for dinner.

The task began on Friday night with a couple of loads of laundry and cleaning up around the apartment, followed by driving over most of creation on Saturday morning to get groceries and sundries to make Easter dinner.

Driving in northern Virginia is harrowing at best, but when a holiday deadline is ticking down, finding parking is damned near impossible. More than once, I wound up dropping Lyssa off in front of the store, only to drive around the parking lot for ten to fifteen minutes searching for someplace to park. It seems like most every asshat in this part of the country was out, also, because they took it upon themselves to stalk soon-to-be-vacated parking spaces... while stopping their land leviathans such that the cars attempting to pull out were unable to.
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There once was a BBS tagline that read...

Friday 06 April 2007 at 1:34 pm .."Old virus detected - contact your hacker for an update." It seems that malware authors have taken this joke seriously, and are offering subscriptions to website operators that make use of their software. Malware tends to evolve fairly rapidly to get around the cleaner software, which means that sites that deliberately infect web browsers have to keep up to date to keep as many systems as possible infected. Prices tend to start around $66us and climb from there, depending upon how many systems a particular website is able to infect.

It has become apparent that it is possible to not only turn a profit, but make a decent living by packaging exploits and using them to install browser spies, SSL sniffers, and other infectious agents. Seeing as how zero-day exploits can sell for $1kus on up on the black market (unconfirmed reports state that organizations are willing to pay up to $100kus for zero-days in Windows Vista), it's very cost effective to turn around and re-sell use of these exploits. This also has the added effect of advancing the state of the art in malware obfuscation technologies, which exists in the form of encryption, polymorphic code, arbitrary codeblock manipulation, and techniques that the white hats haven't even heard of yet.

The outfits that sell subscriptions to their malware even offer customer and tech support to their customers. One can only wonder when they'll start outsourcing.

A snapshot of life, or, why I haven't been writing about what's been going on lately.

Friday 06 April 2007 at 11:22 am Frankly, I've just been too tired. Not so much physically tired, though that has been creeping up on me over the past day or two, but a sort or weariness that has settled into my bones and is slowly but surely slowing me down. I've been doing a lot of running around lately and that hasn't been helping - we've got family coming into town for Easter this weekend, so Lyssa and I have been running around getting some last minute stuff to make dinner on Sunday, like a new cutting board (our old one broke a couple of weeks back but was still more or less servicable for everyday stuff, like making lunch). Earlier this week, the couch that we'd ordered last weekend was delivered, so instead of a papasan chair that is a threat to the life and limb of anyone sitting in it, we've got an L-shaped couch that's really helped shape up the living room. The thing is, we've been too busy to actually sit down and enjoy it. We've also been running around getting stuff for a baby shower being held for one of Lyssa's cow-orkers, a task that's taken two days due to last-minute returns.
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Ummmm....

Thursday 05 April 2007 at 09:35 am Google Maps is a wonderful thing.

But seriously, Google's added some interesting features to their mapping webapp, namely, the ability to draw and customize your own personal maps, which can then be shared with others, if you so desire. There is now a selection tool which lets you define routes and points on the map, a tool that lets you put flags on land- or placemarks, and a utility that'll let you define shapes, a utility that I think has a lot of potential.