Jan
Our Economy is in Trouble
Posted by jerry as finance
In the past 24 hours, Bank of America has announced that it entered into an agreement to acquire Countrywide Financial. That’s an amazing thing. Countrywide holds north of 20% of mortgages in the US. As the housing market continues to unwind, they are seeing an increasing number of delinquent payments. Despite this, Countrywide has to continue to pay the investors who funded a given mortgage until a disposition has been reached on that mortgage – either a new payment plan can be established, the borrower pays up, or the mortgage goes into default. Normally, a company like Countrywide would tap a line of credit to help cover any difficulties. These days, though, extremely few investors want to buy debt. So, Countrywide sits in a position where it is exposed to the point where it may have to file for bankruptcy protection, which will cause a further unwinding as it’s credit rating deteriorates. BoA can be seen as a white knight coming in to provide a stable foundation for Countrywide to continue operations. For it’s part, BoA needs to protect the $2B investment is previously made in Countrywide.
Dec
Carbon, human impact on climate and the Earth
Posted by jerry as Environment
How is Global Warming like God?
There appears to be an inverse relationship between the belief in God, and the belief that humans are causing global warming. Certainly, there seems to be an increasing acceptance of human impact on climate, even within the ranks of the religious right, but it’s happening slowly. I find the parrellels between the two quite interesting.
In religion, an authority figure tells you that you must believe in the power of God. You can witness his hand in all that you see. Any time something bad happens, God is testing your faith, and any time something good happens, God is responsible, too. In climate change, scientists or other authority figures tell you that humans are absolutely having an impact on the environment. You can witness the impact in all that you see. There are major wildfires, terrible hurricanes, droughts, floods, all having grave impacts on human lives, all clearly the impact of global warming.
Dec
Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online (SAFE) Act
Posted by jerry as politics, technology
The US House of Representatives passed the SAFE act by a 409 to 2 margin. It also appears likely to pass the senate. It is interesting to note that one of the 2 “nay” votes on the bill was none other than Ron Paul. While I agree with his decision to vote against the bill, it will certainly come back to bite him. “How can you be in favor of exploiting children, Mr. Paul?”
On the surface, the bill appears to be a draconian measure placed on ISPs, web hosts, public wifi provders, etc, requiring them to report all instances where child pornography is transmitted over their network to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The penalty for non-compliance is $150,000US for a first offense, and $300,000 for subsequent offenses. Complying with the law provides civil and criminal immunity from any resulting legal issues of the disclosure. That’s about the extent of what is being reported in most of the alarmist media.
If you ACTUALLY READ THE BILL, you will notice this interesting section:
- `(f) Protection of Privacy- Nothing in this section shall be construed to require an electronic communication service provider or a remote computing service provider to–
- `(1) monitor any user, subscriber, or customer of that provider;
- `(2) monitor the content of any communication of any person described in paragraph (1); or
- `(3) affirmatively seek facts or circumstances described in subsection (a)(2).
Very interesting. So, the law doesn’t require the providers to proactively monitor traffic. So, what does it do then?
Providers that use technology to determine if someone is viewing an inappropriate site – from a known list of sites or from some form of intelligent analysis of the image content – they are compelled to report such traffic to the NCMEC. If a web hosting company discovers that a customer is hosting child porn, the hoster must report it.
The other important aspect of the law is what must be reported. Essentially all identifiable info that is know must be submitted, presumably in an attempt to track back to the owner.
In some respects, this bill just makes something that’s illegal even more illegal. The bill does add some additional mechanisms to find the child pornographers, distributers and those that view it, and does not appear to place a major burden on providers.
The downside, as usual, is in the interpretation of child porn. It’s interesting that a definition of “child pornography” is not included in the bill, yet many other things like “web site”, are. It is conceivable, as some reports of the bill contend, that clothed children in lascivious poses could constitute child porn. I wonder how the average Abercrombie & Fitches catalog would fare?
Nov
Crazy php code injections
Posted by jerry as Hacking, Security
As I’ve written about here several times, the onslaught of unsuccessful php include attacks continues. Today, I saw a new file referenced – bot.txt. It looked like this in the apache log file:
Nov
Kucinich and Paul make a good team?
Posted by jerry as politics
This interview with Dennis Kucinich’s lovely & intelligent wife:
Has moderates on both sides quite excited. Unfortunately, it can’t be. There are a few major obstacles:
- Neither appears to be on a trajectory to win their respective party primary race.
- Someone has to be VP. It’s unlikely that, though they are close on many issues, certain ideologies like abortion, will prevent each from playing second seat to the other.
- Either Paul or Kucinich would likely lose the support of their party should they win the primary and choose a running mate from the opposing party, rather than from the “talent pool” from their own party.
I agree, that it would be a great presidency. There would be balance and sanity in the White House, but we are teeing up for another 4 years of craziness.
Nov
Damn lightning…
Posted by jerry as Uncategorized
I was awoke this morning by a storm coming in. I really hate that sound in the middle of the night, because my kids are very afraid of storms. I was counting to myself how long it would take to hear the first set of footsteps.
The rain picked up and the thunder rumbled on. The kids did come down as I expected. I convinced them to play in the family room and let my wife and I sleep a bit more.
It seemed like I had just fallen asleep when I heard and explosion and felt a blinding light shine through my closed eyes. It was really close. Probably hit a tree in my back yard. Nothing seemed out of place, other than the ghost-white kids in my doorway. The aquarium in my room was still working, and the bedroom light my oldest son turned on was sure as hell working.
My wife got up shortly after, and I went back to sleep. (too many sleeping pills the night before – long story). When I did wake up, I pulled my laptop out from under the bed, and unfortunately no Internet connection.
After a long morning of moving furniture and testing network ports, I found that I had 2 network cards die on me. One in the new PC I had recently bought, and the other in the file server/firewall server in the basement. I’ve spent a lot of money on lightning and surge protection for all of my equipment, including the cable modem, but apparently the EMP from the lightning induced a charge great enough to fry the two NICs.
Fortunately, I had some NICs laying around and got things running again, but that’s pretty frustrating. I am glad that it was nothing more serious, though.
Nov
Have CAPTCHAs been broken? Sort of…
Posted by jerry as Security
I just read this article about the Hannah Montana ticket debacle, and how it points to an apparent weakness is CAPTCHA. Unfortunately, for CAPTCHA, the problem wasn’t some slick new algorithm designed by a miscreant that can reliably decipher the images, but rather establishing a network that grabs the CAPTCHA from one site, shoots it to a porn or warez we site that presents the same CAPTCHA to someone looking to score some boobies, who must answer the CAPTCHA before getting their prize.
It’s really quite clever, and I anticipate that the CAPTCHA breaking network will continue to mature, as we have seen with other malware. Someone’s going to make a business case for hosting a service that has an input API that accepts an image, and returns the CAPTCHA text, and a similar API that presents the CAPTCHA much like an online ad, and accepts the CAPTCHA text as an input. Sites that use the CAPTCHA and returned a “solution” are compensated in the same model as a click through for an online ad – think of it as adsense for bad people. Except, it would be perfectly acceptable for the site owner to sit there all night and answer CAPTCHAs on his or her site, raking in the money.
On the other side, those looking to break the CAPTCHA would have to pay a small fee for a certain number of CAPTCHA credits. The money would flow to the site owners, with the service owner keeping a service charge, of course.
Honestly, that could spell the end for the widespread use of CAPTCHAs. The only way to stop this is to make the CAPTCHA too difficult to read for a human, and that defeats the whole purpose.
So, in effect, CAPTCHA was broken without really breaking it.
Nov
Are domain parking companies complicit in typo-squatting?
Posted by jerry as Uncategorized
From this article
“The domain name parking companies are providing a service. Whether or not you agree with the domain name owner’s decision to buy a certain domain name, it is not the parking company’s responsibility to police the internet and protect a company’s brand. That remains the responsibility of the brand itself. The brand or trademark owner should go after the domain owner, and not publicly lynch the domain parking companies:”
I would say that’s debatable. Think about some “real world” parrellels:
Bootleg merchandise. The retailer did not manfacture fake Nike shoes, he is just selling them. It’s not his responsibility to police the goods that move through his store – that’s the responsibility of the real manufacturer.
Pirated music. Napster, grokster, bearshare, guntella, and on and on, all claimed that they just provided a service, and there were legitimate, legal uses for the service, and that it was not their responsibility to police was was going through.
Picture duplication. Photo development companies claim that it’s not their responsibility to police what pictures they reproduce. The copyright holder must do something to prevent unauthorized duplication.
In all those cases, the organization felt strongly in their footing. But they key is that each one lost in a big way. Like it or not, if you’re aiding in something that’s illegal, you’re complicit. The question is where do you draw the line. Should ISP’s have been held responsible in the music sharing cases? Probably not. Should the manufacturer of photo paper be held responsible for copyright infringement? Probably not. It’s a grey line, to be sure, but it seems pretty obvious that the domain parking companies are well on one side of the line. The only thing missing are lawsuits and legislation now.
Nov
Conservatives Honing Gaydar?
Posted by jerry as politics
Given all of the wacky antics our conservative leadership has been, well, participating in, this, taken from Conservapedia is pretty funny:
Make no mistake, it’s clearly been “stuffed” by someone out to “bone” the repubs, but funny none-the-less.
Nov
Electotainment
Posted by jerry as news, politics
I just finished reading this article and have to respond. The author doesn’t directly come out and say it, but is basically accusing the new media of dumbing down the political process, and we, the electorate are the victims. We are NOT the victims… We are the cause. Have you seen what’s on TV lately? What are the most popular shows? American Idol, Dancin with the Stars, reality show dejure. The media is pavlov’s dog, and the public has been in control of the bell for a long time. They are the monster the WE made.
It isn’t that CNN doesn’t want to let loose Hillary’s view on Yucca Mountain! CNN doesn’t want a million people saying “oh my god, this is boring shit. Lets see what’s on Fox News. Maybe there’s a police chase or a good apartment fire we can watch.” And they’re right. I may be interested in Hillary’s view on Yucca Mountain, the credit collapse, the slowing economy, what to do with Iran, but I represent a small minority that probably doesn’t fit into their demographic anyway.
Up till recently, I hadn’t watched CNN or Fox News in about 2 years. I was really bothered by what I saw when I did have a chance to watch it recently. Every news show on CNN Headline News is presented by a “commentator”, not a reporter. I could not believe that was Headline News. It used to actually be 24 hours of an anchor person giving the news. But, they’ve adapted to what the viewers want.
For pete’s sake, PLEASE STOP BLAMING THE MEDIA. They’re doing what they do best – sell advertising. They can’t sell advertising if no one watches their programming because “hard hitting journalism” can’t compete with Dancin with the Stars.
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