Due to the fact that Rending the Veil hasn't finished restoring older articles from backup since the last server migration, I'm reposting my last article they published on harvesting the energy spent by spammers in trying to get us to buy their crap.
Spam. Junk e-mail. Things you can't say in mixed company.
No matter what you may call it, we're talking about the same thing: E-mail that you didn't ask for and don't want filling up your inbox, sometimes making it impossible to find real e-mail. It's a nuisance that netizens have been fighting for years. In terms of …
This is week four of my "three weeks out, one week in" work cycle, so I'll have much more constant net.access for at least a couple of days. I may as well take the time to write a couple of updates. My off-the-road workload has been sizable lately, enough so that even working from home means a day of solid work, with little to no socially acceptable goofing off at work stuff going on, such as reading Slashdot or checking one's e-mail. Work aside, I haven't been doing much of anything at all. Yesterday morning, Lyssa and I drove …
Cellular biologists working for the company Stemagan, based out of San Diego, California, have claimed something amazing: That they've managed to produce human embryos using skin cells from men instead of gametes (NY Times link - use Bugmenot if you need access). The embryos thus produced didn't develop very far, only to the blastocyst stage, but that in itself is a breakthrough. It wasn't necessary to force the division of the third stage for example (which is thought to have happened by accident under laboratory conditions at least once in medical history), for example. However, because embryonic stem cells weren't part …
As one might expect, it's been a busy couple of days (a week, really), which has kept me from being able to post anything. I got back from Philly around 1700 EST5EDT last Friday, and I've been offline pretty much the entire weekend because I've been too tired to do much of anything. After I got back, Lyssa made a wonderful hot dinner (all the more special because temperatures in the tri-state area have been averaging in the mid-twenties Fahrenheit), and then we decided to get together with some friendly faces to hang out for the evening. To that end …
Well, I'm the field again, back in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to fight the good fight.
Or get myself so worked up that I'll blow through an incarnation, I'm not sure which. It's too early to tell.
My cow-orkers picked me up around 1000 EST5EDT on Monday morning (so written because it'll be well after midnight when I get around to posting this) - apparently my vehicle is distinctive enough that they found my apartment building without too much trouble. Apparently they like the magnets on my car, something that I find endlessly amusing because so few people mention them. After a quick …
While going through my server logs tonight I keep seeing logfile entries like this:
a.b.c.d--[13/Jan/2008:22:59:49-0500]"GET /pivot/archive/2007/11/16/serious_vulnerability_found_in HTTP/1.0"404321"http://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2007/11/16/serious_vulnerability_found_in""Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; Win64; AMD64)"
Someone's going to articles on my website that exist, but then they're clicking a link someplace in the article that's sending them to the same URL prepended with the string /pivot, and I can't figure out where or why they're causing …
It has recently made it into the press that the FBI has been conducting wired surveillance of an international nature - the specifics of the operation aren't known, which is what one would expect of an ongoing investigation. However, due to an ongoing problem with controlling funds allocated to fieldwork, they forgot to pay the telco bill for the wiretap and the telco summarily shut the line off. The FBI's been fighting problems with mismanagement of money and embezzlement for years now, and while the measures they've put in place are helping to some extent they sometimes cause problems. This is …
For a while now I've been hearing about (and thus keeping an eye on) stories from people whose laptops are being confiscated at the border and examined, as sort of a gill net for anything shady (or that they don't understand). Usually you hear about it in the context of people getting busted for carrying child pornography but more often than not it's Joe or Jane User. The US government says that going through someone's data without a warrant is no different from going through someone's suitcase without a warrant; Idisagree, for reasons better elucidated by Judge Dean Pregerson of …
Scarcely one year after the initial appearance of the Storm Worm and its resulting botnet, some heretofore untapped functionality's been pushed out in one update or another in just the past couple of days: Not only is the botnet sending out phishing-related spam but the phishing sites are hosted on the infected machines themselves. The information security community is speculating that it may now be possible for the controller of the botnet to partition it and assign different tasks to different segments of the infected net.population. As if that weren't problem enough, the domains that the phishing sites use …
