Author Archives: tacit

How to Tell We’re In a Recession

Posted on by
26

All the old cockroaches are crawling out of the woodwork to feed.

Incredibly, unbelievably, I’m actually starting to see spam from two of the Web’s former most notorious spammers, streamate.com and webpower.com again. Old-school spam fighters will doubtless recognize these names–porn sites notorious for their spamvertising back in the day, who’ve kept a (relatively) low profile for years. I can remember being flooded under an avalanche of spam from these guys like five or six years ago.

Well, they’re back. Just a trickle now–an email advertising live sexy Webcams here, a set of cloaked redirectors that hop from server to server to server before ending up on Webpower there–and it makes me wonder if times are getting tough in the porn spam business. Maybe there’s some belt-tightening happening, folks aren’t buying as many subscriptions to pay-for-play Webcam sites these days, the owners of the sites are wondering how they’re going to make the payments on their Ferraris…who knows.

Webpower is a particularly interesting case, in that kind of yucky “I study cockroaches for a living because I’m fascinated by insects that eat their own young” kind of way. They started out making a gadget to allow remote control of sex toys over the Internet–a program you’d run and a little box you’d plug your vibrator into. The box had a suction cup that would attach to your computer monitor, and the program would flash a colored square on the monitor to send commands to the vibrator.

They got out of that business pretty quick–I don’t think anyone’s really made a profit on Internet controlled sex toys yet–and started doing porn Webcams instead. Their Web front page doesn’t suggest anything about them–just says “WebPower is an internet services and infrastructure company with offices located on both the West Coast (San Francisco bay area) and East Coast (South Florida)” with links to a “web services division” and a “web conferencing division”–but their bread and butter is live cam sex, and they’ve been in the spam business for almost as long as spam has been around.

It’s amazing to see this particular blast from the past. I haven’t been spammed by these guys since about the time I started dating Shelly.

…as requested…

Posted on by
8

…just in time for the end-run up to the American Presidential election.

Several folks have asked me if I’d be willing to make a bumper sticker version of the “I love sex and I vote” userpic I made a while ago, and since I happened to have a bit of spare time this afternoon, I thought, why not?

So, here it is. Clicky on the pic if you’d like one!

Things and Stuff: The Weekend

Posted on by
48

Saturday brought with it a very interesting reinforcement of what is arguably the overriding, and most important, lesson of living in a post-industrial society:

In a world spanned by an instantaneous communication network of global scope, in a nation whose most powerful and most influential sectors are not involved with the digging of ditches or the making of things but rather with the moving of information, it doesn’t matter what you know. What matters most is how you can find what you need to know. The ability to memorize skills or information matters less than the ability to find the skills or information you need, when you need it.

Seriously. On Friday, I did not know how to set up a database, how to add or retrieve information from a database, or how to pass information from a Web browser to a database. Today, I do. Just like that.

We take for granted many things that for 99.9% of human history would seem strange and unfathomable, and I’m not just talking about heavier-than-air powered flight and iPods. I’m talking about the way we learn, catalog, disseminate, and transmit information and knowledge. Google became a billion-dollar company on the basis of a single insight: when the sum total of readily available human knowledge reaches a certain point, the index into that knowledge is worth more than the knowledge itself. If you can’t find it, you might as well not have it, as any good librarian knows.

Sunday was a bird of a whole different feather. The entire day, beginning to end, was spent playing World of Warcraft (which is, really, nothing but a gigantic database of immense proportions that’s accessed through a very specific type of real-time graphical interface). Ran Hyjal Summit, ended up with a new ring and new wrist piece (which are, for some strange reason, still not showing up on Wowarmory…hmm). Finally replaced the Horseman’s Signet Ring I got off the Headless Horseman event last year, which means that I wore that ring for exactly a year and a day.

Sweet.

Now if we could get our collective asses in gear and kill Kael and Lady Vashj, I could complete the quest for Keepers of Time and get another new ring. Plus Kael drops the Tier 6 chest piece, and that’d be pretty sweet.

I got my Onyxia key just three days before they removed the attunement requirement for Onyxia. Dammit.

It’s growing cold. joreth is coming up this evening; she’ll be here for the rest of the week, and on Saturday i fly to Chicago to see dayo. I’ll be in Chicago until Tuesday, if any of the Chitown peeps want to get together. We’re probably going to be at GD on Saturday, at least. cunningminx? scathedobsidian? Anyone?

Got some wood for the fireplace yesterday, then realized that I have no poker, or little shovel thingie, or any of the other accoutrements one normally associates with fires and fireplaces. Got to remember to go shopping for those things tonight before joreth arrives; I hope to do a photo shoot with her and the fireplace at some point this week.

Mmm, fire. I live in a place that has a fireplace!

Link O’ The Day…

Posted on by
14

peristaltor points out that if John McCain insists on calling himself a “maverick,” he (and his handlers) might want to learn a little bit about the word’s origin. I had no idea myself where the word came from, and now that I know, I gotta say: McCain keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.

Interesting to folks who care about politics and folks who find language fascinating. I know I have a few of both on my flist.

ZOMG! ZOMG! I’ve created a meme!

Posted on by
92

And it’s taken me all day, too.

At the beginning of this day, when I woke up, everything I knew about PHP programming with MySQL would fit in the white space of a postage stamp. (Okay, so that’s not entirely true, but I’d never written database code from scratch before. Everything I’ve ever done up ’til now is modifying someone else’s code, which is a whole ‘nother ballgame.)

So twelve hours, a thousand Google searches, and a lot of head-scratching later, I’ve actually taken the map of human sexuality I created, and made it interactive! You can click on the map in a Web browser to place pins showing where you’ve been and where you want to go, and then save your map to a database so you can show other people!

Okay, so it’s still really, really crude. Scrolling around is a pain, there’s no way to remove a pin once you place it (you gotta erase the whole map and start again), and there’s no way to go back to a map and continue to edit it once it’s saved.

But still…it works! Words can not express how pleased with myself I am right now. It’s been tested in Explorer 7 and Firefox for Windows, and in Safari and Firefox on Mac. Should work in other browsers too, I reckon. And it even generates code to put into your blog automatically.

Give it a try!


Find out where I’ve journeyed
on the Map of Human Sexuality!
Or get your own here!

And now, I am going to bed. My brain is tired.

Time for another meme…

Posted on by
40

Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture. Post that picture with NO editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable.)

Post these instructions with your picture.

Well, okay. The result is a little scary, though. Plus I’m still at the office.

I am, thankfully, mere moments away from leaving.

Well, THERE’S something you don’t see every day!

Posted on by
74

Lately, I’ve been getting a spate of “phishing” emails, at about two a day. These mails claim to come from a bank, and say something along the lines of “Your online banking has been suspended, you need to give us your banking details again.” They then point to a fake Web site that looks just like a real banking site, and try to dupe victims into typing their bank account numbers and passwords and such into the fake site. All pretty bog-standard so far.

The past few weeks has seen a very specific type of phish that’s relatively unusual; rather than trying to get me to type in my account number and password, these phish emails lead me to a site that tries to get me to download a “browser encryption update” to my computer. The “update” is, of course, a computer virus that records everything I do in my browser and sends it back to the hackers. A bit of a twist on the idea, but still basically the same thing.

What’s surprised me is the sophistication of these phishes. The fake Web sites have really long names, such as

http://ktt.key.ktt.cmd.logonFromKeyCom.productsremote.KUTglSiqAY.rnalid.viewcontent.ttioense.com/logon.htm
( *** WARNING *** *** WARNING *** *** WARNING *** This site is live as of the time of this writing, and WILL try to download malware onto your computer!)

What’s unusual about this is three things.

First, the hackers are registering a domain, rather than just hanging the phish off of a hacked Web site.

Second, the hackers are putting this domain on a large number of computers, probably hacked home PCs, spread out all over the world, so that if one of them is shut down the others will still work. As of the time of this typing, ttioense.com is living on ten different IP addresses in ten different parts of the world.

Third, the hackers are running their own name servers. They are hacking computers, setting up name servers on those computers, and then using those name servers to set up sites that pretend to be bank sites and try to download malware. Essentially, they are creating their own “shadow Internet”–their own Web sites set up on hacked computers, and their own domain name servers also set up on hacked computers.

Still pretty bog-standard, if technically sophisticated.

Hold on to your hat, Dorothy, because Kansas is about to go bye-bye.

As of the time of this writing, ttioense.com, the fake bank Web site that tries to download a virus, has two name servers:

Domain name: ttioense.com

Technical Contact:
Pamela Saul pamela@yahoo.com
3366810811 fax: 3366810811
5903 Shenandoah Road
Greensboro NC 27405
us

Billing Contact:
Pamela Saul pamela@yahoo.com
3366810811 fax: 3366810811
5903 Shenandoah Road
Greensboro NC 27405
us

DNS:
ns1.dabchecks.com
ns2.dabchecks.com

Created: 2008-10-15
Expires: 2009-10-15

Now, ns1.dabchecks.com is running on a server in the UK belonging to a company called UK Dedicated Servers Limited.

On the other hand, ns2.dabchecks.com…

ns2.dabchecks.com is running at 22.25.119.21, on an IP address belonging to the United States Department of Defense. Specifically, 22.25.119.21 belongs to the Department of Defense Network Information Center–a military network so paranoid that their main Web site won’t let you log on unless you have a special access card and you’re connecting from a .mil address.

whois 22.25.119.21

OrgName: DoD Network Information Center
OrgID: DNIC
Address: 3990 E. Broad Street
City: Columbus
StateProv: OH
PostalCode: 43218
Country: US

NetRange: 22.0.0.0 – 22.255.255.255
CIDR: 22.0.0.0/8
NetName: NICS0175
NetHandle: NET-22-0-0-0-1
Parent:
NetType: Direct Allocation
Comment:
RegDate: 1989-06-26
Updated: 2007-07-06

OrgTechHandle: MIL-HSTMST-ARIN
OrgTechName: Network DoD
OrgTechPhone: +1-614-692-2708
OrgTechEmail: HOSTMASTER@nic.mil

And that isn’t something you see every day.