All posts by sneaker

Rants and Raves

"You should have bought a squirrel"

Okay, so yesterday I think I was in the mood for what I’d call “light entertainment”. Actually judging from the recent quality of celluloid being produced at hollywood (even though they seem to keep making more and more money every weekend) there isn’t room for much else! But anyhow, so me and two friends of mine who were visiting from out of town decided to catch a movie. Since we didn’t want to wait and hadn’t planned in advance we landed up going to the movie that started closest to our time of arrival: Rat Race.

Now the cast of Rat Race is definitely impressive. Some of the finest comics make an appearance in the movie starting from the insane Rowen Atkins (of Mr. Bean fame), and the multi-talented Cuba Goodin Jr., the guy who plays Newman on Seinfeld (sorry don’t remember his name off-hand!) to the whacky Whoopie Goldberg. Now, if you expect there to be a real plot and a real story to this movie, then you better be looking somewhere else. I couldn’t at more than one occasion reminesce back to the movie which I saw several times when I was a kid: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World Or even Cannonball Run. Rat Race essentially takes the same story line that has been used for years and years – the people will do crazy things for money and puts a modern day spin to it. With everything from bullet trains to private jets and helicopters to hot-air balloons to horses to Hitler’s mercedes being used as the means of transport to get to Silver City (interesting name), New Mexico where $2 million await the first person to get to it.

The absurd incredulity of the circumstances the befall each of the contenders definitely elicits a chuckle and a laugh here and there. Often accompnied by “oh gosh”es along the way though at the absurdity of some of the events. With Hitler at a WWII veterans gathering, to a bus full of Lucys headed to a I Love Lucy convention! (Wait, I thought that was supposd to be Elvi!)

Anyhow, I won’t give away the entire movie. But it was good for a laugh. Truly “light” entertainment, good for those time when you really don’t want to think, but sit back and laugh at people and the crazy things that happen to them and the crazier things people do!

Oh and BTW, make sure you buy a squirrel! 🙂

Coming up soon: The stuff-your-face weekend in Pittsburgh!

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News
No, I haven’t been slacking…

Well, okay, maybe when it comes to writing more stuff to post on the site with all kinds of crazy thoughts, yes… then I have been slacking. But I decided to take a day or two off to go back to my roots of playing with code. I needed to learn ASP for being more useful at work and so just for kicks I decided to replicate the comments system that I’m using here in ASP with an Access database backend. The result is that there is now a whole new section on the site; the projects section which will from now on cotain the various thing that I develop to keep myself entertained and amused.

The first of course is aspcomments. If you’re using blogger on a Windoze based server then this may be really easy for you to setup. It would also be trivial to use a hardcoded blogid and make it function as a guest book. In funcionality it’s very similar to the PHP-based dotcomments solution or the Perl-based cgicomments.

If you do decide to download it and use it, I’d appreciate it if you drop me a note.

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Thought -- caught in the act!

Hackers, Script Kiddies, Virus writers : scum of the Internet?

Is there any possibility of a hackers code of ethics?

I must have jinxed myself by saying lots more long drives in the previous blog entry. As it turns out, I may just have to head back to DC in order to rebuild a few servers. Why? Because some person who seems to lack the good sense of applying their intelligence for the right purposes decided to hack my servers.

Recently, David Coursey, the Executive Editor of ZDNet’s Anchordesk, wrote a column entitled: The only fitting punishment for virus writers? Death!. Today, I think I know exactly where David was coming from when he wrote that! I spent all morning trying to track down an intruder whose antics had successfully crippled one of my crtitical servers. Still going actually, just waiting for some installation files to get transferred over to the datacenter before I return to conducting my autopsy of the hack-attack to assess the level of damage. So far, the resonating piece of advice I’ve received from CERT and all the people who I’ve spoken to is, wipe the machine and start over. I agree that that’s the best thing to do, and that’s what I’l probably have to do… but what a freaking waste of time and effort just because some idiot feel like they have the right to come mess with other people’s systems!

Now, I’ll admit that I’ve done my share of hacking for fun. I was never a serious hacker, but I knew enough to be dangerous. But all the hacking I did was never done with any malicious intentions and was generally limited to learning new tricks without causing any damage to anyone. The hacker mentality is one of someone who needs a challenge. I most cases, there isn’t really any real work or value that the hacker intends to derive from compromising your systems, but instead, it’s just a thrill, a rush… that I am smarter than the other person because I broke into their machine! From that point of view, I would actually consider hackers to be lower on the scale of “the scum of the earth” than someone who commits burglaries, steals or mugs people. At least in those cases they get something out of it!!

Even in hacking there can be some level or ethics and morals can there not? You want a challenge? You want to prove how smart you are? Then do it in a fucking constructive way. If you can’t find a constructive way and you still really want to hack, then go ahead, hack away, but do it so you can alert the person who’s system you’ve hacked to let them know that there is a hole in their system they need to plug!! Trust me a lot more people will recognize and appreciate what you do when you do it in such a way that it helps them than harms them! If your reason for hacking is because you want a kick out it, it’s a bigger kick to help someone and have them thank you then to screw up something they’ve spent time and effort working on!

What most hackers do these days is akin to the street-vandals who go around defacing other people’s property. How would you feel like if someone came in and spray painted your car huh?? That’s what you’re doing everyday that you go treading on other people’s work and effort as you go ssh’ing, rlogin’ing, telnett’ing and su’ing from machine to machine. So develop some request for things which do not belong to you! If you want computing power, then get it the right way! Check out projects like United Devices and SETI@Home. Build your own network. Learn how to channel your intelligence in a way that you can actually get something more back from it than just the hollow thrill of patting your own back!

Well, enough ranting on Hackers, Script Kiddies and Virus writers. I left a message for the hacker who broke into my system by modifying /etc/motd. It reads:

    Dear Mr. hacker:

    Why the heck are you screwing with our systems?

    We’d really appreciate it if you would leave them alone

    and restore all the files that you messed with.

    How’s that for a straightforward request? 🙂

    If you need to contact us, email <address suppressed>

    regards,

    -m

Let’s see if he or she has the good sense to either just go away, have the courage and the decency to actually respond to it openly and explain himself or herself or if this is just another person content to be part of the scum of the Internet…

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