I can't believe that came from your mouth!
Archive for February, 2009
3 PM Music: Paul McCartney, Dave Grohl- Saw Her Standing There
Feb 9th
Legendary performance. Paul McCartney is one of the most legendary writers and singers of Rock and Roll History. And at the rate Dave Grohl is going, he may one day catch up to Paul. Click the enjoy.
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Loading ...The French Surrender to Microsoft Virus
Feb 9th
Faced with the choice of either giving up or fighting against the Downadup aka Conflicker virus, the French military chose to show the white flag. At least one squadron of the French Navy’s Dassault Rafale aircraft were grounded due to problems with the computer systems at the Airbase.
From CNET here:
Apparently, in the past two weeks, some French fighter planes were grounded because the military had failed to take sufficient action (even though Microsoft had sent advance warning) to prevent the spread of a Windows-transmitted virus that some call Conficker.
The virus “brought down certain arms systems” and grounded the Navy’s Dassault Rafale aircraft.
Clearly, I am not in a position to comment as to whether the French military responded appropriately to the Microsoft warning, though Intelligence Online insists that the incident “raises serious questions about the security of French military networks and their capacity to fight off computer attacks.”
Of course the aircraft themselves do not use Microsoft operating systems, so any virus outbreak must have affected the systems that the Squandron office used to schedule flights, maintenance rotations, etc. So keeping the planes grounded for safety reasons made a little bit of sense.
However, it also shows that the Defence networks were not well protected and furthermore, there were no alternative plans in place to continue flight operations using a paper-based backup system. Had this been a real wartime situation, they may be forced to operate without a computer system.
Two weeks ago, I found myself travelling on US Airways during a massive computer outage they had due to a cable cut at a major datacenter. After only one hour delay, US Airways had all planes flying, luggage being routed and passengers changing flights using a backup system. No one knew where they were supposed to sit on airplanes, but travellers hardly felt the inconvenience.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Kaspersky Website Hacked
Feb 8th
A simple SQL injection allows hackers to view the contents of all of the critical information of the business, including account activation keys, admin usernames, partner information and lots more.
The Reg has more here:
A security lapse at Kaspersky has exposed a wealth of proprietary information about the anti-virus provider’s products and customers, according to a blogger, who posted screen shots and other details that appeared to substantiate the claims.
In a posting made Saturday, the hacker claimed a simple SQL injection gave access to a database containing “users, activation codes, lists of bugs, admins, shop, etc.”
It claimed that a simple modification of a URL exposed the site’s entire database. “Alter one of the parameters and you have access to EVERYTHING: users, activation codes, lists of bugs, admins, shot, etc.” The screenshots showed the attack was focused on Kaspersky’s technical support and knowledge base for the Americas.
This breach potentially exposes customer information and could also open Kaspersky’s site to other types of abuse, security experts said.
Since this breach can expose customers and partners, Kaspersky must move quickly to eliminate the vulnerability and then reconcile their accounts to make sure that only legitimate purchases were made. An attacker could hijack renewals or even force customers or partners to download trojanized versions of the software.
It is understandable that security companies are a big high-value target for hackers. But failing to apply this sort of application security to an e-commerce portal is something you expect rookies to do.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...When Geeks Play with Legos
Feb 8th
I saw this over at Neatorama and thought it was awesome. Its the Space Battleship Yamato from the Star Blazers cartoon series. Made out of Legos.
Star Blazers was one of the best cartoon series ever made, and in the 1970′s there was little else in animation that could compare to it. The show is about a crew of soldiers who took to space to fight the evildoers who were bombing the Earth.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Banning Facebook
Feb 6th
Two articles jumped out at me today about people banning Facebook. Apple stores have banned it to keep people from coming in off the streets to just check their Facebook status, and the Maryland State legislative offices have banned it for security reasons.
Facebook has joined the list of annoying social network sites that sysadmins most enjoy banning since they take up so much productivity time on network resources and utilize so much bandwidth. Facebook has not been associated with as many malware outbreaks as MySpace has, but it is so ubiquitous that it makes a good target for malware authors.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Google Puts the Classics in Your Pocket
Feb 6th
Google’s BookSearch has shrunk down the classics to make them fit on your iPhone or iPod Touch. Now if you are bored with games you can catch up on some of the classics you should have read in High School on that summer reading list you threw away on the last day of school in tenth grade. For instance, one of my favorites, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is available.
So if you have one of these devices, browse over to http://books.google.com/m and add the site to your background to make an easy-to-access icon. Now when you are bored with iShoot Lite, you can bone up on the Invisible Man, Wuthering Heights, or Treasure Island.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Klingon Crackhead Robs 7-11
Feb 5th
Someone robbed a 7-11 convenience store in Colorado using a Klingon Bat’Leth. Awesome!
From the AP here:
Colorado police say a man with too much “Star Trek” on his mind used a sword modeled after the weapon carried by Klingon warriors to demand money from two convenience stores.
Investigators say the man took an unknown amount of cash from a 7-Eleven store Wednesday but left empty-handed when he tried to rob another store about 25 minutes later.
No word on whether or not the assailant called the clerk a “bloodless pa ‘tak.”
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(1 votes, average: 6.00 out of 6) Loading ...Obama Orders Poisoned Peanut Butter Sent to White Storm Victims in KY, AR
Feb 5th
If Bush was to blame for bad mobile home trailers and slow response to Hurricane Katrina survivors who were black, then Obama is to blame for sending poisoned peanut butter to white victims of the recent winter storms in Kentucky and Arkansas.
From CNN here:
Food kits recently distributed as part of a disaster relief effort in Kentucky and Arkansas contain peanut butter contaminated with salmonella linked to a nationwide outbreak, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Wednesday. People who received the food kits should throw away the peanut butter packets, FEMA says.
The Kentucky National Guard is starting to notify people who’ve already received the (meal kits) or might be getting one. 6,000 to 7,000 people remained in shelters, primarily in western Kentucky.
The meals were sent in the wake of President Barack Obama’s federal disaster declarations for Kentucky and Arkansas after they were hammered last week with rain, ice and snow.
Its nice to see that FEMA still can’t manage a disaster without trying to muck things up worse. Obama is the man to blame for FEMA’s follies now.
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(1 votes, average: 6.00 out of 6) Loading ...SRA Screws its Employees and its Fed Customers
Feb 5th
Happy happy, joy, joy. I got my notification letter from a previous employer, SRA International. They said that there was a data breach, but they have no idea what data, or how much of it, may have been stolen by hackers. And since they are so clueless as to the extent of the data breach, they are notifying all of their federal customers that information relating to them may have been exposed as well. I am not sure which is worse- that they were so poorly unprotected defensively, or that they have no visibility into the mobility of their PII data.
From ComputerWorld here:
Employees at federal security agencies are being notified that their personal information may have been compromised after hackers planted a virus on computer networks of government contractor SRA International Inc.
SRA began notifying its employees and all of its customers after discovering the breach. The malicious software may have allowed hackers to get access to data maintained by SRA, including “employee names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and health care provider information,” the Fairfax, Va.-based company said in a notification posted at the Maryland attorney general’s Web site.
The breach is embarrassing for SRA, a 6,600-employee technology consulting company that sells cybersecurity and privacy services to the federal government. The company wouldn’t say which federal agencies were affected by the breach, but in U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, it lists intelligence agencies and the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. National Guard among its clients.
SRA doesn’t know if any data has been compromised, but it’s taking the precaution of notifying customers that their data may have been accessed.
SRA also has a large contract with FDIC. From the description of the exposure, it sounds like employee health information was possibly accessed, which points to a breach in the HR department. If the breach was limited to just that internal group, no contract information with Federal branches should have been exposed, unless of course, the HR department could access the rest of the network at will.
I really can’t stand the empty platitudes that often accompany these admissions of data breaches. For instance, in my letter, SRA claims:
Sorry, but I don’t think SRA is really committed to the protection of personal data. If they were, they would have already had the safeguards in place that they are implementing now.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Japanese Police Sketch Artists Take Shortcuts
Feb 4th
Instead of drawing stuff out free-handed based on eyewitness accounts, Japanese police sketch artists are taking the lazy way out. They just fire up the Nintendo Wii and make a Mii character. Check out the photo below for a suspect in a hit and run.
Thanks to the Reg for the story here:
Cops in the Kanagawa area of Japan have begun sticking up pictures of the Nintendo Mii in the hope that a Wii-obsessed gamer will recognise the drawing from, say, a recent game of Wii Sports. Register Hardware’s unsure if the Mii is actually taken from the gamer’s account – in which case they should be able to track the gamer down pretty easily – or if it’s just a mock-up of someone seen speeding away from the scene of the crime.
Either way, it simply goes to show how heavily the Wii has infiltrated our culture.
Just the other day I setup my own Mii character on my friend’s Wii in order to do some bowling.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Google’s Latitude to Stalk Your Mom
Feb 4th
Google introduced a new service called Latitude yesterday. It is a social networking service based on Google Maps that tracks your movements and those of your friends and family with the idea that you may want to meet nearby friends or check in on your Mom without having to bother with the arduous task of picking up the phone and calling her. Thanks to VentureBeat for the article. Check out the video below.
So now your friends will also be able to see that you are nearby and will try to drop in on you unexpectedly. Or they may feel snubbed that you didn’t bother to drop in on them unexpectedly. Now you can ignore your friends with a whole new layer of technology.
If the Federal Government licenses this technology, would there be an outcry about the privacy violations? Why is there no apparent outcry from the public over Google wanting to use this information?
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...The Messiah Begs Forgiveness for his Sins
Feb 4th
Barack Obama has proved that if you swing a dead cat in a room full of democrats, the first four you hit probably cheated on their taxes. And if Joe Biden has insisted in the past that paying taxes is patriotic, does this make Tom Daschle, Nancy Killefer, and Timothy Geithner traitors? Watch the video below where the most perfect man since Jesus says he’s sorry about screwing up his transition.
Does it make America feel better to switch from the “Decider” to the “Apologizer?”
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(1 votes, average: 6.00 out of 6) Loading ...Chinese Exploding Cellphones
Feb 3rd
A Chinese man’s cellphone exploded while it was in his shirt pocket. Shrapnel went into his neck and he exsanguinated. What a bitter way to die.
From the Reg here:
A Chinese man was killed at a computer shop last Friday after the cell phone in his chest pocket exploded, severing a major artery in his neck and leading to massive blood loss.
According to local news reports, the man worked as a shop assistant at the store. An employee at a neighboring 7-11 convenience store told local media that she heard a loud bang and saw her colleague lying on the floor in a pool of blood. She said the man had recently swapped his mobile phone battery for a new one.
Oh my god, you know what this means? You can get a Super Big Gulp in China!
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Reason 479 to HomeSchool: Old Ugly Teacher Won’t Lure Your 14-YO Kid to Hotel Room To Teach Him About Anal Sex
Feb 3rd
Meet Rosanna Brown. She is 49 and in jail without bail for stealing one of her female student’s cell phones and using it to impersonate her and text message one of her 14 year-old male students to entice him to show up to a hotel room for sex. According to BadBadTeacher, she made the young boy stick his penis up her ass too. When the boy found out it wasn’t the hot chick he thought it was, he called his mom who then called the cops.
From MyFoxPhoenix here:
A Phoenix teacher has been arrested for sexually assaulting one of her students. 49 year-old Rosanna Brown lured her 14 year-old student to a Phoenix hotel over the weekend and assaulted him. Brown is an English teacher at Ed Pastor Elementary School.
Brown had been text messaging the boy and lured him to a Tempe hotel by portraying herself as a sexually active teenager. After the assault, the boy called his mother and told her what happened. She then showed up at the hotel and confronted Brown before calling police.
Brown was booked into the 4th Avenue Jail on 3 counts of Sexual Conduct with a Minor.
According to the video at the MyFoxPhoenix site, Rosanna Brown pretended to be the girl because she wanted to protect the young girl’s virginity. I wonder how many other girls she has protected the virginity of? How noble to be a jizzbag on her off hours when she’s not teaching english to kids.
And of course, instead of firing the teacher, she is getting a free paid vacation to sit in jail. According to AZFamily.Com here:
There were awkward conversations between parents and their children on the walk home from school on Monday. Danica Kedekin, a parent, tells 3TV, “This is crazy. I don’t send my kids to school to hear stuff like that.”
The 1st through 8th-graders brought home letters from the principal explaining a 7th and 8th grade English teacher is in jail and is accused of sexually assaulting one of her students.
The school has put the teacher on paid leave. They will have extra counselors on hand on Tuesday for children.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Move Over, OLPC. India Creates 10 Dollar Laptop
Feb 2nd
That’s right, One Laptop per Child. Suck it. For the price of two Subway Footlong Subs, you can get a laptop made by the same people who brought you the world’s cheapest car at £1,420, the Tata, and the world’s cheapest phone. I’m not sure what type of technology will comprise the world’s cheapest computing device, but I think it may entail Crayola Inputs.
From TimesOnline here:
India is poised to unveil the ultimate in credit-crunch computing: a 500 rupee (£7) laptop.
A government-developed prototype, due to be shown for the first time tomorrow, will mark the most ambitious attempt yet to bring computers to the developing world and to bridge the “digital divide” between rich and poor.
It is also the latest example of ultra-cheap engineering to emerge from the sub-continent. India has already given the world a 100,000 rupee (£1,420) car, the Tata Nano, and a super-basic £10 phone — goods that are now expected to find favour among relatively affluent Westerners as the global economic downturn bites.
However, the launch of a viable computer that costs less than most paperback books would herald a startling new era in thrifty manufacturing. The Indian laptop, which has been on the drawing board for at least three years, will be the centre of attention at the launch of India’s new National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology, a scheme to boost learning in rural areas through the internet.
It comes as an answer to the One Laptop per Child project (OLPC) led by Nicholas Negraponte, the American scientist, which set out to produce a computer for $100. The US venture ran into problems when large companies including Intel, the biggest chip manufacturer, refused to co-operate. As a result, the OLPC laptop will cost closer to $200.
Of course Negraponte said there is no effing way the Indians can do this successfully because he himself has failed at every step of his own project to waste a billion dollars by throwing it away on crappy handcranked laptops.
But even if the Indian initiative ends up costing quadruple the price, it may still succeed because they are not trying to shove it down the throats of the world’s poorest children. They are going to allow the free market drive the demand. And that demand will ultimately sound the death knell of the stupid OLPC program. See my previous stories on OLPC here, here and here.
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(1 votes, average: 6.00 out of 6) Loading ...I Played Golden Tee
Feb 2nd
Since having a child, I simply don’t get the time in a pub to myself to play Golden Tee Golf. I was a rabid fan of the game back in 2001-2005, and even won season tickets to the Washington Redskins for playing the arcade game. So it was a rare treat when I was in Saint Louis to find a pub and a few extra bucks to play a round or two.
One of the new features of the 2009 version is the ability to upload great shots directly to YouTube. On this hole I hit from the deep bunker. And the Sports Zone in St. Louis was a fun place with great hot wings.
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(No Ratings Yet. Rate It!) Loading ...Comcast Employees Insert Penis Into Superbowl
Feb 2nd
That headline might sound perverted, but what it refers to is someone at the Comcast HQ in Tucson inserted 30 seconds of of a pornographic movie featuring full frontal male nudity into the last 3 minutes of the Superbowl Sunday night.
According to HotAir, it happened just after Kurt Warner brought his team back to take the lead with under 3 minutes to go.
Tucsonans watching the Super Bowl got more action than they bargained for when a short clip from an adult movie channel interrupted Comcast’s feed with full male nudity during the final moments of the game.
Officials at Comcast said about 30 seconds from Club Jenna, an adult cable television channel, were shown on the local Super Bowl telecast. The company was still working Sunday night to figure out how it happened. …
The Star newsroom was flooded with calls from irate viewers who said that the porn cut into the game with less than three minutes left to play, just after Arizona Cardinals player Larry Fitzgerald scored on a touchdown pass from Kurt Warner to put the team in the lead.
Callers said that the clip showed a woman unzipping a man’s pants, followed by a graphic act between the two.
Comcast knows that this did not happen at the broadcast station, but at their own offices. I think someone has watched Fight Club too many times. Someone is going to get fired big time. And Comcast will probably have some stiff fines to pay.
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(1 votes, average: 6.00 out of 6) Loading ...
