Tape and plaster, Part I

A couple weekends ago, Shelly and I headed down to Tampa.

There were a few reasons for this. Shelly just graduated with her undergraduate degree (yay!) and has a few weeks free before going into grad school. It offered an opportunity to spend time with friends before the move. The new Star Trek opened on the IMAX theater in Tampa. And joreth needed to be covered in papier mache and plaster.

Each of these things could easily be a post in its own right, and likely may be. In fact, I am now in possession of a photograph of datan0de, my former archnemisis, which may put to rest once and for all the debate about whether or not capturing a person’s image also captures his soul; if that photograph doesn’t define datan0de quintessential essence, then nothing does.

But I digress.

The plaster and papier mache was actually pragmatic, not kinky. joreth is in the process, you see, of constructing some dress dummies of herself which are suitable for creating tight-fitting clothing, and so we needed to make a cast of her body.

Strictly practical, right? Not salacious at all, honest. Nevertheless, the rest of this entry, with pictures, is probably not safe for work

Never have I ever…

The range of the human sexual condition is a whole lot wider than a lot of people realize. I’ve met folks who say things like ‘I don’t want to get too kinky too fast because I don’t want to have done everything there is to do by the time I’m 30″ and “I am open to anything,” which I think grossly underestimate the amount of things there are to do.

Whenever someone asks on (most) public forums for wild and kinky sex ideas1, inevitably it seems like the answers that person gets fall into three broad categories: Partners, Places, and Positions. Have sex with more partners, have sex in unusual places, have sex in unusual positions.

Which is fun and all, but it still misses entire huge categories of sex.

Recently, though, someone on another journal flipped the question on its head by asking “what haven’t you done.” And again that’s a way to show how narrow the common perception of sex is, because the majority of responses were perhaps two or three lines long–“I haven’t had a threesome, I haven’t had sex outdoors, I haven’t had sex with the woman on top.” That sort of thing.

I thought about it for a few minutes. The following list is what I came up with in ten minutes; I bet that another ten minutes would probably make it about twice as long.

Never have I ever…

Turtle!

When my roommate David and I went to work this morning, we found this guy stranded next to the stairs leading down from the apartment. He’s a yellow-bellied slider, and somehow managed to travel about a quarter of a mile from the nearest source of water and strand himself.

I have a soft spot for turtles, so we rescued him and brought him back to the pond he most likely came from. He was none too happy about it, and spent a great deal of time and energy trying to remove David’s fingers. Not from the turtle’s shell; from David’s hands.

Postscript to the phishing scam

Many weeks, six emails, one complaint lidged in the ISP’s automated ticketing software, and the phish sites I talked about here remained active and functioning.

But two hours after I make a LiveJournal post about it, the site is knocked offline and I get the following email in my mailbox:

HI
We are aware of this but can’t comment further at this time however please be assured that it is being handeled inline with the local police

Rus

It’s possible the timing was a coincidence, of course, and the site being knocked offline had nothing to do with talking about the phish fraud openly. It’s possible, but it seems pretty weird to me.

Computer security: Down the rabbit hole

So a couple weeks back, I get an email in my mailbox telling me that there is a problem with my PayPal account, and asking me to click a link to verify my account information.

Since I don’t have a PayPal account, it didn’t take a great deal of intellectual prowess to figure out that it was a “phish” email–an email designed to trick the credulous and unwary into going to a phony site and handing over their PayPal password. I get about a half-dozen of them a day, and I fired off emails to the appropriate Web hosts and forgot about it.

Next day, I got another phish asking me to validate my Bank of America account information. I don’t have an account with Bank of America, naturally. Again, a standard phish.

The only weird part was that the phony Bank of America site was hosted on the same Web server as the phony PayPal site. Fired off another email to the ISP hosting the fake sites and forgot it.

And got another phish email. And another, and another after that, and another after that. All advertising phony Web sites hosted on the same server.

“Huh,” I thought. “This is weird.”

We are, of course, about to get technical here

Arrgh! Con artistry hits work

There is an old-school type of fraud, conducted by phone, that’s the old-world equivalent of the “phishing” emails you get all the time. You know the ones I mean–the emails that say “There has been a problem with your online banking/your online PayPal account/your eBay account/whatever, please click here to confirm your identity.” And then you click there, and you’re taken to a Web site that looks like your bank site, or PayPal, or eBay, and you type in your bank account number or your username and your password, and Wham! You’ve just given your information to Russian organized crime!

The old-school variant is the same thing but on a more personal, more individual level, from con artists who believe in age-old, hand-crafted fraud, not this soulless, mass-produced fraud we see so much of today.

In the old-school, hand-crafted variant, the con man calls you up on the phone and says “Hi there! I’m John from Bank of America. Bad news! We think someone just tried to use your bank account fraudulently! Did you just order $2,000 worth of rare wine to be shipped to an address in Hong Kong?”

And you freak out and your heart starts pounding and you sa “No! No, I didn’t! Oh no! What do I do?”

And he says “Relax, don’t worry, we thought it was fraudulent, we’ve put a freeze on your bank account. And then you’re all like “Phew! That was close!” while visions of bounced checks and ruined credit dance in your head. And then he says “OK, we’ll reverse the charge and unfreeze your account. For security, we need you to confirm that you’re the real bank account owner. What’s your social security number? What’s your bank account number? What’s your debit card number? What’s your PIN?”

And he’s hoping you’re so freaked out that you’ll just gullibly tell him.

This kind of fraud fell out of favor a while ago when folks invented caller ID, because (a) the con man doesn’t want to give out his caller ID number and (b) people get suspicious when they get calls that are supposedly from the bank but it says “caller ID blocked.”

They’re making a comeback, though, since it is now cheap and easy to fake caller ID numbers. The con men put fake caller ID numbers–usually random 1-800 numbers (because people think “oh, if it’s coming from an 800 number it must really be my bank!”) that are not really the bank’s numbers (because the con artist doesn’t want folks calling the bank to confirm the story) into a gadget or computer program that fakes what you see on your caller ID.

So today, apparently there’s a con artist who’s rapid-fire calling dozens of potential dupes…

…and is forging our phone number on his caller ID spoofer.

So folks are calling us (a LOT of folks are calling us) and screaming at us–“How dare you try to get my bank account number, you motherless sons of flea-infested goat herders!”

They are savvy enough to realize that the call is a dupe, but gullible enough to believe that the number they see on the caller ID is actually the number that the con artist is calling from.

*headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*

So the stress and poor sleep continues…

…and with it, the unreasonably vivid dreams.

Which, in this case, apparently offer me the history of cinematography for the next century. Apparently, in 2101, I am to be assigned the task of writing a book on the top 100 movies of the past century (2000-2100). You will no doubt be relieved to know, Gentle Readers, that Watchmen made the cut.

Among the more interesting:

The top movie of 2039, surprisingly, was the surrealistically violent, surrealistically explicit Strength, a highly stylized movie billing itself as “inspired” by the life of the Viking king Canute the Great. It was originally released in 2037 under the name Strength Over Ice as a sprawling 3 hour and 20 minute epic, and was critically panned; Strength Over Ice was a box-office flop. In 2039, an edited, streamlined 2-hour version of the movie was re-released under the new title and became an unexpected hit.

The only documentary to make the list was 2057’s Like Neighbors, an account of the brutal murder in 2032 of Kenneth Lanton at the hands of a group of eight members of the theocratic American Dominion Party for alleged “offenses against sexual decency”, and the backlash that it triggered which eventually led to the loss of all six Senate seats held by the party and to the dissolution of the party itself in 2049. When Like Neighbors was released, a handful of theaters refused to show it because the movie contains footage of the murder itself, taken by one of the attackers.

I need to go to bed earlier.

Quote of the Day

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”