Never been one to let the carrier drop

All of you who are whining about the RPC worm, you really ought to stop.

Do you have any idea how much damage the author of that worm _could_ have done?

The government keeps telling us that we live in a dangerous world, where terrorists could come from anywhere. And I don’t doubt that the world’s a dangerous place, especially when you’re a citizen of the U.S.

They hate us because we have freedom? Yes, well, they hate us because we enslave them, but I suppose if you turn that on it’s head you can get the other.

No, seriously, I seriously contemplated buying a new motherboard because I couldn’t work up the energy to swap in a spare.

Then I realized, what am I _nuts_?

Maybe we should start labelling products with what the workers were paid.

Or maybe by how many hours went into it.

You know, I kind of like that. Just, a honesty check kind of tag. Just so you knew..

Of course, then you have to figure out how to account for increasing levels of skill. Or new creativity brought in by youth. Or..

How the heck do you put a honest price on something?

Anyway, I digressed. Back to the RPC worm.

Okay, so if the fix had gone through ‘channels’, would anyone have been patched?

What could have happened there? What digital evil could have sorted its way through all our disks, sniffing for interesting tidbits of data like bank accounts and collecting them, or wiping our hard drives..

Instead, what he chose to do was not only harmless, it pointed out very clearly which boxes were responsable. Even more so after ‘Mr. Billy Gates’ (sorry, don’t remember his name at the moment) added a message box to the effect of, ‘Microsoft Screwed The Pooch In A Fundamental Way’.

(by the way, I wonder how Gates feels about being called Billy by the worm that gave lie to the phrase, ‘Microsoft Software Is Secure’. RPC! A hole in RPC! It just doesn’t GET any more _owned_ than that. Yah, I’m sure RPC runs as a non-priv’d user in microsoft land. Uh, yah, right, betcha it’s part of the kernel or something..

Come to think of it, why does name resolution or scanning the network for new hosts block?

But, returning to the rant at hand, if the government is trying to save our society from terrorism, what about the informational kind? The author of the worm saved us from a real terrorist – one with not-so-benign motives. Imagine every hard drive wiped twelve hours after ten hosts had been infected and confirmed.. Or even two hosts.

Imagine a worm that mutated. By itself, not with human help, using all those computers.. hella good entropy there, really. All those sound cards, keyboards, sources of random noise. And computers are so fast nowadays, all you’d need would be a sandbox and some genetic algorythms.

No, wait, that’s science fiction.

But, seriously, you could make a worm that would wait until it knew two, or three, or whatever other new hosts were infected – not hosts already carrying, and then self-destructed..

You could even have a small percentage be ‘sleeper cells’. Infect them, but then just hide yourself using some DLL tricks or by patching the kernel or something..

The list of evil things you _could_ do with a known security hole is endless. If we’re really to be so afraid, shouldn’t we be afraid of that. I promise you, taking out every w2k machine that’s connected to a network would cost some lives.

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I hate seeing things two ways.

Seeing them three ways is even worse.

Makes it so hard to know which the right way is, which the best way, which way will get me the furthest in the directions I want to go.

————————–

Why do I have so much trouble with lj-cut text=?

Probably because I don’t enter enough things here.

http://www.pornresource.com/

No, really, it’s a web site for people who want to get into the (now rather oversaturated) porn industry. Tired of paying the middleman, porn artists? Go into business for yourself!

Okay, I don’t know why this strikes me as so funny. Maybe one of the most interesting and beautiful things about the internet is that no matter what you’re into, you can find other people that are into it. (IO bet there ar ea lot more people into running porn sites than there are into developing EVs, somehow..)

It’s a network with a message. Well, two, really. The first one is: You are not alone. No matter what kinky sex things you’re into, what bizarro hobbies, what strange obsessions, what conspiricy theories, what causes, what political views.. you’re not alone. There are others out there. Feel better.

The second message is: Pay up. Now. Be spammed to death. Buy porn. Buy drugs that will never work. Buy more computers. Buy. buy. Buy! Capitolism rules! Really..

Somnehow I find it ironic that something as fundamentally communistic as the internet is so.. well, you know.

STill working on editing down the track I recorded with Ron a few weeks ago. 90 minutes is a LOT of audio..

Other than that, just been workin’ on PHP stuff for How.. I’m behind, as always.. should try and get that done and working tonight. but I’m out of disk space, so I need to delete some more assorted stuff – or, the RAID controller came, but the new version of the firmware doesn’t like my oldish m/b – it’s a plot, I tell you – so I’m thinking of going to PC Club and getting a new motherboard.. or perhaps just trying it with another m/b that I have lying around here.

Seattle mercifully has been staying sunny – of course, the down side of that is that I feel like I’m being cooked.. oh well, it’s a price I’ll happily pay.

Till next time,

S.

The list of things to do grows ever longer. The list of things I *must* get done today already has like three entries, and it’s barely noon.

I suppose one definition ofa good weekend is any that you have trouble getting out of bed after.. 😉

We did two days of Bumbershoot this year – bumbershoot, for the uninitiated, is Seattle’s music festival – which, unlike other music festivals, truly does have something for everything. I can’t even remember all the bands we saw – to say nothing of the mechnical printing press, poetry readings, one reel film festival (that was truly great – I could have sat in there all four days except that then I would have missed too many bands)..

Well, what can I say? Bumbershoot is a experience unto itself and next year I’ll try and make it to three days worth of it. I think if I went to all four I would suffer from sensory overload or something.

Or perhaps just really, really tired feet.

Anyway, Bumbershoot is one of those things taht makes me feel really lucky to live in Seattle – which, aside from the weather is the most wonderful city in the U.S. without a doubt – (or perhaps that’s because of the weather – maybe Seattlites feel the need to overcompensate or something?)

There was a woman yesterday wearing a shirt that said ‘musicians, ask me about weed’. I never did get the chance to – we were getting ready to sit down for the REM show, and there were not a lot of places to sit. (By the way, REM was in top form last night, and sang many of their favorites along with many from the new album that are soon-to-be-favorites I predict [if clearchannel will ever put them in rotation]))

Of course, with ten million P2P users, perhaps ClearChannel doesn’t have the control they used to.

Saw another interesting band which I would describe as a cross between information society and the B52s – United States of Electronica. Not even remotely electronica, but still, lots and lots of fun and I highly reccomend catching a show if you liked 80s music.

Well, enough blathering on about my wonderful weekend. I’m sure you all ahd wonderful weekends – after all, isn’t that what the holidays are for?..

To work.. [sigh]..

I’ve been noticing that in sheer.us’s statistics page, there’s rather a unusually large number of unlikely referrers.. things like

3 148 2.12% http://mature-mature.net
4 142 2.04% http://free-cumshot.org
5 142 2.04% http://mature-movie.net
6 139 1.99% http://nude-mature.net
7 139 1.99% http://voyeur-web.ws
8 138 1.98% http://anal-sex-picture.org
9 138 1.98% http://big-tit-picture.org
10 138 1.98% http://cum-shot-cumshot.net
11 137 1.97% http://free-big-tit.net
12 137 1.97% http://mature-gallery.biz
13 137 1.97% http://mature-woman-x.com
14 136 1.95% http://big-tit-movie.net
15 136 1.95% http://cumshot-picture.net
16 136 1.95% http://facial-cumshot-x.com
17 136 1.95% http://free-voyeur.info
18 136 1.95% http://mature-sex-x.net
19 136 1.95% http://upskirt-video.net

Finally it occured to me what is going on here – people have figured out that web pages with links to their webalyzer stats are being search-engine crawled, and so they are adding these entries in order to increase their search engine footprint.

Well, screw that. 😉

I can see a well-placed robots.txt file is in order here – I don’t particularly want to help porn sites increase their web footprint.

S.

So what if that’s the big joke? What if every one of us is stark, raving mad. Every last one of us.

Does it matter?

Well, not if our raving madness is agreed upon.

I feel like I’m destined to learn almost everything from either songs, books, or a very few people.

So I’m trying to figure out how to call a function that’s part of a class inside a library – why does this feel like something out of Dr. Suess? Maybe I should ask some of the people who have sent me resumes in the hopes that I will hire them how to do it.

Of course, I think you’re only supposed to ask employees questions you already know the answer to. Otherwise, I could have employees doing research for me for just about everything, and never actually have to google for anything myself.

I recorded five new tracks – all jam tracks, one take to tape. They’re on my website at the bottom of the new music page. Soon I will have to make a ‘newer music’ page – and thusly does my web site get ever bigger and more convoluted.

Still, the DLL writing goes okay. I don’t know why I’m trying to make a object oriented version of the DLL – just masochistic I guess. Once that’s done, it’s all cut & paste & email the shiznit to how. Then I have to finish the gack php scripts, install another network card in qm so it can act like a firewall [because we know you can’t leave m$ boxes out on the public internet without anything between them and the evil hax0rs, or they get owned. Hell, linux boxes get owned. Actually, maybe you should just stay away from the public internet. It’s a scary place..

One of my boxes got hacked last week through a hole in OpenSSL that’s been there for just about forever. I got a good rootkit, with lots of toys and exploits. The hacker got the privelege of using 50 megabits of outbound bandwidth for about 2 hours before Iso twigged that there was something funny going on.

[I suppose I could have just gotten slashdotted or something – except that I never do anything that cool..]

Nicka got me into this Aesop Rock song that I’m totally digging.. ‘Daylight’. Download it. You’ll hate it the first time. The second time it’ll start to grow on you though.. best line is ‘Life’s not a bitch, she’s a beautiful woman. You only call her a bitch because she wouldn’t let you get that pussy’.

Yah.

R., the guy that I met at DefCon, is supposed to be swinging by on Thursday.. and everything is even more or less working. I no longer have to use DP for MIDI routing, the MOTU units handle that nicely. [Although, despite the documentation’s claims, you can’t chose to only route certain channels on certain cables. Maybe this is a limitation of the OSX version of ClockWorks? I get the feeling it might have been written in a hurry – it certainly doesn’t have any of the nicities of the FreeMIDI system, like telling you what device is connected to what port – and with 16 ports, that actually is a bit of a problem..]

This whole distributed MIDI clock thing is tripping me out to the max. Having all my arps stay in sync, all the flickering lights flash at the same time, and never having to frantically hunt through the proteus menus for the ‘clock’ setting – what will I do with my time now? Can we automate this further and get me out of the circuit altogeather? How about realtime quantize? Well, yes, we probably can do that, but wait a second, at some point the computer is doing all the music playing and I’m left up there waving my hands in front of the D-beam and trying to pretend like I’m a musician – I don’t think this is exactly where we want to go. It’s only through a lack of hands that I’ve succombed to the arps..

I need to start keeping a notebook with a list of the sounds I like and why I like them, because I can never remember what they are later. Tonight I found this kickass flute-morphing-to-organ thing on the Nord Lead 3..

[Somehow it amuses me to no end that I’ve come full circle – after leaving synthesis for sample-playback systems like the P2K, I end up back at synthesis for the ability to twiddle lots of pretty knobs and listen to the sound change..]

And I got these two nifty neon lights from a computer store to light up the two keyboards – and man, they loook sweet. If I ever do a stage show…

Yah, right.

Well, anyway, it’s late, and I still haven’t figured out how to call a function that’s part of a class inside a DLL.

Perhaps I should try the obvious Foo::Bar format..

No, that definately didn’t work.

Hm, maybe the function needs to be listed in some special way in the .def file?

Hrm. I’ll figure it out tomorrow.

I’m proud of the strangest things. I’m proud of the fact that sheer.us is on the first page of Google for the keywords ‘america the broken’

And none of them are even mispelled.

But I still can’t go out to a bar to have fun without behaving very strangely, not knowing how to say hi to anyone, being freaked out by being myself, screwing up culturally in some major sense, and..

I did have fun at times. Half of me had fun. Half of me didn’t.

I feel so strange in this world.

S>

It occurs to me that perhapos the most effective way to get marajuana decriminalized would be to convince every single smoker to turn themselves in.

I know, all y’all out there in Sheer’s-journal land are saying ‘what, are you nuts’? But consider the statistics – 83 million americans admit to having smoked weed – one in twenty smokes it on a regular basis.

Is there jail capacity for one out of every twenty americans? It seems pretty tanj unlikely. Is there booking capacity to cope with the inrush if every weed smoker in the U.S. went to their local police station at the same time? Seems pretty unlikely. Could the court system cope with such a inrush? Seems very unlikely bordering on impossible.

So, basically what one does is to take advantage of the fact that our legal system doesn’t scale very well.

I don’t know wheter it would work or not – and I’d be interested to see comments on the matte r- but it does eem like it would cerrtainly make _something_ interesting happen. I mean, picture the lines at the police station..

Remember how you felt on Sept. 11th? Remember how it felt to be in New York, to be looking at New York and knowing you have friends there.

A attack. No Reason given. Why?

Now think about being in Iraq. Belonging there. Living there. A person, just like you, doing your job over there.

The government announces a fictional [at least, it certainly looks that way] reason for attacking you. Then they blow up half your city block, and knock out your power and water.

A attack. No True Reasons. Why?

It’s not any different. Now think about you feel about being complicit in another country’s 9/11 experience.

We liberated them iraqis. Sure ’nuff.

And the Saudis liberated us.

Yep, they did. Liberated 3,500 of us right into the next universe.

Are you getting even the faintest _twinge_ that maybe this was a bad idea?

My life is exciting enough to me – it just wouldn’t make interesting reading for others. Programming microcontrollers, writing music, programming windows CE devices, going to raves (well, if they ever HAVE any.. whatever happened to the good ol’ fashoned underground party anyway? I suggested to Ron, the guy I’ve been jamming with, that we could ‘always just go somewhere with the PA and the generator and, you know, do something’ and he seemed scandalized by the idea – like, you know, who would come to a unofficial, no-cover kind of event. We’re not in southern california any more, toto.. but I digress)

Anyway, as I was saying. The problem may not be as much that my life is duller than the lives of my friends – as that I can’t plump it up with tasty prose to make it more interesting. Whereas at least two of my friends (you can guess who you are) are such good writers that they shoudl give up blogging in favor of something that actually pays.

Well, I guess we can’t all be good at everything.

And I guess I don’t want a life that would be interesting to read about that badly. It’s better to have one that’s interesting to live.

S.