Life is a State of Mind : ideas, thoughts, rants

Health Care Reform, H.R. 3962

I am seeing a whole lot of angry and misleading rhetoric about the house bill on health care that passed last night. In case you want to know the facts, the whole text is online: H.R. 3962 (OpenCongress.org)

It is interesting to note that most of the early commenters are always paid lobbyists; so disregard most of the comments until the public has had more time to respond.

The OpenCongress site locks up some browsers; you might also try: H.R. 3962 (Library of Congress)

Disappointed in my Precinct

According to the Verifiable Voting Coalition of Virginia, Virginia law requires that all new voting machines be optical scan tabulators that provide a voter-verified paper audit trail.

So why did I have to vote on an unverifiable paperless electronic voting machines, known as DRE?

Because our lame legislators have allowed for a very long, gradual phase-out of the damned DRE machines and my precinct will probably be the very last to get a verifiable machine of any sort.

So much for “Trust, but verify” – there is no verification.

Vote Today

If you are able to vote, and you do not; you have no right to complain about the government you get stuck with.

Virginia polling stations are open 6am to 7pm today. Don’t chance it, get to the station plenty early.

2009 11 03 snolan Economics
Environment
Local
News
Politics
Virginia Politics Comments (0) Permalink

More job possibilities

A friend has struck out on his own and landed some contracting work, and needs some help. He is brilliant with network gear and security services; and he needs:

web content manager
web developer
systems/network admins (can be new to the field, and willing to learn)
project manager (PMP, Project Management Institute Body of Knowledge)

Security clearances are needed, and the geographic location is Alexandria, Virginia. 1-5 year contracts.

Stefan is quite brilliant and if I had money socked away I’d consider interning with him to work with him and learn from him. If you are interested in learning anti-DDoS technology at the router level, you want to check these jobs out.

2009 11 01 snolan Computer Security
Computers
Local Comments (0) Permalink

Appeal to moderates and reasonable people

Hello, hello; mainstream Americans… please vote. When you skip your chance to vote, you lend more power to the radicals on all sides. The power of each vote is inversely proportional to the number of votes being cast. In non-presidential elections most voters stay home, leaving only the most motivated with control of the off-year elections. Sadly, this means that extremists on all sides can pretty easily take control of an election.

You need to go vote in the off year elections as well. Please.

2009 11 01 snolan Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Thank you David Pogue: Take Back the Beep

David Pogue posted a public rant about the annoyingly long “voicemail instructions” messages on nearly all carriers now; not the personal ones people record, but the ones you have to wait through to even get that.

My time is worth money and yours is too. Please call your own phone from work or a friend’s phone; let it ring and go to voicemail. See for yourself what people calling you are hearing…

If you don’t like it; please do something about it. Find out from your carrier what options need to be saved to eliminate the unnecessary and time consuming (and call minute burning) instructions. If your carrier is uncooperative (T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T: I am looking at you), then subscribe to YouMail or Google Voice (both are free, both are excellent voice mail services for older phones without visual voicemail of their own, both help intercept and block unwanted calls, both allow you to set custom greetings for calls from your friends).

Huge thank you to Robert for the Google Voice invite. I have now used both Google Voice and YouMail; and love them both. They are somewhat unnecessary on a modern smart phone like the iPhone; but on older phones they are very useful services.

If you are confronted with one of these annoyingly long outgoing messages instructing you on how to do what you’ve already known how to do since 1982, you can sometimes bypass the instructions if you already know the service carrier of the person you are calling:

AT&T: * or #
Sprint: 1
T-Mobile: #
Verizon: 1 or *

Sources:
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/the-mandatory-15-second-voicemail-instructions/

http://lifehacker.com/5226278/hack-your-voicemail-to-save-time

2009 10 29 snolan News Comments (0) Permalink

Weekend in Baltimore

Erci and went to Baltimore for a little weekend get-away this to see Rodrigo y Gabriela in concert and to have some time to ourselves.

We stayed at Brookshire Suites in the Inner Harbor area (small, but clean with excellent service) and used their complimentary shuttle service to get over to Fells Point for dinner and back. We enjoyed drinks at the hotel, and then a quiet dinner at Louisiana Restaurant (rich, pricey, but delicious) the first night.

We walked over to the Maryland Science Center to see the Leonardo da Vinci the Genius exhibit (which is inspiring, and on display until January 31st, 2010). We also got to see an egg drop competition, hot air trash bags floating in the atrium, blue crabs, dinosaur bones, and all kinds of hands on science exhibits and displays. We continued walking to the Rusty Scupper for a fun lunch and then meandered back through the Inner Harbor doing a little shopping at La Mesa (nice cotton clothing, interesting weaves, unfinished website).

We somehow managed to be indoors through Saturday afternoons biggest downpours of rain; which was a lucky break. We napped a bit and then walked over to the main event: Rodrigo y Gabriela in concert at Rams Head Live!. The venue is really nice, but standing room only. You can get very close to the performing artists; and they have drinks and food; but there is no reservation system other than what the crowd comes up with on the fly, and you’d best be wearing very comfortable shoes. No cameras allowed, and they require you to check any you may bring accidentally. Interestingly this did not seem to apply to cell phones and other flash-less devices… so I suspect they don’t want flashes distracting the artists.

The opening act was Rocco DeLuca (on his own, no band), and he was spectacular. I’d never heard of him, though several of his songs were familiar. This opening act alone would have been worth the trip to Baltimore for a weekend; we liked him so much we bought his CD and I was happy just to see him play live at about 30 feet (amazing guitar technique).

Rodrigo y Gabriela were even more astounding. I think this was the best concert I have seen (and I have seen Jethro Tull and The Who when they were in their prime). The amazing skill at which they play their guitars is astounding and inspirational. Also – I’d only ever heard them and seen a few videos at very low resolution; so I was pleasantly surprise to discover that both are very beautiful people. They played most of their new album, 11:11 and some of their big hits from previous albums. Beautiful, talented, authentic, sublime. I cried. The crowd was a very interesting mix; so Rodrigo y Gabriela clearly connect with an eclectic mix of fans of many ages and demographic groups.

After the show we were famished and we managed to get into Ruth’s Chris just before they closed; and so we got a very quiet and romantic meal in a mostly empty restaurant. A short walk back to the hotel to collapse for the night finished our Saturday.

Sunday we checked out of the hotel and drove back to Virginia on a gloriously sunny Fall day that inspired us to stay outside and taste wines at La Grange (a few miles from our house) where you can sit outside and enjoy the crisp Fall air.

You can get a taste of Rodrigo y Gabriela on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8dPso79Z9I

2009 10 27 snolan Fun
Local
Music
Personal
Travel Comments (0) Permalink

Gah – turns out the websites are infected

All my html and php files on scottnolan.org, blog.scottnolan.org, labelle.org, and wiki.labelle.org have had the following bogus HTML code added to the files:

example of the iframe injection malware

(I hand recast the real greater than and less than signs so it would not execute)

That means the malware somehow got shell access to my web servers on Dreamhost; I can think of no other reason it would effect all these websites, but not other websites on the same host. I suspect it exploited my ssh keys.
Smart malware.

Update: wrote a script to remove the malware on every html, htm, and php file on the domains listed above; now to restore my Safari settings and change passwords everywhere.

Update 2: turns out the bad folks used scripts to exploit an old, no longer used, but not updated copy of wordpress software to break into my websites. That coupled with my foolishly using the same password for sister websites let them into those as well. Passwords all changed, and deliberately different now; old wordpress versions purged.

Here is my quick and dirty cleanup script:
quick ksh script to remove iframe injections

2009 10 25 snolan Computer Security Comments (2) Permalink

Safari Browser User Settings Cracked

Pre-emptive Update: Turns out my assumptions were all wrong and this entire post is incorrect. Safari on both my laptop and iPhone are fine; hackers found an old WordPress blog on my website that I stopped caring about and updating, and used it to infiltrate the site and related websites.

Deprecated material:

I run Safari 4.03 (5531.9) on Mac OS X 10.5.8 with all the latest updates on my laptop.
I took a lovely trip to Baltimore this weekend (more on that elsewhere) and tried guessing the hotel’s wireless network rather than reading the brochures (which were not clear anyway) or calling the front desk for the correct SSID. I must have signed into a malware infested wireless service, because the normal user account I normally use on my laptop has it’s Safari library files for that userid messed up. When I try to visit my own websites, I get what looks like the Google Safe Browsing alert warning me that my own websites are suspected of having malware.

The page is not real; though it does link to Google’s own page of warnings if you click for more information.
The payload of this malware does not appear to work properly, or I have no discovered it yet – it is just frustrating.

I checked my own sites on a different computer in a different browser, you can do this too:
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=https://blog.scottnolan.org/ (just replace blog.scottnolan.org with whatever site you want to check).

If Google really is listing your website as suspect, you’ll have more work to do. In this case my sites come up clean; which means my Safari is “pwned” – damn. I visited my websites as another user on the infected computer, and Safari for all users other than my own are clean; so it only impacts the user who connected to the LAN. I also visited my websites from several other computers, they all come up clean.

So now I need to figure out how to purge the malware from within Safari’s user library files on my phone and on my laptop (both got infected).

2009 10 25 snolan Computer Security
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Elections Rigged?

For all of you who thought I was crazy for harping on the possibility that voting machines were rigged to skew an election one way or another… uh… I damn well told you so!

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/10/20/voting-machine-sourc.html

Basically this proves that the logical check sum that most election processes in the United States require is simply not enough insurance (and it never has been). The check sum only verifies that votes have not been added or dropped. It does not prove that some percentage of votes haven’t been tallied in column B when they were meant for column A.

We need Verified Voting immediately; and if that is technologically impossible – we need to go back to hand counted paper ballots until verified and source code visible machines can be made.

As for Sequoia specifically? I’d like to see an explanation for why skewing source code is needed if they have any integrity at all. It took effort to add the skewing routines, effort that must have already been used. I you are not sick to your stomach thinking about what this means already, for the last several elections; please take a deep breath and start reading again.

2009 10 21 snolan Computer Security
News
Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Life is a State of Mind