Noted without comment
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Author Archives: tacit
Whew! I just dodged a bullet…
So this morning, a member of a mailing list I belong to pointed out to me that a Web site had reprinted an essay from my BDSM Web page without attribution.
At about 10:40 this morning, I started to write a polite email to the owner of that Web site asking him to attribute any of the material he uses from my Web site.
At about 10:42 this morning, my Web site came under attack from a person or persons who had located a JavaScript injection vulnerability in my guestbook script (which is hand-rolled, so it wasn’t a script kiddie attack).
At about 10:44, I went to my BDSM page to copy the exact URL of the essay the other site owner had “borrowed” without permission. When I went to the BDSM page, an alert dialog popped up that just said “2”.
At 10:45, I took apart the HTML of the page and realized that the intruder had injected a JavaScript into the site that popped up an alert dialog, just to let him know that his injection had been successful.
At 10:46, I reuploaded the page.
At 10:47, the attacker injected a different JavaScript. I don’t know what it was; i overwrote it immediately and reuploaded the page again.
At 10:48, I started examining the guestbook, and worked out how he’d managed to inject the JavaScript.
At 10:49, I disabled all the guestbooks on the page. Simultaneously, the attacker injected a new JavaScript onto the page, just seconds before I disabled the guestbook.
We went back and forth for quite while after that. Somehow, I don’t know how, he’d gained sufficient access to be able to change the httpd path and was trying, I believe, to install a hostile drive-by downloader script on my site. I successfully prevented him from doing so, and closed the holes as fast as he was opening them.
At about 11:15, I closed the injection vulnerabilities in the guestbook and reuploaded it. By 11:20, the attack was over, and I had re-uploaded a clean copy of the affected pages.
Had I not been composing an email to someone who’d used my work without permission, I would not have been on my site at the beginning stage of the attack, and my site might now be home to a malicious JavaScript or JavaScripts.
My heart is still pounding. It’s like PvP in World of Warcraft, only with higher stakes.
I didn’t keep a copy of the pages he was modifying, and I’m kicking myself for that now. In hindsight, I should have, but at the time the only thing I wanted to do was undo his changes faster than he could make them.
My car is an alchemy lab…
…gone horribly, horribly wrong.
A couple weeks back, I went shopping. I bought the usual assortment of stuff–an enormous pile of TV dinners, kitty litter, bananas, and apple cider. Generally speaking, any time I go shopping, this will be the contents of my basket when I’m done. The TV dinners are there because I can’t cook; the kitty litter is there because I like tormenting the cat (he hates when I change the litter, and always looks at me like “Noooo! I worked so hard on that! Don’t take it away!”), the apple cider is there because it’s better than Coke (which tastes, when you get right down to it, something like malted battery acid), and the bananas are there because bananas are tasty and delicious.
This isn’t actually a post about my shopping habits; that’s just the backstory.
I went shopping immediately prior to my last departure to Chicago to see dayo. In my haste and desperate desire to rush to the airport, I inadvertently left the bananas in my car; they had fallen, you see, and I did not see them.
On my way to the airport, I stopped at McDonald’s. My orders at McDonald’s, like the contents of my grocery basket, tend to be rather static as well: a quarter pounder with cheese, no onion1, extra pickle, large fry, medium iced tea.
The God of McDonald’s Drive Through (a very minor position in the general pantheon of the universe, many steps below the God of Lesbian Tentacle Porn and only half a step up from the God of Things that Go Squish when you Step On Them) did not smile on me that day–though, to be fair, the The God of McDonald’s Drive Through rarely smiles, given the constant ribbing from other gods, especially the haughty, highfalutin’ gods of Important Stuff like the God of Assassins and the God of Proton Decay2…but I digress.
Anyway, the God of McDonald’s Drive Through saw fit to bless me with a quarter pounder with cheese, extra onion, extra pickle, which as anyone who knows me can testify, is almost but not quite the antithesis of a decent Franklin burger. I carefully picked off the onions, left them in the bag, and ate my burger.
At the airport, I left the bag of onions in my car, together with the aforementioned forgotten bananas, and went out of town for four days.
There is a line in the original Star Wars movie, which comes about midway through the movie when our heros, in their desperate attempts to escape a bunch of Imperial Storm Troopers who can scarcely hit the side of a barn door at point-blank range, dive down a garbage chute. Quite why there’s a garbage chute in the middle of a hallway leading down to the cell blocks is something I’ve never really understood…but again, I digress.
The line is “What an incredible smell you’ve discovered.” The clever reader will immediately intuit why I mention this.
The scent profile in my car changed over the next week or so in some very interesting and complex ways, at one point resembling nothing so much as old coffee grounds. I don’t know how onions and banana combine to form old coffee grounds; I suppose this is one of those things, like the fractional quantum Hall effect3, I may never fully grasp.
However, I am now pleased to report, gentle reader, that at this point, the scent profile of my car has now decayed to a level at which it is undetectable, at least by me, and this pleases me.
1 Every year in this world, thousands of species of plant and animal life are rendered extinct through the actions of man. Why can’t onions be one of them?
2 The God of Proton Decay is even more hypothetical than the other gods, yet this still does not stop him from razzing the God of McDonald’s Drive Through at company picnics. You’d think he’d have more respect, considering that McDonald’s actually exists and proton decay, at least so far, has not been demonstrated to exist at all, but no.
3 Those silly, silly phycists used to believe that the fractional quantum Hall effect could be explained by a hierarchical model. Quasi-electrons or quasi-holes excited out of the Laughlin ground state would condense into higher order fractions, known as daughter states e.g. starting from the 1/3 parent state addition of quasi-electrons leads to 2/5 and quasi-holes leads to 2/7. Some physicists will believe anything!
I can has internets?
I’m back! The Comcast technician just left my house after repairing my tether to the Internets, which apparently one of my neighbors carelessly sliced through with a sharp implement of some description.
I’ve been nonet, except at work (where I’ve been able to check my email at least), for quite an extended numer of days, and consequently I haven’t posted on LiveJournal or read my flist for about..lessee, carry the 4…that would make it approximately 14,282 years in Internet time.
If I’ve missed anything exciting, or any lesbian tentacle sex pr0n, or both, let me know.
Noted without comment
Television ad for juice, which combines lesbian sex with just the slightest suggestion of a golden shower fetish. I have no idea whether to call this “not safe for work” or not.
The Mathematics of Sex Toys…
…in which we learn just how big a stinker Franklin is.
Okay. So. Long story behind it, but I have on my balcony a large Tupperware container filled with sex toys. Vibrating eggs, to be exact. At one point, I had about 250 of them. I keep giving them away to people (in fact, I’ve been known to refuse to let guests leave the house unless they take one with them), and now I’m down to about 20.
Which is still a lot of vibrators, just for the record.
Some time ago, I read online about a guy who’d taken a vibrator and connected it to a Basic Stamp–think “little tiny computer on a single chip”–that he had programmed to switch the vibrator on and off at random intervals. The idea, you see, was to play with a quirk of human physiology.
Quick dissertation about human anatomy: The way our sensory nerves work, if you present the same stimulus to the same part of the body without varying it, eventually, your sensory nerves will quit responding to it. Take a toothpick and put it on your palm; you’ll be able to feel it. Leave it there long enough without moving it or your hand and eventually you’ll stop feeling it.
The sexual organs are no different than any other organ in this regard. Flip side of the same coin, if you vary the stimulation presented to a sensory nerve, it’ll keep informing your brain “Hey! The stimulus has changed!” and you won’t be able to ignore it.
Now, this guy had programmed his Basic Stamp to switch a vibrator on and off at random, but fairly short, intervals. The idea was to create an infuriating sex toy–a sex toy that, when you wear it, you absolutely can not ignore. Because the stimulation is random, you don’t become acclimatized to it–and if it switches on and off quickly enough, it also doesn’t stay on long enough to get you off. So basically, he created a sex toy that will make sure you always pay attention to it but won’t make you come.
If you draw a graph of the way the sex toyy switches on and off, you get something like this:
There’s vibration, then no vibration, then vibration, then no vibration, for randomly varying periods of time:
bzzzzz….bzz………bzzzzzzzzzz..bzzz……bzzzzz… you get the idea.
Now, that’s good and all, but the vibrators I have are equipped with a little thumbwheel speed control. When one of my partners is foolish enough to put me in charge of the control pack for one of these things, I like to run my thumb up and down the speed wheel thingy, making the vibrator go FASTER and slower and FASTER and slower.
So I started thinking, why not program a computer to run the vibrator for random times at random speeds? From there, I started thinking about how to actually code for that.
Now, it seemed to me, as I was thinking about it on the bus on my way down to Tallahassee, that the most obvious way to go about this is to take a bunch of sine waves and put them together. One can construct a waveform of nearly arbitrary complexity by merging together sine waves of different frequencies, via a mathematical bit of wizardry called a fast Fourier transform.
For example, suppose we have something like this:
The sum of the red sine wave and the blue wave (which is itself a composite of three sine waves) looks a bit like this:
Now, feed that into a vibrator and it should keep a person infuriatingly close to orgasm without letting her get off or ignore the vibrator just about indefinitely.
The thing is, you want a wave that looks random. Any composite of a finite number of sine waves will be periodic (that is, at some point it will start to repeat), so you want something that looks random and also has a long periodicity. I was thinking about how to choose a relatively small number of sine waves–say, sixteen or so–in such a way as to maximize the periodicity and also maximize the apparent randomness when combining them with an FFT. Make the ratios of their periods prime? Stuff like that?
I was hampered somewhat by the fact that I also know fuck-all about how to actually do an FFT, too, which means that basically I know squat about the best way to go about choosing the sine waves.
Shelly’s dating a physicist, though. And he took one look at the problem and observed that a fast Fourier transform isn’t really necessary; it’s using an anti-aircraft cannon on a mosquito.
His idea, which is brilliant, is this:
Take a sine wave whose period is the interval of time over which you don’t want the pattern of the vibrator to repeat. Add it to itself with a period of double that, and add it to itself with a period of three times that, and again with a period of five times that. (Geeky readers will already see where this is going: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5… is the Fibonacci sequence.)
You don’t need very many sine waves to get a right royal (and therefore random-looking) mess.
So, in theory, it will be remarkably simple to make The World’s Most Annoying Sex Toy(tm). A little bit of simple programming and some kind of variable interface and the result should be a vibrator that will drive the wearer right straight up the fucking wall for hours, with no relief in sight.
I am such a stinker.
Fortunately, the world is saved by the mere fact that I don’t at the moment have time to actually build one of these. Yet.
Haphazard
Thoughts and fragments from the last weekend, and other miscellaneous assorted stuff. Ready? Here we go!
Everything I ever needed to know, I learned by fisting my girlfriend at a play party
– Trying new things is fun.
– Stretching one’s boundaries may be uncomfortable, but the reward is more than worth a little discomfort.
– It’s difficult to predict in advance what one will or will not enjoy. The only way to learn one’s self is by systematic experimentation.
– Life rewards courage.
– Life is not a spectator sport, but sometimes having an audience makes things just that much better.
Meetings and new friendships
The weekend was a blur of new faces. I met cunningminx, libbydabomb, scathedobsidian (who is an outstanding writer; I highly recommend his journal), and jaded_dreamer; shot pool with shinyobject; and variously up-met-with, around-hung-with, and otherwise associated with a startling number of people who very probably do not have LiveJournal accounts (or at least do not have LiveJournal accounts I know about).
I did not get to meet amorsalado or purplebard, on account of missing furniture and such. Maybe next time.
Quotes Out of Context
“I only hurt you because it gets me off.”
“Sucking cock is contextual.”
“An irrational trigger around sex? Oooh, shiny! Let’s play!”
(okay, so the last isn’t technically from the weekend, but still…)
Jesus Christ, Metrosexual!
Sunday, dayo and I staggered out of bed at the ungodly hour of noonish or so, after a rousing and lively Saturday evening that included, among oter things, meeting many cool people and chaining dayo up in a sling. We were awaiting the arrival of cunningminx, who’d promised to be by in about half an hour, so were quite surprised (and scrambling to fix the indecent states our states were in, being indecent and unclothed) when the doorbell rang some five minutes later. “But…but…she promised us half an hour!”
Was it cunningminx? Oh, no. It was a babble of Jehovah’s Witlesses, come to preach the good news that a Zombie Messiah had risen from the dead to pardon us from a collective sin visited upon us when a woman made out of a rib was persuaded by a talking snake to eat an apple.
Anyway, they left some literature, which included on its cover this picture of Christ the Messiah:
The first thing I couldn’t help but notice is that, my, that Jesus looks awfully Caucasian for a Middle Eastern Jew. cunningminx also observed that he clearly uses Product in his hair, and his beard is remarkably neat for a person living in the desert in a pre-industrial society.
He’s got great teeth, too.
I had no idea that Jesus was a metrosexual. The things one can learn from Watchtower publications…why, they’re nearly as informative as Chick tracts!
Fire in Chicago!
Andre the Giant has a possee
Apparently, the Andre the Giant has a Posse crowd has made it to Atlanta. Spotted this sticker in Little Five Points a couple weeks back, stuck to the back of a road sign:
I’ve posted here before with examples of the same kind of agitprop in Tampa, but this is the first time I’ve seen it in Atlanta. I’m extremely impressed with the quality of the design work on this sticker.
Two steps forward, two steps back. That seems to be the general theme these days.
In the “two steps forward” category, I’ve finished the first go-round of the new SymToys site. I say “first go-round” because I have planned a LOT more content; in the interests of getting it online, I scaled back three times. Eventually, I’ll probably end up adding a very long list of kinky sex ideas and scenarios, several more BDSM tutorials (including a lot more do-it-yourself toys!), a review section, and a radical expansion of the flogging how-to pages. I’ll be adding a lot more photographically, as well, as I have time to do some more shooting–some of the current pages are pretty stark. (Thanks to Shelly, joreth, dayo, my non-LJ friend Stephanie, and everyone else who helped with modeling, suggestions, ideas, and proofreading!)
I’m very pleased with the look and content so far. It represents a lot more work than you might think. Check it out! If you feel up to it, add something to Whispers!
Now my attention has turned to the book on polyamory I’ve been off-again, on-again working on for quite while. It’s on again, and will be my #1 priority for the foreseeable future, with my #2 priority being to finish Onyx 3–which could conceivably be done (finally!) next week.
The “two steps back”–still dealing with all kinds of financial problems related to working for a small startup. Ugh.
Tonight I’ll be in Chicago to visit dayo! *bounce*
It’s shaping up to be a really busy weekend. Drumming and fire spinning (yay! I can hardly wait!) tomorrow; then clubbing at Neo. Saturday, we’re talking about doing the Ren Faire and then heading to GD. Sunday’s still up in the air, but I know that I’ll be having brunch with cunningminx at the least…I’m looking forward to meeting her in person (finally!). With a bit of luck, we’ll be seeing her before then, too.
I know that there are some other chicagoites on my flist; if you think you might want to hook up this weekend, drop me an email! tacitr [at] aol (dot) com.
Some time soon, I need to post a review of this:
I don’t normally gush about stuff like this, but… seriously, coolest sex toy EVER. Like, in the entire history of human sexual expression. Really, it’s that cool. dayo, I’ve already got it packed for the trip…