Monthly Archives: December 2003

(If you make that an acronym,. it’s an anagram of “DDR”! Nifty!)

Yeah. I’m bored. So I took this test again. I think this is the third separate blog entry I’ve made about this silly thing. :)

Anyway… this time my score was 59.56607% - Extreme Geek. Maybe I should stop using this thing as a checklist for things I should know (THACO)/ own (4-color pen)/ do (wear a digital watch [I'm not wearing two yet, at least!])/ etc. Or maybe I shouldn’t.

Sax just linked me to an incredibly “evil” (according to Sax) AIM bot. You can play pranks on your friends with it! What fun!!!11!!!!11!

Anyway, I decided to try it on myself, because I was curious and bored. Here’s the conversation:

The idea that people actually fall for this thing boggles the mind. I mean, the spelling, capitalization, and grammar are waaaay better than what you see when you are randomly IMed by an unknown human! *rimshot*

Anyway, the lameosity of this amused me greatly. But then again, it is after 3 AM and nothing else is happening, so it probably isn’t too hard to amuse me at the moment.

Well, the next major (actually, minor) revision of the kernel is out. I’ll probably end up waiting a good while before I try it though…. I want to see what good/bad experiences others have before I cross that bridge, heh.

If anyone reading this has some of the above experieces to share (especially if they relate to USB, DRI, or !ide-scsi) by all means, share. :)

One ring to find them
One ring to bring them all
And in the darkness, bind them

So, I’ve returned from one of the first public showings of ROTK. This movie was really good, I think it’s the best one in the series. Hopefully if they ever end up doing The Hobbit, it is as good as this movie was.

Despite how great the movie was, I feel the need to list my gripes with it anyway (to avoid being called a poor excuse for a Geek :) ) Just off the top of my head:

• No Saruman
• No troubles in the Shire
• Denethor not having a palantir so he just looks like a psycho (well, he is- but at least he had some reason before)
• Killing a Nazgul leaves one with very few ill effects
• The belated reforging of Narsil
• The majority or Frodo & Sam’s journey was from the second book

I’m sure there are more things that are quite different from the books, but it’s been a few years since I read them so this is all I could remember at the moment.

Anyway, this movie was incredibly fun to watch, and even if it wasn’t perfect it was a very good representation of the story. I’m really looking forward to going to see it again :D

I just got this article linked from Beth, about how the Blaster worm may well have contributed greatly to the widespread August power outage. One choice quote:

To be fair, if Linux was the primary OS of the world things like this could still happen. To be more fair, sysadmins would in general have to be even less competent than they are now to allow it to happen.

The problem isn’t so much the holes in the operating system (all operating systems have holes) as it is the sysadmins who don’t pay enough attention to these security issues. This is even more critical in monolithic systems like windows where you have very little control over what software makes up your operating system and you are forced to rely on just one source (the software vendor) for security updates. You can be assured that almost every hole affects you because, well, you probably have everything installed.

An advanage of systems like Linux is their inherent modular tendencies. You can install just the base operating system and whatever additional services you need to run, and then sign up the both the distribution’s security mailing list and the mailing list for each of those services. This way you have several places to get informaiton about security holes as they are discovered (and these things are usually patched as soon as they are discovered :) ). After that, fixing these holes is usually as simple as downloading a new package (usually helpfully linked from the distributions’s email, IME).

In the latter scenario, instead of having to worry about every hole that is found (because they likely all affect you), you only have to worry about the ones that concern software you have running on your system. Hence- less holes affect you, they are fixed faster- the system is more secure. :)

Of course in this case the problem stems more from the inept admins than a bloated operating system. The RPC vulnerability was known about for a long time, and patches had been available for MONTHS prior to this. Inept admins make it easy to crack into any system, no matter what OS it runs.

I took another stupid quiz, but this one is fun!

As for what I’ve been up to… I’ve been hoping that the cracker issue on Peter’s site and FFAF/MoMaM would go away when Surpass switched to the new server, but it hasn’t. I’ll have to talk to them tomorrow and see if they are still intending on restoring things from older backups.

I’ve also been reading a lot of really cool sci fi, which was a thoughtful gift from a friend who doesn’t blog often enough.

I’ve been working all night, and it looks like I won’t sleep again until tonight. Bleargh.

First, I started ugrading Invision Board on OBW. This necessitated the development of three skins to suit the site, practically from scratch.

As if that, and the inevitable pitfalls that come with that, aren’t enough, at around 06:30 in the morning I discovered that my affiliate site, FantasyFinale, got cracked. So then Sax and I set about trying to figure out what happened. I managed to get the raw logs before we lost complete access to them, and with them we got the refferring address that the attacks originated from. It’s some cracking forum that has a .nu domain.

Meh, I doubt anything will come of this, but I’ve done all I can for now. Unfortunately, this was a shared host, so it isn’t just FantasyFinale that’s affected. A lot of people are really pretty screwed because of this. I’m just glad I have the habit of kepping regular backups of my site, in case something like that ever happens on my host.

Anyway, if you care about the Friday Five (I’m not too sure I do, at this point), keep reading.
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