Ugh yuck.

Spent the entire afternoon at the doctor’s office today, on account of this nasty hacking coughing yuck that I’ve had for the last three weeks and that has been hanging on like an uninvited house guest. I was swabbed, poked, prodded, X-rayed, poked some more, and several people looked at me and said “hmm” a lot.

After hours of poking, swabbing, prodding, X-raying, and “hmm”ing, the diagnosis is: antibiotic-resistant pneumonia.

Fuck me dead.

The doctor is taking it seriously and treating it aggressively. My kitchen counter now looks like I knocked over a pharmacy. Two different steroids, two different antibiotics, one shot in the ass (that burns like a motherfucker), an inhaler, industrial-strength cough medicine, some foul-tasting bright-orange pills that I don’t even know what they are, two different OTC cough medicines and expectorants that my doctor suggested, and another appointment to go in next week for further evaluation. Hundred and seven bucks for all the prescriptions, and my insurance paid more than twice that.

Apparently it’s going around. Doctor told me I was the third case of antibiotic-resistant pneumonia she’d seen today. Ye gods.

You know it’s bad when you’ve been too sick even to be horny.

The Russians are at it again

Mac users, we had a three-month respite. The Russian Zlob gang, which last September lost its servers that were distributing the Mac DNSchanger malware when the corrupt hosting company EST Hosts went dark, are back after Macs again.

Just discovered a server being used to spread Mac malware from

http://brakeplayer.net/download/get7003.dmg
*** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING *** This link is live as of the time of this writing. The payload, named get7003.dmg, contains a new version of the Mac DNSchanger, aka OSX.RSplug.A, OSX.RSplugin.A, or OSX/Zlob, computer malware.

The malicious server brakeplayer.net is brand new and is hosted in Latvia, on an ISP called “zlkon.lv”.

whois brakeplayer.net

Whois Server Version 2.0

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

Domain Name: BRAKEPLAYER.NET
Registrar: REGTIME LTD.
Whois Server: whois.regtime.net
Referral URL: http://www.webnames.ru
Name Server: NS1.BRAKEPLAYER.NET
Name Server: NS2.BRAKEPLAYER.NET
Status: ok
Updated Date: 26-dec-2008
Creation Date: 15-dec-2008
Expiration Date: 15-dec-2009
Name servers:
ns1.brakeplayer.net
ns2.brakeplayer.net

Registrar: Regtime Ltd.
Creation date: 2008-12-15
Expiration date: 2009-12-15

Registrant:
Nikolaj Selivestrov
Email: paul.aspen111@gmail.com
Organization: Private person
Address: ul. kosmonavtov, 132-13
City: Moskva
State: Moskovskaya
ZIP: 129301
Country: RU
Phone: +7.4957854978

I’ve also noticed an uptick in the number of hacked Web sites hosted by iPower Web lately. As I’ve talked about extensively here, here, here, and here, iPower is basically a mess. For more than a year now, hackers have been walking all over their servers, planting virus redirectors in sites that are hosted by iPower or their subsidiaries.

For a while, the number of attacks against iPower dropped to next to nothing, and I thought that they’d fixed their security problem. Now, Im not so sure–now, I think that iPower is as compromised as it always has been, but the hackers toned down the attacks when they started getting attention. Can’t prove it, but my hunch is there’s a long-standing zero-day exploit in vDeck, iPower Web’s home-grown Web control panel software.

I think we’re going to be seeing more Mac malware in the near future.

Portland bound!

OK, folks, looks like I will be in Portland [Edit: Portland, Oregon!] for the last week of January, where I hear it’s cold. I’ll be spending quite a bit of time with zaiah, and apparently there will be get-togethers at the home of edwardmartiniii on the 24th and 31st. But I will still have some unallocated time available as well, mostly on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday (the 25th, 26th, and 27th).

I will not, however, have a car.

So, anyone fancy a meetup? What’s a good thing to do in Portland on a weekday with no transportation?

Still sick…

…and I’ve got just two words for that. Code signing.

Seriously. Code signing.

Viruses work because our cells contain machinery which will read, accept, and translate any RNA strands they see into proteins. Any RNA strands they see. Including RNA strands injected into our cells from viruses, or RNA strands transcribed from DNA injected into our cells from viruses.

Which is, from a security standpoint, pretty fracking stupid.

Code signing, I’m telling you. If our genetic material were signed with some sort of unique code that means “yes, this really does come from us, it’s safe to translate this RNA and build this protein,” and the transcribing and translating machinery would refuse to process RNA that wasn’t signed, then viruses could inject their bits into our cells from now ’til Doomsday and it wouldn’t mean diddly.

Code signing. Just one more reason why if we were designed by some Grand Creator, he wasn’t very good at his job.

Some thoughts on women, sexual double-standards, and complicity

So I can not fracking sleep tonight. This fever is refusing to go away, even after I’ve waged a fierce two-pronged attack on it with Advil and Tylenol, and I feel like I’m about to hork up a lung. Truly, I am a walking shambling catastrophe.

The fourth night zaiah was here, and the first night I had this damn fever, I woke up from a very strange dream. My dreams tend to be a bit weird to begin with, but when I have a fever, look out.

This is actually a post about societal fears of women’s sexuality and sexual double standards. Bear with me; I’m a bit fuzzy-headed at the moment, and apt to be preternaturally rambly. Now where was I?

Oh, yeah. fever dream. Anyway, I had this dream, and in this dream I’d met and made friends with a woman. Don’t recall her clearly–long black hair, big brown eyes, that’s all that stuck.

Anyway, in the dream, shortly after we became friends, a group of researchers pulled me aside and explained to me that she wasn’t actually a woman at all. She was a synthetic construct–body engineered and grown in a vat, brain a gigantic supercomputer kept in a huge facility elsewhere in town and remotely operating the body. She was not aware of any of this; she was actually an experiment in artificial intelligence, socialization, and the development of self, carefully monitored over the past thirty years. The place where she lived–a gorgeous penthouse suite, indoor pool and all–was closely monitored ’round the clock, and all her interactions with the outside world were carefully regulated. She was encouraged to keep a private diary, which she believed was secret but which was actually published monthly in a trade journal about AI and machine consciousness.

They took me up to the control room and let me read some of the back issues of the journal. One of her diary entries was particularly strange; she’d somehow got her hands on a book of basic anatomy, and was utterly perplexed that the book showed things that she didn’t have. Specifically, the book showed reproductive and sex organs, and she had nothing of the sort–no sexual organs whatsoever between her legs. No labia, no vagina, nothing. The researchers, somewhat shamefacedly, said they had been too embarrassed to put them in the design when they were growing the body.


I woke up really, really pissed off, with nothing to attach the pissed-off-ness to. It took some introspection to figure out what the pissed-off-ness was connected with; this bizarre and nearly universal sexual shame that we as a species seem to attach to female sexuality.

I’m not talking about the schizophrenic Puritanical sexual asshattery that we in the US attach to sex in general. I’m talking about a hatred of sexual expression in women that’s so virulent that entire societies will surgically mutilate women to prevent them from enjoying the act of sex.

And make no mistake about it–the impulse to label sexually promiscuous men as “studs” and sexually promiscuous women as “whores” is no different in kind; it is the exact same impulse, merely taken to a different but equally illogical conclusion, that drives folks to get out the scalpels.

And it’s frickin’ everywhere. It’s not just a handful of societies. It’s not just a few places. It’s everywhere. The ancient Israelites had all kinds of weird religious rules about touching women when they were ‘unclean,’ that speaks to a level of institutionalized abhorrence and fear of basic reproductive biology that’s mind-boggling. In Hindu societies, a woman who committed adultery was publicly executed after first having her sex organs cut off with a knife–and the real kicker is that for this purpose, “adultery” could be defined as “talking with a man and touching his clothing.”

This is a level of fucked-up-ness I can’t quite wrap my head around. Seems like everyone’s just scared silly of women’s sexuality. Seriously, WTF?


The part that really blows my mind, though, and the part I really don’t get, is the extent to which women themselves buy into this kind of thing. One thing that consistently mazes me on online forums that have anything to do with discussions of sex or sexuality–any time a woman talks about how much she likes sex, or about enjoying any kind of non-traditional sexual arrangements, especially things like polyamory or (God forbid) casual sex, there will be a handful of guys who’ll say things like “slut!”–but they have to stand in line behind all the women who’re screaming it, too.

And I really want to grab some of these women and shake them and say “WTF is wrong with you? Don’t you understand that by slinging around words like “slut” and “whore,” you’re participating in your own sexual disenfranchisement? What are you thinking?”

And I’m not even talking about the fun use of the word “slut,” as in the “My, aren’t YOU a naughty little vixen? I have just the thing for a naughty slut like you!” that dayo so enjoys hearing.

So, naturally, since I couldn’t sleep, I decided that zaiah shouldn’t sleep either, and woke her up to talk about it.


Enlightening conversation, it was.

She is of the opinion that, popular opinion to the contrary, women are if anything fare more competitive and far more hierarchical than men are. Take a group of three female friends in a bar, she says. Each of them knows precisely what her place in the hierarchy is. If they spot a group of three men across the bar, they’ve already decided which one gets who before the first words are even exchanged. Should one of the men approach the “wrong” woman, her friends will smoothly step in and cock-block him, and order is restored. With, naturally, the men none the wiser.

It starts in grade school, she says–a formalized, competitive hierarchy of popularity and subtle social status, with rigorous standards about which women are eligible to compete for which men. It continues through high school and college, and even carries out into the adult world–often, she says, women wear makeup and jewelry not for the direct benefit of men, but rather to signal to other women their status and intentions in the competition.

And it’s a ruthless competition, with a high cost for those who refuse to buy in.

The cost of not buying in? The women who don’t compete in this way, or who pursue men deemed above their status or outside their league? These are the women labeled “slut” and “tramp”–not by men, but by other women.

Color me astonished; I’m forty-two years old and none of this had ever occurred to me.

So, yeah. Dreams and fever: interesting combination. Now I’m going to take some more meds and try to go to bed.

Back from the doctor, and Penthouse Magazine digs me

The last few days of zaiah‘s visit, I was sick as a dog–first with her cold, then with an opportunistic throat infection that moved in while the crack special forces commandos of my immune system were busy dealing with that issue. Stayed awake all night last night with a sky-high fever and hacking cough, lost my voice, went to the doctor’s office this morning, I’m now on some potent broad-spectrum antibiotics which should give the opportunistic bacteria the what-for.

Still can’t talk, though. Which sucks when you’re me.

So not as much kinky sex and other fun stuff as I had hoped.

On the more interesting side, though, I got an email from one of the editors of Penthouse magazine. She said they want to do an article about the Human Sexuality Map, and could I send them a press-ready version of the file kthx? Right now it’s slated for publication in the March 2009 issue. (When I first started working on it, figmentj predicted it was going to turn out to be a big deal. She was right.)

I really, really want to make posters of the map. Unfortunately, it looks like unless I’m prepared to plunk down a lot of cash for a large production run, the posters are gonna cost me in the neighborhood of $12 apiece to print(!), and I doubt I can sell them for much more than that. I can get the price way down if I print a whole lot of them, but then I’m out a bunch of cash I don’t have and I’ll be sitting on a huge pile of posters if nobody wants ’em. Grr.

One thing I think I will do, though, if I do make posters, is put a glossary on the bottom of the poster. I still get a lot of “What does ____ mean?” emails.