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Sunday, 27 May 2001
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No entry.
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Monday, 28 May 2001 — Memorial Day
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Tuesday, 29 May 2001
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Yesterday I took my daughter to see Pearl Harbor. The movie, not the tropical seaport. We pretty much enjoyed it, but I can't really disagree with the majority of critics, who were underwhelmed. The characters were standard, the plot was standard, the love story was standard, the scenery was beautiful, and the action scenes were visceral. Kate Beckinsale is about as pretty as Ben Affleck. It did seem to me as if some effort was made not to demonize the Japanese, which may ameliorate the fears in the Asian-American community that such a flag-waving movie may stir up anti-Asian sentiments. One hopes that enough water has flowed under the bridge since the end of the war that people will have no difficulty remembering that the former Bad Guys are now our friends.
But the biggest feeling that I came away with was simply that it's very sad that America has to gaze sixty years into the past to find a time to be proud of this country. I myself have never been patriotic per se, and have always considered being proud of one's country akin to being proud of having been born with brown hair. We didn't choose what country to be born in, so why should we take personal pride in it, as if it were some kind of accomplishment? Personally, I'm grateful to have been born here, because for all its many faults, it's still a pretty good place to live, compared to many other possibilities. But proud? Get real.
In any event, it still makes me kind of sad that no event since the second World War has allowed America to stand so clearly on the side of the angels. Since that time, for a myriad of reasons, the country has changed, along with the rest of the world. I suppose the changes were inevitable, and I suppose that many of them were good. But where there used to be clearly defined black and white, there are now only shades of gray. No one knows the difference between good and evil anymore, and all morals have become relative. We no longer declare war on enemies, and rally the country's will and resources to achieve a definite goal. Instead, we nickel and dime our way in through the back door of every issue and conflict, making no moral judgment. We participate solely on the basis of "what's in it for us?" Bosnia? Desert Storm? Don't make me laugh. War no longer exists. We now have only police actions. There's no longer good and evil, only expedience. There's not even the concept of victory any longer. Only the achievement of limited policy goals, that the spin-meisters can whip into whatever shape the moment's local political goals seem to demand. I pretty much believe that it's no longer possible for real political leaders to emerge in our system. There are no more statesmen, and I see no reason to believe that there will be again. No one cares about anything more that the next electoral cycle. And that will continue to do for American politics what a similar shortsighted focus on the next quarter's financial statement has done for American business.
LATER...
Here's a cute cartoon, with my apologies for any inadvertently violated copyrights.
And today's award for Most Cryptic Opening Sentence goes to... Bo Leuf, with this gem:
It's raining... I've so far resisted assimilation by these wretched virian nanoprobes.
Positively Dr. Who-vian. Kudos!
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Wednesday, 30 May 2001
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No entry. Some days life is just too complicated.
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Thursday, 31 May 2001
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Today the Register has an interesting article about Steve Gibson's recent encounter with script kiddies and their Denial of Service attacks using the entertainingly-named Zombie Bots, which they plant on the PCs of unsuspecting users with active internet connections. "Script kiddie" is a derogatory name for the type of teenager who uses and perhaps customizes various "attack" type viruses, for the purpose of inflating his little ego by making life difficult for grownups who run websites. The Reg article links to Mr. Gibson's extensive account of his encounter with current script kiddie culture. Mr. Gibson is an internet security expert and a very smart programmer. I first became aware of him quite a few years back, when he wrote SpinRite, a utility program that fixed some types of hard disk problems. His Gibson Research Corporation does interesting things, and Mr. Gibson himself remains an active programmer. He says that when Windows XP becomes widespread, it will make things much easier for the script kiddies, because Microsoft has (as usual) no clue whatsoever about security, and WinXP is extremely vulnerable to the kind of hacking that lets people of insufficient moral development place remote control programs on other people's computers. Fortunately, a simple firewall program like the free version of ZoneAlarm can prevent this activity.
I'm going to quote a couple of things from Mr. Gibson's article, because I found it really interesting that he was able to actually contact the 13 year old weasel who attacked his site, and even the author of the Zombie Bot that was used. Their conversations make for interesting reading. Here's what the kid, who calls himself "Wicked," emailed Mr. Gibson (I tweezed some naughty bits):
yo, u might not thing of this as anyomous, but its not real info, its a stolen earthlink, so its good, now, to speak of the implemented attacks, yeah its me, and the reason me and my 2 other contributers do this is because in a previous post you call us "script kiddies", atleast so i was told, so, i teamed up with them and i knock the hell out of your cicso router, and....im building up more bots, no, not sub seven lame *ss script trojans, i made my own, and it seems quite effective does it not? seems to me that ur backbone has trouble handling the cr*p sent at it, go ahead and drop icmp pings, u still need to say "NO" to them so it still takes bandwith, thats where tracert comes in, to find the t3 box ur on, nice, i see u stop it as-of today, :) good for you, now ill find ways around it and we can keep playing these games, i find it very fun, shout out to hellfirez and drgreen, and yeah the hellfirez from subseven, hes a friend and he isnt a script kiddie u stupid f**k...now, if u wish to talk to me in person, hows irc??? talk to WkD, the nick wicked was taken, good luck :)
Note the careful attention to spelling and punctuation. But eventually Mr. Gibson even managed to get into a chat session with the Zombie Bot writer, "^b0ss^". Here are some highlights:
<Gibson> heh
<^b0ss^> who are you
<Gibson> Hi B0ss. I'm steve gibson (grc.com) ... ShieldsUP,
<Gibson> OptOut, Leaktest ... and all that stuff.
<^b0ss^> how did you get in here?
<^b0ss^> your not a IRCop
<Gibson> As you might know, my site was attacked (but I don't
<Gibson> think by your bots) a few weeks ago.
<Gibson> Some guy, calling himself "Wicked"
<^b0ss^> my bots?
<^b0ss^> no no
<^b0ss^> I know wicked
<^b0ss^> it was not my bots I promise
<^b0ss^> Wicked has his own
<Gibson> I wanted to learn about this stuff
<Gibson> since Wicked was attacking me
<^b0ss^> then how did you know about this place
<^b0ss^> you have your own server?
<Gibson> So I wrote some fake bots to monitor various Bot
<Gibson> networks so that I could learn.
<^b0ss^> damnit
<^b0ss^> so you been spying?
<^b0ss^> hehe
<Gibson> Yeah
<Gibson> But not to worry, I'm no narc.
<Gibson> I just want to be left alone.
<^b0ss^> but how did you get the Key
<^b0ss^> I don't even know you
<^b0ss^> I don't bother anyone with my bots
<Gibson> Check out GRC.COM. That's me.
<Gibson> (You have 241 Bots.)
<^b0ss^> thats not it
<^b0ss^> not just on this server
<^b0ss^> how in the hell do you know how many bots I have?
<^b0ss^> damn
<Gibson> I've tracked 241 coming and going over the past four days.
<^b0ss^> let me get some of your bots
<^b0ss^> lol
<^b0ss^> I can't believe this shit, what kind of bot you have
<Gibson> Do you know where Wicked got his? He claims that he
<Gibson> wrote it, but it looks like a pure hex-edit to me.
<^b0ss^> oh no
<^b0ss^> lol
<^b0ss^> he didn't make them
<^b0ss^> he got his bot from these bots in this room
<Gibson> You really ought to check out my site. grc.com
<^b0ss^> I am right now
<^b0ss^> ;)
<^b0ss^> nice page
<Gibson> I don't care if he wants to blast IRC folks,
<Gibson> but I haven't done anything to bother him.
<Gibson> If he blasts me again I'll take them away.
<^b0ss^> lol, he is 13
<^b0ss^> did you know that
<Gibson> Yeah, he said, and he writes like he is. But I didn't
<Gibson> think he could really write that Bot from scratch.
<^b0ss^> which bot you talkin about
<^b0ss^> do you know mimic?
<Gibson> You call yours "evilbot" (version 0.4c) ...
<Gibson> he renamed it "WkD Bot" (version 1.0)
<Gibson> Like I said, I just needed to learn about this
<Gibson> stuff so that I could defend myself.
<^b0ss^> man, I wouldn't attack you I promise you that
<^b0ss^> I have no reason
<Gibson> I asked all of the ISP's of the people whose
<Gibson> machines were attacking me for a Bot.
<^b0ss^> oh
<Gibson> Someone sent me one ... and from there I knew what I needed.
<^b0ss^> hehe
<Gibson> Then I wrote a custom "spy bot" and started monitoring
<Gibson> more and more conversations, following leads, URL's, etc.
<^b0ss^> hmmm
<Gibson> Well, it was nice to meet you.
<^b0ss^> nice to meet you to
<^b0ss^> You are pretty good
<Gibson> If you see Wicked, tell him we had a nice chat
<Gibson> and ask him to lay off. I don't want to upset him,
<^b0ss^> okay
<Gibson> but I need to, and will, defend my site.
<Gibson> Thanks!
<Gibson> .
<^b0ss^> hehe, okay
<^b0ss^> welcome
There's a lot more, all very informative, including the utter uselessness of the support and security people at Earthlink and @home networks, two big high-speed internet service providers whose customers' PCs were being hijacked to run the attacks against grc.com. This stuf is something all internet users should be aware of.
RANDOMOSITY...
Here's what I found when I searched some popular search engines on the phrase "i hate microsoft":
AltaVista: 1146 hits
Dogpile: 10 hits
Excite: 365 hits
Google: 6380 hits
Lycos: 10 hits
NorthernLight: 1485 hits
Yahoo: 1360 hits
Could there be any clearer demonstration of why Google is the best of all search engines?
Oh BTW, here's a site with links to LOTS of search engines for various purposes.
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Friday, 1 June 2001
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Well, it's always nice to wrap up a (short) work week with a new reason to hate Microsoft. Fortunately, this is almost never difficult. The Borg must have feet the size of Alaska, because they keep shooting them pretty consistently, yet still they keep stumbling along. From Woody's OFFICE Watch, we have a pleasant little article about the way that Office XP knows better than you do about how to insert a URL into a Word or Excel document. Interesting and entertaining reading. Here's a brief excerpt:
Try it yourself. In Office XP, choose Insert | Hyperlink then type in this fake hyperlink
http://www.fred.com/trial//2345/
Hit enter, and the double slash is unceremoniously converted to a single slash. You aren't notified. You aren't given a chance to change it. In fact, with one exception, you can't even *override* Office's ham-handed mangling of your carefully constructed hyperlink.
The exception: in FrontPage 2002 you can fix the link by going into HTML mode and overtyping - but there's no such option in Word, Excel PowerPoint, or Outlook. Even Microsoft can't suggest a workaround. It's even worse than you might imagine. The text appears in the document the way you typed it - that is, you'll see
http://www.fred.com/trial//2345/
in your document. But the link itself - the part behind the scenes that controls where you go when you click on the text - is altered to
http://www.fred.com/trial/2345/
without any notice. Don't believe me? Follow these instructions, then right-click on the hot text and pick Edit Hyperlink. Look in the Address box. See that?
For sheer entertainment value, this can hardly compete with last week's episode, in which the Borg launched a pack of Mounties at a disabled mother of four, who had unwittingly resold some Microsoft software that had originated with one of the professional counterfeiters. It looked real, even to an MS expert at the trial, but there's no penalty for selling things in good faith if you had no reasonable way to know they aren't genuine. I hope the Reg covers the next trial, when she sues the Beast From Redmond. Transcript excerpts are sure to be every bit as titillating as those from the bespectacled übernerd's own disgraceful videotaped deposition at the big show in DC. And the most entertaining thing about the Borg is that no matter how much we hate them for their cluelessness, cockiness, and sheer rapacity... they're still their own worst enemy. And for that, we can almost forgive them. Almost, that is.
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Saturday, 2 June 2001
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No entry.