The Blog of Harald

So while I was in the shower today, I heard a report that three women are suing Koko the gorilla for “pressuring them to see their nipples”. My first thought was: what has the world come to when people are suing a _gorilla_?

Of course, sanity prevailed, and I checked Google. Turns out that the women are suing the Gorilla Foundation because the women were informed that failing to expose their nipples would cause their employment to “suffer”. When the women reported health and safety violations rodents in the food preparation areas, for example) they were dismissed.

The truth is entirely more reasonable than the radio report. Of course, the radio report was more sensational…

See “Google News”:http://news.google.com/news?q=koko+%22lawsuit%22 for more stories…

My car barely made it to the school and back, but that’s not why I’m writing.

I wished I taken my camera with me today. As I was leaving the school I saw one of our big snowplows (not the truck kind, but the big construction grader style ones).

It was stuck in a large snow bank, slowly being pulled out by one of those industrial tow trucks….

“It’s Back! Yay!”:http://geourl.org/near?p=http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/

bq. If you go to Winx Club, and read Bloom’s blog, it says that…

My six-year-old just used ‘blog’. In context.

The debate over women in technical fields (in school) summarized:

bq. Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.

Well, I laughed…

via Philip Greenspun

bq. “Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity… We cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.”

– A.E. Newton

*That* explains my bookshelf…

There’s a news story today about how antibiotic resistant bugs are on the rise again. Ah, but this time doctors are blaming patients; it seems we’re “demanding” antibiotics for all of our ailments.

Here’s the kicker: antibiotics are prescription drugs (up here in Canada). If you don’t think the patient needs them, *don’t prescribe them*! Passing the buck to patients is just plain irresponsible.

Collected from various sources.

Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
— Sir Ralph Richardson

Only an “S” separates laughter from slaughter.

I have found a marvelous technique for increasing the size of one’s member, which this subject line is too small to contain.
— Fermat’s Last Spam

The construction crew managed to fill the server room with drywall dust, taking out four power supplies (including persephone.cfrq.net). It took a couple of days to procure and install a replacement.

As always, I thank my generous hosts for their time and energy!

Apparently I never documented how much I hate raccoons. Well, they’re back. A loud clatter in the attic at 2AM made me haul out ladders and flashlights, and sure enough, there was a critter up there. I’m not sure where she got in, since there’s no externally visible holes. Based on the noise, I think she’s not sure how she got in either; she was trying to claw / eat her way out through the siding or soffets or something….

I’ll pay the animal control people to deal with it. Again.

At the rate that i’m blacklisting spammers, I’m going to end up blocking the entire Internet… *sigh.

GO AWAY! My statistics pages (the only place you’ll see referers) are password protected! Google can’t see them! You won’t get any pagerank from me!

(pant pant pant…)

I’m not your damn search engine
“I’m someone’s fetish”:http://www.nonzerochance.com/index.php?p=buypage&design=fetish&style=kshirt
“polyamory is wrong!”:http://www.cafepress.com/captainwhimsy.16788296?zoom=yes#zoom (read the back :-)

If you’re having trouble understanding why wikis are so useful, or having trouble explaining it to other people, try this story:
Monkeymagic: The architect and the wiki

bq. The moral of the story (which doesn’t really need saying): its better to start with a load of old crap than aim for an idealised version.

(via “Cutting Through”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/infosential/cdIB?m=130)

It’s a small, lightweight webserver that speaks IPv6. But that’s irrelevant. I’m just in it for the “file not found error page”:http://leahhttpd.sourceforge.net/screens/screen3.png.

:-)

Today I’m feeling like throwing in the towel on this web server business: there’s just too much crap to deal with.

A friend’s server was broken into and defaced last week by a script kiddy. I’ve been double-checking my box over the last few days, and I’m astonished at the amount of crap flowing in from the Internet. As a security professional I knew it was bad, but I was fooling myself; I didn’t know it was _this_ bad!!!

I monitor the site regularly, mainly to ensure that we’re not abusing bandwidth that is generously donated, but also to make sure everything is working, and to watch for obviously suspicious activity. In the last week a major portion of the traffic to this server has been:

* referrer spam (which doesn’t do anything for the spammer, since I don’t display referrers anywhere; it only abuses my bandwidth). About 15% of my bandwidth for the last _month_ has been referrer spam; they seem to breed faster than I can block them out!
* people trying comment spam on weblogs with no comments (and no comment script!). This includes attempts to invoke old security holes in Movable Type.
* people probing for security defects in software that I don’t even have installed.
* people probing for security defects in software that I _do_ have installed (fortunately that was password protected, so they didn’t get in :).
* probes for network sockets (both for software with vulnerabilities, and for software installed by hackers). This box is heavily firewalled (in both directions; blocking outbound traffic has saved my bacon more than once!), but I still see the logs.
* password guessing attempts (mainly via SSH, which has been locked down to a small number of IP addresses for months now, since the last major SSH vulnerability).

The promise of Open Source software was that more eyes staring at code would lead to fewer defects. I’m seeing the opposite; it seems that the rate of vulnerability annoucements, and resulting patches, is _increasing_. Just last week I just upgraded three packages here as a direct result of security announcements (and, as mentioned above, caught someone probing for one of them…)

The Internet has become the cesspool predicted in several recent science fiction novels (notably Peter Watt’s Behemoth, which specifically mentions automated virus / hacking activity). After three days of looking two closely at my logs I feel like pulling the plug. If it were just me using the server, I probably would…

MSNBC – First Amendment no big deal, students say

bq. The way many high school students see it, government censorship of newspapers may not be a bad thing, and flag burning is hardly protected free speech.

bq. Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.

Wow.

bq. They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security. — Ben Franklin

or even better:

bq. I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it. — Voltaire

Worthwhile: Oh why cahn’t the marketers … learn … to … speak

This sounds like the underpants gnomes:

1). Scalable Enterprise ? Solution
2).
3). Profit!

Before and after pictures, brought to you by yesterday’s snowstorm…

bq. “We can tell when a technology has truly arrived when the new problems it gives rise to approach in magnitude the problems it was designed to solve.”

– Arthur Chandler, 1997 (quoted at the end of “Morality Play”)
[http://charon.sfsu.edu/MORALITYPLAY.HTML]

bq. “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”

РVoltaire [Fran̤ois Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)