Search Results Archives: May 2008
Heh. Look at the near-empty office I found next to my corporate office of PlxxxCo out on the West Coast. I peeked inside and could only see a single maniacal employee with a robotic parrot. I’m sure any day now they will find the breakthru they are looking for. But probably not.
And you thought that the Maytag repairman had the loneliest job.
I don’t have the time to battle evil people, so I don’t think I would be able to be a superhero. But I could certainly get into the super villain business as long as it didn’t take up too much time or cross any lines. For instance, at dinner tonight at a great Chinese restaurant, I disclosed my next campaign of evil:
Replace all of the fortune cookie sayings with popular email spam messages:
I have a big meeting at PlxxxCo this week, which caused me to have to fly to Oakland California and rent a car and drive to corporate HQ in the Silicon Valley. I am dining as I write this on overpriced room service food (panini is a stupid word that just means crunchy bland sandwich bread) and a beer from the minibar. Blogging may be pretty light this week as I’m not due back until the weekend. If you are a regular reader, feel free to check out my archives. Lots of good stuff in there! Or feel free to visit the fine blogs featured in my Blogroll.
Here’s a pretty good post courtesy of Poppy that is right up my alley. Its the eight most annoying types of people that you find at a Starbucks.
I would like to add myself as the number Nine type. I go to Starbucks quite often because many of my friends love their overpriced coffee, and my wife likes their chai. But whenever I go there, I always order a large Diet Coke and then argue with the Barista about how stupid they are to sell crappy Jones Soda but refuse to sell me a mainstream diet soda that is the number one selling soft drink nationwide, and if they only sold Diet Coke, their sales would be much better because they could attract non coffee drinkers. And I always leave without a coffee, declaring loudly that the Baskin Robins next door will sell me a Diet Coke, and they will avoid giving me attitude about it! And then I savor the heavy sighs and dirty looks the other patrons give me, all the while my wife pinches me and harshly whispers through gritted teeth, “Remember the talk we had about last week about you giving Starbucks employees a hard time!”
Weezer has managed to generate the best geeky music video based on Internet Viral videos ever! This Beans and Franks video, first off, sounds outstanding, especially if you catch it on the radio. But you can catch lots of internet stars in this, including cameos by Tay Zonday, and is that K-Fed? This new album comes out on the 3rd of June. Click below to enjoy.
I missed attending the parade that precedes the Ride of the Patriots this weekend. Check out last year’s slideshow here. But my buddy Tom went and sent along this photo of the Orange County Chopper designed for the US Army. Totally badass.
Hope everyone had a great Memorial Day!
This is according to BWE here. Janet Jackson sings about love that is “heavy as a first day period.” Holy Gross Similes, Batman!
You can check it out at the video below. The actual lyrics begin at 2:30 .
The lyrics:
Flyer than a pelican find another
Chick better than I don’t see her
Cause my swag is seriousSomething heavy like a first day period
Strum me like a guitar blow out my amplifier
When you hear some feedback keep going take it higher
Why is it that the Jackson’s always want us to know what’s going on inside them? But Nasty Jackson is indeed singing about riding the cotton pogo stick. Singing about straining tomatoes. Singing about Organic African Chunky Marinara. Singing about making teabags for vampires. Singing about a rusty axe gash. Singing an ode to Aunt Flo. Serenading Carrie on Prom Night. A ballad about hitting the jackpot on the RedCross Slot Machine.
If you see the Google Street View van drive by, whip out your Googles. Just like this girl in Chicago.
From the Reg here:
we suspect that as the Street View motorised tentacles extend across the globe, the sport of “Flash your Googles” will become increasingly popular.
Yeah, let’s hope so. I want to see topless girls in a convertible chasing the Google van down the street.
A targeted spear-phishing attack aimed at corporate executives are shaking up some companies today. The emails look like notifications from the United States Tax Court that someone in the company has neglected to pay their taxes. Then the email urges the reader to download the full petition from a website, which of course contains a trojan horse program. Check out how this looked to executives at McAfee:
From McAfee’s blog here:
The scammers do their homework when it comes to spear phishing. Instead of pumping out millions of emails to anybody and everybody, spear phishers send out their scams only to people they know will be susceptible to the scam. In this case a top executive–rather than the average employee–is much more likely to be involved in a court case of this nature.
As long as you have email operating for your enterprise, Spear-phishing is the only cyber attack that can’t be defended.
And where do you think attackers harvest these email addresses from? My guess is the public filings at the SEC.gov website.
The pace of work is pretty heavy now which is why posting has slowed to a crawl. I’m in the middle of performing compliance scans for my new company, PlxxxCo, and we are up against a deadline so some of the engineers are getting a little panicky about not being able to complete their work on time. Others are wondering why we have to do the scans in the first place and are refusing to do any work until they are in a meeting and beaten about the heads and shoulders by their boss with the compliance regulations.
I plan on sneaking off soon to see Indiana Jones. Hopefully a little escapism and a tub of buttered popcorn will break up the monotony at work.
I had the terrible experience of sitting through Strange Wilderness, a horrible movie so bad that it scored a 0.0 on Rotten Tomatoes.
About as funny as watching a cute animal die a long slow death – and probably as painful.
04/11/08 04:40 AM‘Strange Wilderness’ isn’t funny enough to produce anything more than a few slight chuckles. We mostly groan and squirm in our seats while watching it.
03/16/08 05:52 AM
Seriously, if there were ever a movie made that would cause cancer, it was this dreck by Adam Sandler’s company, Happy Madison. Sharon Stone is now happy that her movie, Basic Instinct 2 has been bumped from the bottom of the list.
Wow, a malignant brain tumor. Nice way to go. Its better than drowning in a car.
From the AP here:
A cancerous brain tumor caused the seizure Sen. Edward M. Kennedy suffered over the weekend, doctors said Tuesday in a grim diagnosis for one of American politics’ most enduring figures.
They said tests conducted after the seizure showed a tumor in Kennedy’s left parietal lobe. Preliminary results from a biopsy of the brain identified the cause of the seizure as a malignant glioma, they said.
His treatment will be decided after more tests but the usual course includes combinations of radiation and chemotherapy.
What is it about the Kennedys and their brains? His brother’s were blown out at Dallas. His other brother’s blown out in DC. His nephew had his spattered on the windshield of an airplane. Another nephew left his brains in tree bark on an Aspen ski slope. Now Teddy’s is going to explode from within. At least with the chemo Teddy will finally lose weight.
And even when Teddy’s a corpse zombie with no brain, the fine people of Massachusetts will still vote him in for another term.
This is indy music, but the sound is pretty cool. I think the difference between Indy music stars and rockstars may have something to do with how attractive the singers are. Or maybe it’s hair gel. I dunno, click the video to enjoy.
Check out [GAS] for my latest post about the stupidity of the pentagon’s bureaucracy as they finally get around to defining “cyberspace” for their war chiefs.
Thanks to Sean for the .pdf!
If you are like most people, you enjoy some gooey nachos and a huge video arcade. One of the best places to play video games and chow down on junk food is the Dave and Busters restaurants. But if you used a credit card at one of their stores recently, your credit card information, and maybe even your bank account could be at risk of theft. A hacker group infiltrated the D&B cash registers at several locations and installed card sniffers to steal the data.
From the AP here:
Three men were charged Monday with hacking into a national restaurant chain’s computerized cash registers and stealing credit card information from customers.
Eleven Dave & Buster’s restaurants at various locations around the United States were hit in the scheme, including one on Long Island, NY where information was stolen on 5,000 credit and debit cards, causing at least $600,000 in losses.
Maksym Yastremskiy, of Kharkov, Ukraine, and Aleksandr Suvorov, of Sillamae, Estonia, were charged in a 27-count indictment with wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud, conspiracy to possess unauthorized access devices, access device fraud, aggravated identity theft, conspiracy to commit computer fraud, computer fraud and interception of electronic communications. The indictment was unsealed in U.S. District Court in Central Islip. Albert Gonzalez of Miami was charged with wire fraud conspiracy.
The trio hacked into the cash register terminals in order to acquire “track 2″ credit and debit card information. Track 2 data includes the customer’s account number and expiration date, but not the cardholder’s name. The men then sold the stolen data to others who made fraudulent purchases, prosecutors said.
Yastremskiy and Suvorov are accused of gaining unauthorized access to the terminals and installing so-called “packet sniffers,” which are computer software codes designed to capture communications between two or more computer systems on a single network. Gonzalez supplied the computer software used in the scheme.
I can’t quite figure out if the packet sniffers were installed physically- like a USB stick- or if it was done over the network using software. Either way, it demonstrates how easy it is to tamper with the process.
We were watching a movie at home and munching on snacks. The strawberry twizzlers were broken out and enjoyed until Jess slapped me with one. Those freakin’ candy ropes hurt like the dickens! Seriously, they should put a warning label on the candy bag. We both ended up with twizzlers burns, but Jess got the worst of it, which is just fine since she started it. And I did a Google search for “twizzlers hurt” and got this video.
Those red marks on their arms are welts, not stains from the candy.
Lori Drew is rightfully the most hated person on the internet. She impersonated a boy on MySpace with the express intention of hurting Megan Meier, a little girl who was her neighbor. That girl, brokenhearted over drama resulting from the fake MySpace page, committed suicide.
I never covered this story since it was so well covered by Trench here, here and here. But now she has been indicted in Los Angeles on federal charges for conspiracy, fraud, and get this- hacking! What hacking? She violated the terms of service on Myspace.
From Reuters here:
A 49-year-old Missouri woman accused of pretending to be a love-struck teenage boy on MySpace and driving a 13-year-old girl to suicide with cruel messages was indicted on Thursday on federal charges.
Lori Drew and others created the fake MySpace persona of a 16-year-old boy to woo neighbor Megan Meier for several weeks, then abruptly ended the relationship and said the world would be better off without her.
Meier’s 2006 suicide by hanging, just hours after she read those final messages, made worldwide headlines and prompted calls for social networking sites like MySpace to crack down on cyber-bullying.
The indictment, which was handed down in Los Angeles after Missouri authorities declined to prosecute Drew, was a first of its kind and could stretch the bounds of the federal statute on which it was based.
Drew was charged with accessing a protected computer to obtain information, a statute typically used against defendants who hack into government computers.
Drew, who faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison if she is convicted on all of the charges, was expected to surrender to authorities in Missouri.
I think Lori Drew deserves punishment of the harshest type. But if the Feds are going to step in and prosecute based on the violation of the Terms of Service agreement, which is a civil agreement between private individuals, this is a bad idea. First, the feds have neglected to do this for every creepy web predator that rapes kids they entice on MySpace. Second, no federal laws were actually broken under the code cited, which is Title 18 Section 1030, a code every cyber security professional is familiar with. In order to prosecute under this section, Drew would have had to steal a password or compromise the system- Not use the service in an unintended way.
The conspiracy and harassment charges should stick. But also think about this- when was the last time any prosecutor in Los Angeles was able to get a conviction? Unfortunately, I think Drew will walk on this charge.
The British tabloids are going berserk over “emo” fashion and attitudes taking root in Great Britain. And supposedly, wearing black clothing makes their precious snowflakes want to “snuff it.”
First up is the face of failure- Hannah Bond. She goes from homely to goth-and-homely, to having pennies over her eyes.
From the Mail here:
Hannah was a happy 13-year-old until she became an ‘emo’ – part of a sinister teenage craze that romanticises death. Three months later she hanged herself. Here, her devastated mother tells other parents: No child is safe
Hannah was what is known as an “emo”. Some describe it as a cult or a sect, but in reality the term — derived from the word “emotional” — encapsulates a trend that is becoming hugely popular among Britain’s schoolchildren.
A trans-Atlantic import, its followers dress in black, favouring tight jeans, T-shirts, studded belts and sneakers or skater shoes.
Hair is all-important: often dyed black and straightened, it is worn in a long fringe brushed to one side of the face.
Some time before her death, Hannah’s parents, who live in Kent, noticed scarring on the inside of her wrists.
When they questioned her about it, honest and open as ever, she told them she’d inflicted the wounds herself and that it was part of an emo “initiation ceremony”.
Only after her death would they discover how she had secretly chatted online to emo followers all over the world, talking about death and of the “black parade” — a place where emos believe they go after they die.
This is all so hilarious in the fear mongering and misrepresentation. But what do you expect when kids are taught that there is no God, life is meaningless, and there is no hope? I call it Darwinism.
Mopey ass kids. Stay off my lawn!
This is what you get when you strap rockets to your hang glider. I guess everyone needs a hobby, but wow.
From the BBC here:
A 48-year-old Swiss man has successfully jumped out of a plane over the Alps using a new improved version of his jet propelled hang-glider.
Yves Rossy has spent five years training for the event and was helped by four jet engines.
And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no I’m a rocket man
Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone…
Liberals are wetting themselves over the possibility that ICE agents are injecting sedatives into illegal aliens when they are packed onto airplanes for deportation. Oh Noes!!!
I think its great. I hope they get injected with a drug that makes them forget how to sneak across the border.
From Reuters here:
The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.
The newspaper said it has identified 250 cases in which the government has, without medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003.
Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees without medical justification is a violation of some international human rights codes, the Post reported.
As I have said before, illegal immigration is a matter of risk. If the risk of getting caught becomes too great, aliens will stop trying to enter the country illegally. I say its time for landmines.
Being a black superstar means you have to invent a new line of clothing. Pdiddy has Sean John. Jay Z has Rocawear. Even porn-lovin’ Kanye West has a stupid clothing line called Pastelle. Now Beyonce Knowles came out with her overpriced clothing line called “House of Dereon.”
In a recent ad blitz in magazines, you can see how she has developed a line of whore outfits for 7 year old girls, because no second grader should go to school without looking like a call girl.
Michelle Malkin is outraged here and says:
The Knowles’ family business, “House of Dereon,” recently published advertisements for its “Dereon Girls Collection” with young models who look no older than my second-grade daughter. They are seductively posed and tarted up, JonBenet Ramsey-style, with bright lipstick, blush and face powder. Draped in bling, several of the girls sport leather jackets and studded accessories.
One of the children wears sparkly, killer high heels (more pint-size Pussycat Doll than Dorothy from “The Wizard of the Oz”) and another slouches, gangsta gal-style, with a neon pink boa, leopard-skin fedora and stilettos. An even younger model is a toddler-aged Beyoncé Mini-Me with huge hair, skinny jeans, spike-heeled leather boots and attitude to match.
Next there will be whore outfits for infants. Remember the days when women objected to being viewed as only sex objects? Now all women, regardless of age, are just a place to park male geesh. Thanks, Beyonce!
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