You know I was ultimately unsatisfied with this book. If you don’t know who Kevin Mitnick is then short story he is probably one of the most well known hacker out there. Since he is so well known then you’d be right in presuming that he is also a graduate of PMITA Federal Prison. He was, at one time, the proud pwner of most all of the major telecommunications companies infrastructure and became a hunted man through the desire of MSM to have some street creds by writing a lot of bullshit about hackers cos we all know hackers are sexy.
I approached this book from the perspective of someone who is technically savvy and looking forward to reading how hackers hack. Instead I sort of got the everyman’s intro to hacking with some truly suspect tales that smelled like teen fantasy to tell you the truth. By doing what he did, try to appeal to the droid book buying public I think Kevin missed the mark by the way. Non-geeks won’t buy this book because they don’t care. Geeks will buy it and then never buy another book by the guy. Kevin, here’s a truth, if you target a book at an audience too dim to even avoid being botted then you aren’t going to hit the mark.
Meh. I won’t even lend this book to my friends as they will probably think I’m a lamer for even buying it. Oh and by the way Kevin, don’t spend a chapter of your new book blatantly trying to sell me your old book. Recycling is for trash not treasure.
My mother has this scrapbook at home. Everytime us boys would turn up in the local paper, school exam results, science fairs, criminal court, she would clip out the article and proudly past it into her scarpbook. Since Con & I don’t have any children together this has been a pretty much non-event for us.
Until now!
Yes, my two girls are on the front page of MSN Canada. I could not be more proud!
My wahine sent their Halloween photo into MSN for some unknown reason, it’s not like there was bling on offer. Anyway, they got picked for their pet costume slideshow. I will point out that they received the highest rating of all the hounds that were displayed. My script must have worked.
I wanted to replace my Monowall firewall with some kind of appliance. Not that Monowall wasn’t good shit, it rocks. But running a whole box just for a firewall seemed a bit excessive, especially when you consider the electricity cost. So I went shopping for a bargain. I got one. You see 20$ for a Netgear FVS114 may seem like a deal but only if the bloody thing works.
I am not going to do a review here. I am just going to point out to any other poor bastard out on the tubes that is being driven mad by the FVS114 dropping the internet connection randomly and repeatedly that there is a fix. No, don’t drag it to work behind your car by a cat-5 cable. Instead go and download the 1.15 firmware that has just come out here. Yeah, it’s a bloody bug. I just upgraded and the shitty thing is running okay. Maybe I am lucky this time. Maybe the FVS114 is lucky. Mmmm lucky. Fuck I hate you Netgear.
I have this cool trick that works wonders with corporations. It’s called the “Executive Mailbomb”. Here’s how it works. When you get less than expected service from some company or other don’t waste your time trying to work your way up through the food chain. Sooner or later some mid level asshat is going to close you out. No matter how much you may wish ask to speak with their manager they will insist that “computer says no”.
Instead do the following. Go to their corporate website and find the names of their executive management, their CEO, their VP’s etc. The names are easy to find, these guys love the spotlight, it’s all about their careers after all. Now you are going to want their email addresses. These are impossible to find on the web as the last thing a company wants is the ability for their customers to speak directly to their senior management so here’s where it gets a bit technical.
All corporations have a predictable way of creating their business email addresses. They have to be predicatable, so that the Exchange guys can create them without making duplicates and so internal staff can work out what they are without using the address book. If you can work out the pattern that the company uses then you can work out the email addresses of the guys you want to send to. For example the email address format will be joe.bloggs@company.com or jbloggs@company.com or joeb@company.com or whatever. The best way to find out how they do email is to go to their domain record using a WHOIS. There is always an administrative email and a technical email address in there. That will give you the corporate email pattern. Then it is just a simple matter of inserting the names you collected of the corporate website into the pattern and et voila you are now mana el mana with the President of the offending company.
This last week it was Sears that felt the effect of the CEO email. We had bought a set of appliances for my in-laws for their 50th wedding anniversary. Despite being told for two weeks that it would be delivered on the day we were called up 4 days before the big day to be told that we wouldn’t get the goods until far too late. Despite the efforts of the sales folks (who were all nice people btw) the computer just kept saying no.
So I used this trick to veto said computer. The CEO replied to me within 15 minutes and I was chatting with the VP of Logistics just a few hours later. Needless to say, there was much anguish and scurrying about by the little people at Sears and 4 days later all of our appliances appeared in our driveway. Boomer! Now ususally I am a bit cruel about companies when I write this sh*t but actually I was pretty impressed by how much energy and rule bending the folks at Sears were prepared to exhibit when the CEO became our temporary best buddy. Ha bloody ha.
I know the meme is a little old by now but I just couldn’t help myself. Der Untergang is now Der Othergang. My German friend Thomas tells me he couldn’t understand all the jokes but then again he is a little English-As-A-Broken-Language!
You will notice that the posts here are gradually growing from the wrong end of the blog. That’s because the only way I can get any of my old content back is by recovering it from the Google cache. Tedious & time-consuming, it will take all of my type-A-osity to get this done. So it goes.
I have been facing the reality of digital media this past week. Last Friday the 300GB Maxtor drive that housed my VMWare servers died. One of these servers was my Win 2K3 web server that hosted ikilledamaninreno.com and a couple of vanity web sites. Yeah I know I should have had a backup. But the trouble with the digital life that I have (and I am sure many others have) is that as your collection of avi’s, mp3’s and jpeg’s grows they all begin to compete for drive space until in the end, trying to find the 70GB of space required for a plain old copy just gets too damned hard.
Of course the reality of it all is that I have lost seven years of my web site. Gone, gone, gone. I even sent my drive off to Seagate in the vain hope that something could be retrieved. Of course it could, for $1700. F**k off.
So I have two choices, I either go and spend a couple more days setting up another virtual server and start try recreating my old web site from old Google caches or I just eat sh*t and rely on some anonymous web cockroach like WordPress to provide the infrastructure so I can concentrate on the real reason I am on the web, being an ass. A creative, caustic, pompous ass.
I have been pretty darned lucky. Up until five months ago the problem of spam had pretty much passed me by. Think about that, I have had an email address for over 13 years (my first one was a cc:Mail one, before the Interweb almost). And until just this past February or March I had never experienced the wonders of Cialis offers or observations about the size of my penis made by anonymous strangers. I did this by being careful. I had a throwaway hotmail address that I signed up for s**t with. And I had my “real” address that I shared only with friends. In addition, when I had to sign up somewhere with a pop3 address I would create a special vendor@mydomain.com email address just for that occasion. That way if I ever did get spam from a signup then I would know what b*****d was responsible. This worked, for a long time, but not now.
Suddenly in late February I started getting spam, lots of spam. In addition I got a lot of those really annoying bounce messages where some mongrel used my email address or domain as the return address. For a while I tried to fight it. Bayesnian filters. Okipipi Thunderbird extensions. Reporting the mongrels to SpamCop. It was pretty clear to me that someone harvested me from somewhere. I think it’s someone I know in Canada, most of the spam started coming from Canadians. I am guessing that someone got themselves infected with a worm or virus that clipped their mail address book. Bugger. Now my spam is almost entirely out of Korea, China or Brazil meaning I have bugger all chance of ever getting it to stop.
Finally I gave up and just logged onto my mail forwarder and set up black and white filters. I am thinking about just dumping my email address and creating another one. But I don’t want to do that. It means the swine have won. And I like my email address. I have a vanity domain and the address is kind of quirky. Now if someone could only create a mashup of Google Maps, the originating headers of my spam and a Bushmaster .50 cal I would be a happy man.
This post is mostly about social networking sites and why they fail to give me pleasure. I guess it mostly has to do with my personality type. I’m an A, a capital A. There are some advantages to being type-A. I rename peoples stupid nicknames in IM to their real names. My files are backed up. Twice. My photos also live on a tape at a friend’s house in case I burn the house down one night. My email address book is thoroughly up-to-date. I email contacts regularly and make sure I have their details current. I have a membership in LinkedIn that allows me to download their profiles and keep my contact list valid. It’s just a bloody shame that the folk I interact with don’t take it as seriously. They are always leaving their old job titles and out-of-date profiles scattered across my slice of the web. So I guess a lesson for me is that although I am type-A, most other people aren’t and me trying to organise them through encouraging membership of a social networking site like LinkedIn just increases the chances of me gettin’ stabby for no good reason.
My wahine is into social networking sites as well. Her internet world consists of places like Dogster and recently Facebook. I can understand the attraction for these sites. She gets to show off her photos, make sharp remarks on other peoples walls. Not for me. I have had phases of interacting in these types of places, forums, message boards and the like. What I have determined is that the people on these sites, the ones that post frequently at least, are generally as dumb as a bag of rope. They won’t stay on topic. They read a little and decide they know a lot. They adopt the first POV they come across as their own and then tergiversate randomly so they are a constantly moving target and totally frustrating to attempt to interact with intellectually. The type who offer “The Waffen-SS were totally cool!” threads on a history forum. Go buy a leather jacket off eBay mate and jack yourself off until you die.
What I realise now, it’s taken me a while, is that social networking is a right brain thing. It’s chatting about nothing, it’s being posing not positing. It’s people wanting to be part of the mass and people wanting to stand out both at the same time. It’s flamers and trolls. Morons and stay-at-home mums. It’s a ship of fools. All of this is happening inside the software construct of the web site. The authors of the software have sat down and said here are the mechanisms by which people will interact in this context. Here are the rules. And then they sit back and wait for people to engage in their software. What I find funny is the way that people will deliberately sabotage or try to avoid these programmed channels. Sometimes it’s creepy like the Furries on Second Life humping each other until their pixels burn out. Other times it’s hilarious, like a friend of mine reporting that every time he logged onto World of Warcraft, for months, there was a guy waiting there who would simulate sex with him for a few minutes without saying a word.
I am unable to function inside these constructs. I admit that. My personality is too detail obsessed. I can’t forgive and forget. And I don’t want to fucking well nurture anyone. When I am on my computer, staring out at the Interweb, I prefer it to be a solitary exercise. Yeah I’ll reply if you IM me. But don’t ask me to join jack sh*t cos I’m tired of it, I suck at it and I don’t want to live through someone else’s software.
The Rumanian kid, John, who is living with us this year is a typical teenager. In other words, irritating beyond words, self centred and totally unable to empathise. One of his most annoying habits is when he slides in behind you when you are on the computer and reads what you are doing/browsing. When you are reading a web page it is irritating enough. When you are writing a letter to your Mum it’s just plain rude. When I pointed this out to him he just couldn’t grasp the concept. So I decided to provide some aversion therapy for him. So I created a page containing the infamous lemon party, tub girl and goatse shock images. Then I attached the url to a hot key on my laptop. Now when he comes near my screen I give him something to fear. It seems to have worked.
I believe I have a career in front of me in child psychology. Ha!
You know I was ultimately unsatisfied with this book. If you don’t know who Kevin Mitnick is then short story he is probably one of the most well known hacker out there. Since he is so well known then you’d be right in presuming that he is also a graduate of PMITA Federal Prison. He was, at one time, the proud pwner of most all of the major telecommunications companies infrastructure and became a hunted man through the desire of MSM to have some street creds by writing a lot of bullshit about hackers cos we all know hackers are sexy.
Yeah I know I should have had a backup. But the trouble with the digital life that I have (and I am sure many others have) is that as your collection of avi’s, mp3’s and jpeg’s grows they all begin to compete for drive space until in the end, trying to find the 70GB of space required for a plain old copy just gets too damned hard.