I can't believe that came from your mouth!
Archive for January, 2009
3 PM Music: Oasis – I’m Outta Time
Jan 31st
A great video for a cool song. Enjoy.
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Loading ...Fannie Mae Employee Gets Fired; Plants Logic Bomb On Way Out
Jan 30th
Rajendrasinh Makwana, an Indian citizen living in the United States under a work visa, was fired from his job for creating a superscript that would update all of the servers at Fannie Mae without authorization. Rather than revoking his network access and privileges, Fannie Mae let the guy stick around long enough to use his superscript to try to take down all of the servers in the organization. It was by sheer luck that he was caught in time.
I have the full write-up over at Geeks Are Sexy here. Be sure to check it out!
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Google Street View Van Slays Bambi
Jan 30th
Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto apparently does not apply to the driver of the street view van. The driver didn’t even slow down when he struck this fawn pictured below from the Google Street View.
Notice how the deer bounces off the side of the truck and slides hooves-up to the ditch in the side of the road.
Oh deer. Thanks to Chris for the article from the Reg here. Other Google Street view hijinks are here.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Zombie Outbreak Warrants Public Notification
Jan 29th
My pal Robb sent this along. A zombie outbreak prompted a citizen to hijack a street information sign to warn others to held for colder climates. Notice how the media is willing to go along with the official government coverup and say how this was a prank? Don’t believe it.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Symantec’s John Thompson to be Commerce Secretary?
Jan 28th
Symantec’s John Thompson, along with future CEO of Symantec, Enrique Salem, recently told the corporate employees during an all hands meeting 4 days before the election in November, that they were going to fire 4.5% of the workforce. Other Antivirus companies were doing fine. Only Symantec was reporting that they were suffering from the economic downturn. But they spun it as a good thing to happen. The reason it was a good thing is because they figured that Obama would bring new road building projects and guys that worked jackhammers were Symantec’s target customers. Yeah, they really said that.
Now CNET is reporting what I had speculated months ago- John Thompson is likely going to be the secretary of commerce under Barack Obama.
John Thompson, outgoing chief executive of security company Symantec, is being considered for the post of secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
“He (Thompson) is the leading candidate,” Reuters quoted an unidentified senior Democratic source as saying. “He is still being vetted.”
Thompson, who announced in November that he would step down in April, held several fund-raisers for Obama at his Silicon Valley home.
“John has always kept his political activities personal in nature and separate from him activities as head of Symantec,” a Symantec spokesman said in an e-mail. “He hasn’t commented in the past and hasn’t been making himself available this time around, either.”
Dean Garfield, president of the Information Technology Industry Council said, “His work on diversifying the corporate ranks bodes well for his willingness to think broadly about advancing our competitiveness on a global basis.”
Ah, he is experienced in recognizing all of the different races, genders and sexual deviants and putting them in positions of power. How else does one “diversify corporate ranks,” after all?
If Thompson gets the secretary nod, Canada better watch out. They will be acquired in a takeover, all of its wealth reported as current US income in order to bolster market share, but a year later everyone will be fired and replaced with people from India.
Thanks to Juan for the story.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Wrapping Up the CyberCrime Conference
Jan 28th
This was my first time working an exhibitor’s booth at a trade show, and I think it went great. We got contact information for hundreds of federal and DoD IT people and we spread the word about our product.
I have always thought that doing shows like this was a “cushy sales job” and now that I have done it, I understand I was wrong about the level of effort involved. I spoke myself almost hoarse, my legs are crampy and my feet are killing me. Note to self: bring gel supports for the next show.
The sun actually came out today in St. Louis and some of the snow is melting from the heavily salted roads. Its still quite cold, however, and I don’t think I will be venturing far from the hotel. I hear the snow and ice was pretty bad back home too.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...National Science Foundation Employees Jerking It on the Job
Jan 28th
A federal government agency, the National Science Foundation, which receives 6 billion bucks annually in tax payer funding to help fund whackjobs who think CO2 is killing polar bears, allows its employees to work from the office without requiring them to wear their pants. In fact, several of the employees often jerk it while at the desk and complain to the IT staff about having sticky keyboards and slow web cams.
From the Politico here:
A report that says NSF employees have been spending significant amounts of company time on smut sites and in other explicit pursuits. The employees in question weren’t just logging onto their Facebook accounts or buying birthday gifts on Amazon.com. The report says they were watching, downloading and e-mailing porn, sometimes for significant portions of their workdays, and over periods of months or even years.
One NSF “senior official” was discovered to have spent as much as 20 percent of his working hours over a two-year interval “viewing sexually explicit images and engaging in sexually explicit online ‘chats’ with various women.”
The value of the time lost was more than $58,000 — for that employee alone. A single internal server showed workers harboring everything from software that can allow users to set up camera-to-camera connections to hard-core images and titillatingly titled bookmarks.
One employee even had camera-to-camera software to facilitate his on-the-job sexcapades – and that the employee had complained to the IT specialist that his camera was working too slowly.
If you think this is happening at just one government agency you would be wrong. I have heard about the same thing happening at other Federal departments. While at the cybercrime convention this week, several senior IT persons complained that they cannot filter pornographic traffic because in some cases, the Federal Government Employees union won’t allow filters on network traffic. I had no idea that they even had a say in the matter.
This is why employees who are caught spanking their meat at the NSF and other government agencies aren’t fired or even forced to undergo sexual harassment training. Yet these same government agencies can mandate such foolish guidelines and training for the rest of us.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Ghetto Mom Teaches Kids to Shoplift
Jan 28th
If you need to buy baby clothes, there is no where on the planet you can get them cheaper than at Wal-Mart. My own kid wears Wal-Mart clothes, because when you outgrow them every 4 months, you don’t want to spend a fortune on them. So why would this ghetto-tastic Mom teach her youngin’s to shoplift from the baby section of Wal-Mart? And why then would she show more “ghetto flava” by hauling ass when the cops nabbed the kids? And you pay for this haircut??!
January’s entry for Mother of the Year of 2009 is Latoya Bradley. From News-Press.Com here:
A Lehigh Acres woman took four children clothes shopping Sunday at the Lee Boulevard Wal-Mart. But instead of a lesson in good deals, Latoya Bradley taught them the basics of shoplifting and then left the four to try it themselves.
When they were caught, Latoya fled and abandoned the children there. Bradley is in Lee County Jail for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, child cruelty and larceny petit theft.
Bradley went into the store wheeling a shopping cart that carried three children. Another girl, a 12-year-old, walked beside her. They walked over to the infant clothing section where Bradley showed the 12-year-old how to discreetly take baby clothes off the rack and place them underneath the three children in the cart. Bradley then left the children in the section to take more clothes, but watched from afar.
Cops arrested the kids. When Bradley saw them take the kids, she took off. 17 items were in the cart with a total value of about $49. Cops later arrested Bradley at her home.
This is why Nancy Pelosi wants to sterilize poor people.
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(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 6) Loading ...Britain’s National Healthcare Service to Switch to Meatless Hospital Food
Jan 27th
Go vegan! Britain is cutting out all meats from its menu, not as a cost cutting measure, but because they foolishly believe it will somehow save polar bears from drowning and prevent plagues in Africa due to carbon emissions that they say causes global warming.
From the Guardian here with thanks to S&L:
Meat-free menus are to be promoted in hospitals as part of a strategy to cut global warming emissions across the National Health Service. Dr David Pencheon, director of the NHS sustainable development unit, said the amount of NHS emissions meant it had to act to make cuts, and the changes would save money, which could be spent on better services for patients.
“This is not just about doing things more efficiently, it’s about doing things differently, because efficiency is not going to get us to big cuts,” said Pencheon. “What will healthcare look like in 2030-2040 in a very low carbon society? It will not look anything like it looks now.”
Ever notice that global warming fanatics all seem to have some Utopian idea of what the future will look like? Yet they fail to ever articulate it? And they always project their radical societal changes to be 40 years in the future, because, that way, if they are wrong, no one will remember their original dumbass predictions, or they will be dead and gone so no one will be able to kick their ass for being an idiot zealot who predicted the end of the world.
Last year the NHS published what it believes is the biggest public sector analysis of carbon dioxide, the biggest greenhouse gas, which showed the organisation’s emissions in 2004 were 18.6m tonnes and rising. This accounts for more than 3% of all emissions in England, and if the NHS was a country it would have been ranked as the 81st biggest polluter in the world that year, between Estonia and Bahrain.
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is a harmless gas.
It follows a government pledge last year to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050.
“If you’re going to get me radical I say the default place for health is in the home, and the person who delivers it is yourself: that’s the ultimate low-carbon health service,” he said.
“Unless we all take effective action now, millions of people around the world will suffer hunger, water shortages and coastal flooding as the climate changes,” he says.
A warmer planet has never killed a single soul. And besides, there is no consensus that the world is even warming, and certainly no scientific proof that CO2 is the cause of any climactic changes.
Here is a tip for the NHS in Britain. You wanna cut carbon by 80%? Make a REAL hard choice and just kill 4 out of 5 patients. That would give us a real carbonless society. And that will certainly make people stay at home and treat themselves for their ailments.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Gonna Have to Shovel Me Outta Here
Jan 26th
The DoD CyberCrime Conference in St. Louis is going great. As a sales engineer for my company, I have to demonstrate the product, and until today I have not had the opportunity to really pitch the product to people one on one. I think it went great and we made lots of new sales leads.
It started snowing at 5 PM today and by the time we got back from dinner, downtown was buried. We shivered our way back to the hotel and enjoyed a beer at the lobby bar. I did enjoy a good laugh at the smokers who had to stand out in the 14 degree weather to light up.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...I Pledge: To Tell Other People to Volunteer Because I’m Too Damned Busy
Jan 26th
The whole nation is awash with commercials and do-gooder feelings that urge volunteerism, hand holding and singing cumbaya. Oddly, however, I don’t see anyone actually doing anything of substance with volunteerism. I think most of it is due to greedy capitalists trying to market Obama mania to sell another latte or some shoes. Its annoying, mostly. This video, however, with thanks to Hot Air has made me rethink my selfishness, and now I wanna pledge too.
What will you pledge?
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(1 votes, average: 6.00 out of 6) Loading ...Monster.Com Breached Again
Jan 26th
I have no idea how Monster can continue to stay in business if it doesn’t do anything to protect the integrity and confidentiality of the data its users entrust to them. For the second time in 18 months, Monster has had millions of user accounts, including cleartext usernames and passwords, and email addresses, swiped by hackers. This information is valuable to hackers because they can use it to write phishing emails that appear to originate from Monster.Com and to enlist job seekers in becoming money-laundering mules.
In the latest breach, Monster put a notice here on their website that says:
As is the case with many companies that maintain large databases of information, Monster is the target of illegal attempts to access and extract information from its database. We recently learned our database was illegally accessed and certain contact and account data were taken, including Monster user IDs and passwords, email addresses, names, phone numbers, and some basic demographic data. The information accessed does not include resumes. Monster does not generally collect – and the accessed information does not include – sensitive data such as social security numbers or personal financial data.
Immediately upon learning about this, Monster initiated an investigation and took corrective steps. It is important to know the company continually monitors for any illicit use of information in our database, and so far, we have not detected the misuse of this information.
Now let’s flash back to 2007 and their statement to the press regarding that breach:
Sal Iannuzzi, the company’s chairman and chief executive, said the company was improving its surveillance of how the site is used as well as limiting the way data can be accessed. Iannuzzi declined to provide specific details about how the new security measures will work, saying he didn’t want to make them vulnerable to potential hackers.
It appears to be obvious that whatever improvements were made in Monster’s surveillance and security measures did not work. Data was stolen yet again. And now we are supposed to believe that a company that can’t see hackers on their own network are supposed to somehow watch if that data is being used improperly? Riiiight.
Getting breached a second time, in pretty much the same way as the first, means one of two things:
- They are incompetent at information security.
- They are operating at an acceptable level of risk.
If they are just incompetent, then they should fire the IT staff, starting with the CISO. If they are operating at an acceptable level of risk, then the users have to decide if they want their personal information handed over to criminal gangs. Either way, its no way to run a business.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Nigerian Cops Arrest Carjacking Goat
Jan 25th
Those Nigerian cops sure know how to do detective work. While chasing a couple of carjackers, one of the suspects transmogrified himself into a goat to avoid arrest. But such shapeshifting trickery won’t get past Nigeria’s finest law enforcement officers!
From the Vanguard here:
It was a shocking sight yesterday as men of the Kwara State Police Command paraded a goat as an armed robbery suspect.
The goat “suspect” is being detained over an attempt to snatch a Mazda car. The mysterious goat, according to the Police, is an armed robber who attempted to snatch the car Wednesday night, and later transformed into the goat in a bid to escape arrest.
Police explained that officers had chased two armed robbery suspects who wanted to carjack the Mazda, and while one of them escaped, the other was about to be apprehended by the team when he turned his back on the wall and turned into this goat. They quickly grabbed the goat and here it is.
The police spokesman said the goat “armed robbery suspect” will not be left off the hook until investigations into the case are concluded.
Mighty fine policework there, Lou. Now I understand why so many scammers are running around in Nigeria. They keep turning into goats to avoid arrest! All those Nigerian scam emails? Written by goats. Srsly.
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(1 votes, average: 6.00 out of 6) Loading ...Frozen in St. Louis
Jan 25th
I’m in St. Louis this week attending the DoD Cybercrime Conference. Looking forward to running into some old friends and making a lot of new ones too. But curiously, why they choose to hold the conference in St. Louis as opposed to someplace warm is beyond me. My weather applet on my iPhone says it is 18 degrees outside. And then it says “Feels Like: Too damned cold to feel anything, fool!”
They should hold this thing in Houston, Tampa or even New Orleans.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Caylee Anthony’s Dad Attempts Suicide By Giving Himself Wicked Bad Writer’s Cramps
Jan 23rd
George Anthony is still grieving over the loss of his granddaughter Caylee Anthony. The toddler was murdered by her boozy party slut mother Casey Anthony, who dumped the little girl’s body in the woods by her home. So it is little wonder that George Anthony, sick from grief and the media circus, ran off to commit suicide. But after writing a six page Suicide note, his writer’s cramps were so bad he couldn’t get the bottle of sleeping pills open.
From MSNBC here:
The grandfather of slain Florida toddler Caylee Anthony was in stable condition Friday after he was taken to a hospital over concerns that he might be suicidal. Anthony was found early Friday at a Daytona Beach hotel after he was reported missing for several hours. Anthony sent text messages to family members indicating he “wanted to end his life.”
Police also found a “five to six page suicide letter,” he had written.
On Wednesday, reports were released showing that the toddler’s mouth was covered with silver duct tape that had been adorned with a heart-shaped sticker. When investigators processed the duct tape at an FBI lab in Quantico, Va., they noticed the residue of a heart-shaped sticker on it. The sticker was later found near where the toddler’s remains were discovered.
I found this story over at FARK, and one of the commenters said, “Six pages? Christ, Tolstoy, care to boil it down a bit?”
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(1 votes, average: 6.00 out of 6) Loading ...Deadbeat Lithuanians Tracked Down by Witchcraft
Jan 22nd
Economic times are tough all over, even in Lithuania, where, desperate to get people to pay back their loans, the Debt Collecting Bureau hired a witch to track down deadbeats and bewitch them into paying their loans back. I guess she tracks them using a crystal ball and some nefarious flying monkeys.
From SignonSanDiego here:
In these difficult times for creditors, a Lithuanian debt collector is offering an unconventional service to retrieve arrears: witchcraft.
The Vilnius-based firm has hired Vilija Lobaciuviene, the Baltic nation’s most famous self-styled witch, to hunt down companies and individuals who are failing to pay their debts amid the credit crunch.
“There are certain people, who are using this crisis situation and refuse to pay back banks or other companies,” said Amantas Celkonas, director of the Skolu Isieskojimo Biuras, or debt collecting bureau.
“Our new employee will help them to understand the situation, reconsider what is right and wrong and act accordingly,” he said. “We will also help those who are in real trouble, suffering from psychological impact of bankruptcy and depression.”
Lobaciuviene, who describes herself as “Lithuania’s leading witch,” is renowned in the former Soviet republic of 3.4 million people for providing such “magical” services as predicting the future and casting spells. She claims to use hypnosis, herbal medicines and “the bio-energy field” when helping her “patients.”
Burn it with fire, Blessed Be! Why is it that witches never seem to be able to whip up any potions that keep them from being so hideous?
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...New Obama Staffers Pissed They Can’t Use Macs
Jan 22nd
The WaPo has an article bemoaning how the most intelligent tech-savvy kids in the world, the staffers who got Obama elected by using MySpace and Facebook, have to stop using Macs when working out of the Executive Office of the President (EOP). They complain that they now have to use Windows XP and are not allowed to access Facebook or other social networking sites that are blocked because of numerous security risks. They are trying to hack outbound past the content filtering proxies to use their own email address accounts, which, by the way, is a violation of the law. But the story of the One must be spread via constant Twitter posts dammit!
From the WaPo here:
Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.
No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.
By late evening, the vaunted new White House Web site did not offer any updated posts about President Obama’s busy first day on the job,nor did the site reflect the transparency Obama promised to deliver.
One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.
Senior advisers chafed at the new arrangements, which severely limit mobility — partly by tradition but also for security reasons and to ensure that all official work is preserved under the Presidential Records Act.
Several people tried to route their e-mails through personal accounts. And officials in the press office were prepared: In addition to having their own cellphones, they set up Gmail accounts, with approval from the White House counsel, so they could send information in more than one way.
The liberals were apoplectic over the fact that the Bush administration were using their own communications methods. But now that they have the power, technological rules and constraints are something to be tossed aside to allow the One’s message to ring ’round the world.
Remember how Obama’s camaign site was hacked? Cyber security at the EOP is about to get a whole lot worse.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Black Lady Quits Paying Car Payment Because Barack Obama is Now Pres
Jan 22nd
From Moonbattery and Ace of Spades here. Hey, maybe its worth a try. If you are black, call your bank and tell them that now that there is a black president you no longer have to pay your bills. Let us know how it works out.
Click the audio player to hear the voicemail recording. Stick with it to the end. Now that’s what I call hope.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Largest Cyber Crime Evah Nets 100 Million Credit Cards
Jan 21st
In what could be the largest ever cybersecurity breach, Heartland Payment Systems disclosed that an attacker had installed some malware on their internal network that siphoned off 100 Million credit card transactions.
It took the Secret Service Agency along with a team of cyber security forensic specialists to uncover the software. Heartland claimed that they were duped by geniuses far beyond the mortal ken of human hackers by declaring in this Wall Street Journal article here:
Heartland was targeted with malicious software that was “light-years more sophisticated” than malevolent programs commonly downloaded from the Internet.
“Light Years” more sophisticated? What did they use, a Jedi Mind trick to exfiltrate the data or just a normal program that sniffed the wire, bundled the data,and shipped it off? I’m going to go with the latter. And the fact that Heartland couldn’t tell that this much data was escaping is more an indication that they are likely “light years” behind the state of the art for internal security solutions.
I posted the whole story on this over at GeeksareSexy here so you should check it out. Bottom line is that if you ate at a local owned restaurant in the past few months, you need to keep an eye on your credit card bill for suspicious charges.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Senator Ted Kennedy Has a Swimmers Ear Flare-up
Jan 21st
After the immaculate coronation of The One yesterday, there was a luncheon for a bunch of big-wig Democrats. Teddy Kennedy’s Swimmers Ear flared up unexpectedly, and he flopped around on the floor like a gaffed tuna. He was rushed from the room and Obama tried to use his powers of healing on him, but to no avail.
From ABCnews here:
Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., who is battling a brain tumor swimmer’s ear, was taken away from the inaugural luncheon on Capitol Hill in convulsions.
Kennedy was at a table with Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., Vice President Mondale and Mrs. Mondale, and others. While at the table, Kennedy began having seizures that lasted for several minutes. As they were carrying Kennedy out of the room, he was still suffering a seizure. President Barack Obama went out of the room with him, but came back in the luncheon room.
I guess Teddy was dumped at the loser’s table. Mondale, Kerry and Kennedy all lost in their bids for the Presidency.
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