I can't write well with a cold.

I have, over the years, gradually learned my limits. One of them is that, when I have a cold, that vague sense of disassociation with what's happening means that my writing is probably a lot less coherent than it seems. Thus, I don't write much when I have a cold. The relevance of this is left as an exercise for the reader.

Learning about cats by observation.

My cats were being cute, and I wanted a picture. I got out the camera.

Maya immediately got up and ran out of the room. She stayed in the doorway, looking at me, and blinking a lot. Whenever I moved the camera, her eyes closed.

What have I learned?

1. For a brain the size of a walnut, she's pretty smart.
2. Cats experience very bright light as pain, same as we do.

So little data, so much inference... but it's impossible for me not to accept these conclusions.

ToEE: Nice try.

So, I got Temple of Elemental Evil today. For the uninitiated, that's a game for the PC. It's based on an old D&D adventure titled, unsurprisingly, The Temple of Elemental Evil.

I got this game because Troika is an excellent game developer; their first game, Arcanum, was brilliant.

I was worried about it because it was published by Infogrames, who, to dodge the crappy reputation they've earned, recently bought the rights to the "Atari" name.

I was right to be worried. The game is unplayable, quite literally; it will not start on my machine, and it appears that a goodly number of people (10%? 20%?) have serious problems getting it to install or run, at all. That's because of the incredibly-bad SecuROM copy-protection scheme; a scheme which appears to be a big barrier to successful playing of legitimately purchased games, but the warez sites have all had cracks up for ages.

The amazing thing is the sheer density of weird bugs which you'd think would have been caught in beta testing - and indeed, some evidence suggests that they were caught, but Atari doesn't want to bother putting out a patch.

But... if they fix the horrific mouse movement problems, and the crashes and crashes and crashes, and all the magic spells that become permanent and undispellable for no obvious reason... It'll be a great game. The combat engine is exactly what you'd want if you were going to play 3.5E D&D on a computer. It's really good, and all the finicky stuff is there.

In other words, it's a Troika game; good attention to detail. I just hope that Atari is willing to make a patch happen, because this game desparately needs it. I really hope Troika finds better publishers in the future.

Cartoons!

The Cranky User book, it turns out, is likely to have cartoons. At least one of the cartoons won't be in the book - it's a bit over the top. But there should be a few cartoons, to spruce things up a bit. Beloved Spouse is doing a couple, and a friend from Internet Infidels has volunteered to contribute some. YAY!

In other writing-related news: I don't know how much of it was mishearing, and how much of it was shoddy arithmetic, but I was recently presented with an offer which suggested that, should a book sell 5,000 copies, my royalties would be $30,000. For various reasons, my royalties on that project would only be about 5% of the publisher's price. So... at $6/book, that makes the publisher sell it for $120, and that means street retail price would be around $240. My first theory was that the illustrations were to be gold leaf, but in fact, it was a misunderstanding. More news on that if and when contracts are signed and I'm cleared to talk about it.

The truth, the whole truth, or nothing like the truth.

I think I just watched a witness lie under oath today. It's a bit weird. You know that it happens, but you never really expect to see it happen. Today, I was a witness in a trial with Mobile Cellular Unlimited. I almost settled a case with them. Watching Richard Luzaich testify was, however, quite enlightening. For one thing, he kept watching for hand signals from his lawyer.

When Plaintiff's lawyer asked whether the Defendant had hired Whittemore Communications, Defendant paused and looked at his lawyer, who shrugged, before answering. I saw a couple of other guestures that looked more like hand signals than anything else during the examination.

Given that he's sent in copies of his contract with them, I'd expect him to recall. I don't know why he's denying knowledge of this; he already sent in the documents. We saw the same thing in his deposition; he clearly waited for guidance from his lawyer before claiming not to remember. Perhaps Whittemore Communications, like our friends Eloansites, has a confidentiality clause in their contract?

But it gets more extreme. When the Plaintiff in this case (Bob ELIDE) called Mobile Cellular, in early 2002, they insisted that Richard Luzaich had nothing to do with any kind of marketing plan, and that everything was handled by Gail Luzaich; that she was the one who made the decision to hire faxers. Today, under oath, Richard Luzaich denied that. Why? I don't know. What I do know is that I have a hard time believing that the original story, presented by people who showed no signs of a planned preparation, seems a lot more probable than the revised story. Furthermore, it would explain why Mr. Luzaich has been so hard-pressed to provide specific answers to questions about their faxes.

I dunno. Maybe he's telling the truth now, and was just lying then. But it's been very interesting watching how, at any given time, his testimony always seems to be what he thinks will sound the best for his case.

Note: This was written on the 24th, but didn't get posted until the 25th, as it took a while to check facts and spelling.

Car alarms.

What do these numbers have in common?

0054. 0059. 0109. 0738.

They have in common that they are most, but not all, of the times today when the car alarm across the street has gone off.

I wish the police could do something about this, it's incredibly annoying.

HEY, BOZO! FREE CLUE! DO NOT PARK A CAR WITH A VERY SENSITIVE ALARM OUT ON THE STREET ON A TRUCK ROUTE!

Law enforcement to internet: FUCK YOU!

It's time we were honest.

Law enforcement does not give a flying fuck at the moon about the internet. Law enforcement does not care about you, or me, or anyone else. Law enforcement doesn't care.

This was driven home by the fact that a couple of the best and brightest anti-spam resources have been shut down by DDoS attacks. These are attacks which can shut down anything - Yahoo! and eBay were shut down briefly by them a while back.

The only way to do anything about them is for law enforcement to, well, enforce laws.

But they won't. Not for you, not for me, not for anyone who can't afford to fund millions of dollars worth of investigations. They won't, because they don't care, and they won't start to care until it's the White House. Then they'll care, very briefly, until they get a scapegoat... But the people behind these attacks are still out there, and they know that no one cares. When a guy broke into one of our systems through a back door, I called around. The police don't know what an internet is. The FBI doesn't care unless it's child porn. That's what they told me; no naked kids, no involvement. Period. Ever. No matter how much damage is being done, no matter how much our country's infrastructure depends on it. It just doesn't matter.

What that means is that you cannot expect to have the internet forever. The spammers have the ability to shut you down. If you piss them off, they will destroy you, and they will destroy any ISP that hosts you. No one, anywhere, is big enough to prevent them from doing this.

They will do this with the full cooperation, endorsement, and support of every law enforcement official, every legislator, in the United States. When they could have acted, they didn't. Now, it's too late. The anti-spam resources that have protected mailboxes for years are gradually falling apart. They are being shut off. The guy who nearly got a major ISP in Shanghai to shut down spammers is no longer able to do anything; he's been forced to retire, because there isn't enough money in the world to buy the bandwidth he'd need just to keep his site up.

But, as long as it's just the fundamental infrastructure on which the continued functioning of the internet depends, and not a commercial venture of some sort, there's no chance, none at all, of getting law enforcement involved. Why should they care? It's not like it's costing anyone any money.

Only it's costing all of us billions of dollars a year, as the internet's infrastructure continues to degrade under the constant onslaught of spam and viruses, enabled by Microsoft's suicidally stupid "open door" policy on protocols, and supported by the FBI's unwillingness to actually do something about people who are committing tens of thousands of federal crimes a day.

It's not that the FBI isn't solving some crimes. It's that most of the crimes they're solving, today, are less relevant to the future of our culture than the crimes they aren't solving. Large scale distributed denial of service attacks are much more serious than any crime involving under a dozen people. We are talking about the ability for some guy, somewhere, to permanently disable all network services for any organization, at will. That's out there, right now. And the FBI doesn't care, because so far, the attacks on big companies have been transient. What's being shut down is small organizations providing crucial infrastructure support to the people who have, until recently, been trying to keep email usable as a mechanism for private communication. As they fail, so too does email fail.

Under 10% of the mail that reaches me these days is anything but spam and Microsoft-borne viruses and worms. That percentage keeps dropping. As time goes on, it's becoming more and more expensive to be able to process any email at all.

There is one, and only one, way for us to fix this. The FBI has to devote even a couple of people - really, one or two could do this - to tracking down one or two of the people behind the DDoS attacks, and shutting them down. Permanently. They've broken enough federal laws that minimum sentencing would be on the order of millenia. But, with the structure of laws in the U.S., no one but the government can initiate this action. They need to decide to care. They need to care now, while there's still something to save.

To Ron, my friend, and one of my personal heroes: I'm so sorry. I wish the world were other than this. I wish things were different. I know that, right now, a Venn diagram showing "people who care" and "people who can do anything" looks like two circles which don't even touch. I wish we could communicate with the people who could do anything, make them think... But we probably can't. Maybe some day they'll get off their asses, and you can have another go at saving the world.

The big lie

Deep in the core of mainstream religious thought is a lie so deep, so pervasive, that it often seems to have corrupted everything. This lie is the belief that to have faith, you must be totally free of doubts. It's wrong.

Doubt is not the absence of faith. Doubt is the context of faith.

I have a cat. I don't have faith that I have a cat. I just have a cat. I have scars from the time he almost fell off my lap but managed to save himself at the last minute. There is no faith. There is no hope. There's just a cat. That's all good, but there's no doubt, and with no doubt, there is no faith.

You can't have faith in things you know. Faith is about things you don't know. Things you want to be true, or things you believe should be true, or must be true, but never things you actually know.

This is the opposite of what mainstream Christianity teaches. People have it drilled into them, time and time again, that if they had true faith, they wouldn't doubt. It's bullshit. The apostles, people who knew Jesus personally, had doubts. They didn't know. They knew they didn't know; they confronted this head-on, and they had faith.

Consider 1 Corinthians 13:12. "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."

Our knowledge is incomplete. Our knowledge is limited. Faith is holding to things that we cannot be sure of.

The false belief that faith must imply certainty does immeasurable damage. People who are struggling with faith are not supported, or comforted; they are rebuked for "lacking faith". When people ask tough questions, they are dismissed or attacked. The idea that there could be questions we cannot easily answer is seen, by many, as an attack on the faith; in fact, it is the substance of the faith.

Without the admission of uncertainty, we cannot grow or learn. When people falsely believe that they know, with total certainty, what God wants, they stop asking Him what He wants. The result is ever-greater depravity, as they build their own imagined sets of rules and regulations on top of instructions they think they understand. It gets worse, and worse, with time. They plug their ears and shout to prevent any hint of wisdom from reaching them, lest it contradict the things they are sure of. They develop elaborate justifications and rationalizations for believing that they can fully understand the world, name every part of it truly. Even if they accept some ignorance, they will cling to the false things they've already picked as truths despite everything.

The false equivalence between belief and knowledge leads to a false equivalence between what a person believes God wants, and what God wants. People put their own hatreds in God's mouth. Professing themselves wise, they become fools.

If you think you know, you cannot sincerely ask. If you do not ask, how can you be answered?

Once again: Doubt is not the absence of faith, it is the context within which faith means something.

Hard Drive Failures 'R Us

I think this is probably my fifth or sixth hard drive failure this year. And, so far, it looks like I'll make it through without serious data loss. One of my drives is being fussy about writing blocks, but I can still read from it just fine, so I'm gonna migrate all the stuff to another machine right away. This is getting weird; I guess all that stuff about keeping good backups and keeping an eye out for disk error messages really works.

Whee.

I blame the latest MS worm; a thousand or more 150k emails in the junk bin must be adding up. It's certainly increased load on my machine measurably.

UPDATE: Moved to a new machine so I can swap the old drive at leisure. Sorry for the down time. Expect another 5 minutes or so of down time when I move the new machine down to the basement.

Sore Loser

We've reached settlements in fax cases before. What's different is that, this time, they didn't bail on the deal at the last minute. Which isn't to say the one guy didn't want to.

It was pretty obvious which of the three people didn't want to deal. It woulda been the guy who was muttering under his breath about "extortion." I wonder if he talks that way about speeding tickets, too. The junk fax law is really simple. "Do not send unsolicited faxes." It's not a hard law to follow, and there's a penalty when you break it. No big deal. You screw up, you pay the penalty. Life goes on.

He said some pretty funny things. He tried to get me to "admit" that it's all about the money. If it were all about the money, would I have settled with them for $750, when I had good evidence of willful and knowing violations on two consecutive faxes (giving us damages of $3,000, plus attorney's fees)? No. I wouldn't.

What makes it exceptionally pathetic is that, right there in their contract, there's a clause talking about the TCPA - the law they broke. They knew about that law; they signed an agremeent saying they would not use the faxing equipment they were leasing to break it. Gosh, that makes them look clever. Here's what it says, in section 1.2:

Customer agrees that it shall not (a) sell, resell, rent, lease, lend, or otherwise transfer the Software or ortherwise breach LAN's Software license or (b) otherwise breach LAN's license or breach or fail to comply with any applicable law or regulation of California or any State to which customer transmits by facsimile transfer using the System, the United States or any other State or jurisdiction applicable to faxing of unsolicited advertising, promotional or other materials, mass faxing, spam, junk mail, or the use of the System, including without limitation California Business & Professional Code Section 17538.4 and TCPA 47 U.S.C. section 227 etal.

There it is. Customer agreed to comply with laws. Our friend, Zachary Roux, put his signature to a contract saying he would not use the system to break the TCPA. Then he sent junk faxes. And then, he thinks it's unfair when he gets busted.

He said, to one of his colleagues, that he was probably losing more money not being in the office than he was paying this "extortion". Y'know what? If he's losing more than $250 by not being in the office for a couple of hours, then whining about the money is more than a little pathetic. Anyone who is making more than a couple hundred bucks a day should be able to deal.

It's still sad. It's sad to see a grown man's body with the attitude of a little kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. You expect better of people. You think that they understand that, if you make the conscious decision to break a law, that you're accepting the potential to be penalized under that law. Maybe he never read the contract; maybe he just signed a contract in bad faith. Does it matter? There's no way he's clean in this picture. He broke a law, knowingly. He did something obviously wrong. He got busted. He whined like a little kid.

Speaking of getting busted, his check lists a Minneapolis Minnesota address, and a Wisconsin driver's license. Now, you're allowed to drive on an out-of-state license in Minnesota - for sixty days. I don't know that you're allowed to do it for long enough that it would make sense to have an out-of-state driver's license preprinted on your checks. Who knows? I hope he has the sense to make sure his Minnesota license is current within sixty days of starting to drive here.

The personal attacks were pretty funny, too. I had brought a new keyboard along to show my lawyer (it's a Happy Hacking Keyboard, and it's a really cool little keyboard). While we were waiting for copies, I was typing on it. Not that it was connected to anything; it's just that typing on a good keyboard is a wonderful fidget. If you can't understand why anyone would want to do this, you must not have a good keyboard. So, Mr. Roux unleashed his full, towering, wit. "You must pick up a lot of girls that way." Wow. I mean, "pick up girls". Was this guy a high school student tagging along with the other people?

You could tell he didn't want to settle. I almost wish I'd let him bait me into not settling; after all, we'd be in court, asking for $3,000 plus reasonable legal fees. The fees add up pretty quickly when you make a lawyer do a lot of extra work just to find out who you really are. But the fact is, we didn't really care about these poor suckers. They, along with a lot of other mortgage brokers, have been suckered by a bigger fish, who sells them incredibly overpriced stuff. $21,000 for a few tweaks to an old Claris Home Page file. IANMTU.

So, we got what we wanted - information about the big fish. We got a little tiny pittance, enough money to cover costs in pursuing a couple of junk faxers. Nothing big.

The guy sure was a sore loser, though. But, for all his bluster, that's what he was; the loser. He lost. He screwed up, he got tagged. Maybe just once, but we have his signature on a document saying he won't do junk faxes again. Of course, he signed something before saying he wouldn't break the TCPA. Maybe we'll be seeing him again.

Thanks Microsoft!

It's another Microsoft Virus Day.

The amazing thing is not that viruses target Microsoft; after all, Windows is the biggest target.

The amazing thing is not that there are so many new, critical, bugs in Windows.

The amazing thing is the apologists. People who say "yeah, well, there were nearly as many security reports for Brand X Linux as there were for Windows last month." Never mind that the Linux bugs were things like "someone found a way to crash a screensaver" or "it is theoretically possible for an email message to be lost instead of delivered," while the Microsoft bugs were "could allow attacker to take over a system," "could allow an attacker to take over a system," and "allowed attackers to take over systems."

I don't get it. The facts are simple. The Morris Internet Worm was in the 80's. Since then, Unix systems and admins have been active in checking for and closing security holes, and we haven't had a remotely comparable repeat. By contrast, I've lost count of the newly-discovered Windows holes that have done over a billion dollars in damage each in the last couple of years.

Today, I have gotten something like 127 copies of the latest MS Worm. It uses the exact same security hole as the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that, which is that, of all major vendors, only Microsoft insists on making every email run attachments with no security, no validation, just BOOM, it's running. On any other system, actually running a program attached to a message requires the user to make a conscious decision to activate a program. The user has to think "This is a program, should I run it?" Microsoft doesn't want that, so Microsoft becomes the vector for every worm, because the single, simple, trivial, fix that would close this hole is simply not acceptable to them.

Instead, MS wants to push for tons of Digital Rights Management things, and "certificates" and "signed programs", all of which have ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER ON THE PROBLEM. Why? Because those things would help them sell more licenses. So, if they FIXED THE PROBLEM, they would lose one of the arguments they use to push DRM crap on people. So they don't fix the problem, even though it is VERY VERY EASY TO DO SO.

It's simple. STOP RUNNING ATTACHMENTS.

The irony of the latest one is delicious; it uses the technique of pretending to be a Microsoft-generated security patch, encouraging people to run it. Has Microsoft ever actually sent security patches via email? I've gotten enough spam from newswire.microsoft.com to assume that they probably have, although I understand they have an official policy against it.

Of course, this is where "signed content" would supposedly help. After all, you could "verify" that the material came from Microsoft. In fact, you probably can't. A while back, someone tricked a certificate-signing authority into signing a bogus "Microsoft" certificate. All it takes is one cracked certificate, or one social engineering hack, and everything goes kablooie.

Or, you could just STOP RUNNING ATTACHMENTS.

If you're out there, and you run Outlook Express, please stop. Any mail program other than Outlook will reduce the chances of you causing thousands of dollars of damages to everyone you know. If you run Windows, please reconsider. Even apart from the incredible number of security holes in Windows, the fact is that heterogeneous environments are more resistant to attacks. If you click on attachments when you do not have prior communication through other channels from that person telling you to expect that particular attachment, PLEASE STOP.

Anyway, all this does is remind me why I read mail under Unix. There's an old joke about the Unix email virus.

>From: Virus Sender
>To: Virus Recipient
>
>Hi! I'm a Unix email virus. Please send me to all of your friends, then delete
>all of your files.

Curiously, the older folks out there may remember the GOOD TIMES virus scare. GOOD TIMES was actually a hilarious parody. It warned you of a "GOOD TIMES" virus which would send itself to everyone you knew, then destroy your files. It then told you that you should send this warning to everyone you knew, then destroy your files in case they were infected. GOOD TIMES was a pure wetware virus.

It was also a joke, because there was no way for email to run itself on someone's machine.

Until Microsoft made one.

The net value of Microsoft Corporation is probably smaller than the net damage done to worldwide computer networks by their willful and continuing negligence in security matters.

UPDATE: Five hours and eleven minutes later, I have gotten another 170 copies of the latest Microsoft exploit. Yay.

UPDATE #2: While writing and saving that, another ten or so. I really value Microsoft's contribution to my productivity.

Don't forget that tomorrow is "Talk Like a Pirate Day"

Hallmark hasn't covered it yet, but Dave Barry has. Tomorrow, September 19th, is Talk Like a Priate Day.

I love this. In a world full of holidays invented to sell cards, holidays invented to sell presents, and holidays invented to get out of workk, there's one holiday that's totally free of that. It's some guy's ex-wife's birthday, and all you do is talk like a pirate. There's no one you're talking like a pirate for. You don't need to buy anyone presents. You don't need to send cards. You just need to talk like a pirate. Is that so much to ask? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

VeriSlime t-shirts

It occurred to me that I have access to an incredibly talented artist, so I got some nice, oogy, green, icky, slime drawn up.

And, of course, t-shirts and bumper stickers are available.

It gets better. Want to print this stuff yourself? Go right ahead. We are releasing these images into the public domain. Do what you want. Make copies. Alter them. Go wild. This is not about me raking in money (if my sales triple, I can take my wife out to McDonalds), this is about calling attention to the insanely abusive behavior of VeriSign.

UPDATE: Added a new version, using "No Values to Trust" as the slogan. Thanks to James Lick for thinking of it.

New version:
T-shirts and bumper stickers.

Blogspam.

So, I don't know what the deal is, but TechCentralStation spams me. They probably think it's just a newsletter, but when I get 357-line blasts of HTML in my mailbox from people I've never heard of, it's spam.

Until recently, I though they were generic spammers. I never read any of the crap they sent me; it's just spam, who reads that? I just set up a 'bot to forward spam complaints to their provider and ignored them. A couple of days ago, my mom mentioned something about an article "on tech central station". I said "oh, I know them, they're spammers". She was surprised, so I went and looked. Sure enough; the ones spamming me are the ones with the web site about free markets and technology.

I assume they just have a really, incredibly, badly-run newsletter. What I don't understand is how anyone claiming to know anything about technology could be stupid enough to send HTML mail. No MIME headers, just blocks of HTML garbage.

Here's what it looks like:

<html>
<head>
<title>TCS Newsletter</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<link href="http://www.techcentralstation.com/tcs-indexstylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
<style type="text/css">
  <!--
  a  {
        text-decoration : none;
   }
  a:hover  {
        color : #ff8600;
 
  }
-->

That's garbage. And, since I never asked for it, it's spam.

I've emailed them.

I've called them.

I'm still getting the spam. I still haven't heard back. It's sort of depressing; when things like this pass for "clueful", I'd hate to see what we'd look down on. I can't think of any plausible reason for a non-spammer to have ignored email sent a week ago. Anyone who wants to pretend to be a technology pundit had damn well better respond to email in under a week.

Anyway, if anyone out there has a contact at TCS, I'd love to know where the fuck they got the idea that they had permission to send me mail, 'cuz I never gave them any such permission. I'd also like to know whether they realize how stupid HTML mail looks .

U. S. Navy announces formation of Shore Leave Division

Responding to concerns that some members of the U. S. Navy had not lived up to the standards expected of them, the U. S. Navy has announced today the formation of the new Shore Leave Division. Members of this division will be specially trained in responsible drinking, as well as undergoing a whirlwind course in the etiquette of over two hundred cultures. Beginning on April 1st, 2004, every ship that puts out to sea will have a squadron or more of members of the new division, to take on the responsibilities and challenges of shore leave. The extra training is expected to produce vastly more efficient shore leave, improving crew morale substantially. Members of the division's precision whoring squad will perform regular displays around the world, demonstrating the finesse and skill that have made the U. S. Navy famous everywhere.

VeriSgni [sic] t-shirts!

Here's my t-shirt idea.

Available as a golf shirt or a t-shirt.

Note that this is not a "modified logo". If it were a modified logo, it would say "VeriSign". It doesn't. This is the logo for VeriSgni - one of the billions of domains that VeriSign hijacked yesterday.

VeriSign destroys the internet, film at 11

It's hard to explain how important this is. Most of you won't notice much; you'll get a bit more spam today, and maybe your email will be a little slow, but who'd notice? The sysadmins, though... Most of us are noticing.

Sunday and Monday of this week, VeriSign introduced intentional errors into the zone files for the .com and .net top-level domains. That is to say, they changed it so that, if the domain you try to browse to doesn't exist, you get redirected to a "portal" page they're running, which is supposed to help you buy services from VeriSign.

That's as far as most coverage goes. It's a web page thing, whatever.

That's the tip of the iceberg.

The real problem here comes in with email. Spammers have always loved to use made-up names. Thanks to VeriSign, the defenses most mail systems have against those made-up names stopped working today. It's only a couple percent of the incoming spam - but it's the most expensive part to deal with. When the mail comes in, you check for a valid address. Until Sunday, if the spammer had just made up a string of letters, you could reject the mail right away, knowing it was invalid. Now, it looks like a valid name, so you accept the mail. Your user gets spam. Of course, maybe you bounce the message. In that case, your bounce message gets routed to VeriSign's very very overloaded machine, so it takes a long time (and possibly a few tries) to bounce it, and then the bounce fails - because there's nowhere to deliver it - and the sysadmin gets a copy of the spam, complete with records showing why the bounce couldn't be delivered.

So, thanks to VeriSign, that's another hundred or more messages a day for tiny sysadmins. Another million for the big guys. A friend of mine is a sysadmin at a major company, and he says this is loading their servers more than SoBig did.

What's happening here is simple. VeriSign is hijacking the internet. Again. The FTC smacked them for their fraudulent "renewal" notices sent to people who weren't even their customers. They were running out of scams. So, today, they are squatting, not just on likely typos, but on every possible string of letters which isn't already spoken for. And they will be, until they're stopped.

Hanlon's Razor (often misattributed to Heinlein, but Robert J. Hanlon was a different person) is the incredibly useful "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". We now have the VeriSign Corollary: "Some things can only be adequately explained by a combination of malice and stupidity."

Related links:
slashdot
kuro5hin

Car alarms

The car alarm across the street is going off again.

Our roommate says that people park somewhere else (never by the house in question), then walk over to it, walk in, and leave within five minutes; he thinks it's a drug dealer's house. The car sure looks like a drug dealer's car; a big, boxy, shiny-white sedan with hubcaps that glitter and sparkle.

And a car alarm. Did I mention the car alarm? Dee-doo! Dee-doo! Dee-doo! Weep weep weep! Dee-doo! Dee-doo! Dee-doo! It's 3AM. And every time a truck, or a particularly heavy car, goes by, the car alarm goes off. Again. And again. The police were by around 8ish, they said that the owner of the house said that the owner of the car (and its keys) were at a football game, so it wouldn't get turned off until he came home. Well, it's 3AM, and the car alarm is still going off.

The funny thing is, if he is a drug dealer, this is not merely annoying, but unimaginably stupid. He's just given everyone in the neighborhood reason to ask the cops to visit his house. Duh.

This is perhaps the stupidest thing I've seen involving a car alarm... Oh, who am I kidding, it's not even close. When we lived in Uptown Minneapolis a few years back, there were some yuppies who had a very very expensive car. I think it was a Lexus. Anyway, it had a very sensitive car alarm, which could only be turned off by actually walking over to the car and doing something.

And they parked it...

Under a walnut tree.

I kid you not.

It was hilarious, but very annoying - but it was enough more annoying for them than for anyone else that I don't think anyone cared.

Of course it'll work. It always works.

For eternal beings, they are strangely impatient. "Will it work? Will it happen?" "Of course it'll work. It always works."

The archangel Gabriel steps back from his handiwork, in which he is well pleased. It has, of course, been done perfectly; every detail is just so. The preparations are complete; when the one they are waiting for arrives, things will be as he expects them.

The angels stand back, waiting.

A man walks into the room. Overwhelmed by the assembled beauty before him, he doesn't look down.

John Ritter trips over the ottoman, one last time.

The angels bow in reverence. They have seen something which was made, but which was made by mortal man. They have been privileged to experience something which was created, but not by the Creator. It amazes them, every time, as it always has and always will. They don't understand how it is possible, but they don't need to understand.

My wife wrote an article, ending with "O God, I see now why you commanded the angels to bow down." When I read this essay, it occurred to me that even the most trivial and banal creations of humanity must seem wondrous to the angels. We are doubtless as strange to them as they are to us. Where we wonder, and doubt, and have faith and hope, they have only certainty. They cannot wonder whether we are real; they simply know things. The things they don't know aren't mysteries, though; they simply don't know them. No mystery.

In all the mythology where we speak of humans as "superior" to angels, we are missing one central point. "Superior" is the wrong word. We are good people; they are good angels. Cats are good cats. Each thing is good at being what it is. There is nothing wrong with being mortal, uncertain, and ephemeral, as long as you're good at it. Trying to explain why we're so special holds the risk that we'll start assuming we're better than all the other things, which we tend to assume aren't special. I think they're all special - in thousands of different ways, each also important.

Anyway, just some idle thoughts. Jesse's article is way cooler than mine, and you should read it.

TM is back in town!

TM, my ex-roommate, is back in town. He spent a year in Pearl Harbor, working for Naval Intelligence. There is a great deal of fun to be had explaining to people that "TM used to be in the Army". No matter how often you do this, he always corrects you. Politely, but he corrects you. "TM used to be in the army." "Navy." "Oh, yeah, TM's ex-army." "Navy." It's great fun.

This is the roommate our psychotic cat hospitalized. He still has the scars. Poor little Yojimbo; she was unable to understand the idea of "these pills will make you healthy". (I still have scars from that encounter too.)

TM is in Naval Intelligence. All he's allowed to say is that he looks at pictures. As an amusing side-effect of the way regulations work, I like to tell people he sorts porn for the Navy. The great thing is, he is not allowed to deny this! To confirm or deny anything would be to give some information about what he does, and he's not allowed. Gotta love regulations.

He's also one of the sysadmins for plethora.net, my ISP, and occasionally our webmaster. There's been talk of upgrading a couple of machines, which we'll be trying to do this week, and redoing the web site. I'm pushing for something in tasteful plain text; I hate graphics on web sites.

Anyway, TM, welcome back!

I seem to be a writer.

For months, I've been saying "gosh, it looks like I'm sort of turning into a writer".

Today, I'm staring at a to-do list which is, frankly, bordering on being too long. I have writing projects and writing projects. It's 2AM, and I'm still working on a project I originally hoped to do over the weekend. I have others waiting. The first page of my PDA's to-do list doesn't even get me through the end of the week; too many projects that I'm obliged to at least make some kind of progress on.

If I actually manage to do all of these projects, I will, in fact, be earning a living as a writer. It won't be the luxurious lifestyle I always wanted; it's a lot of hours, and a lot of stress. But it's way better than looking for techie jobs in the current market, and the flexible hours are unbeatable. Working at 2AM isn't so bad when you don't have to get up before noon. The office is great; I have cats and MP3s to listen to. Well, I had MP3s; a recent reorganization of furniture has my cat jumping on the power strip and killing the Linux box I play them on. I guess I have cats or MP3s.

If all goes well, I'll have a book out by the end of the year. I lost count of my published articles a long time ago. Today saw the first time a hardware vendor offered me a free piece of hardware just to poke around on it, based (I think) partially on my history of publication credits.

The risks in this job are unlike the risks in most jobs. I actually have to worry about RSI, because I don't do much of anything but type. This means all sorts of weird things; for instance, I'm trying out different typing monitors. Big obvious problem; they all assume you only have one computer. If I switch from one machine to another, the one I'm not on thinks I'm taking voluntary rest breaks, when in fact I'm doing nothing of the sort. Maybe I'll write one which sets up a server over a network and monitors typing and mouse activity on multiple systems.

A lot of people want to be writers. Here's the trick: There's lots of writers out there. There's not that many writers who can synthesize writing with other skills. A lot of the work I get requires technical skills, not just writing. For a typical project, I may well have to learn a little bit of a new programming language, or debug an embedded system I've never used before. General hacking skills pay off big here. Of course, the world is also full of computer people who can't (or won't) write. Most of the people I know who want to be professional writers, but aren't able to get paid, are either unable or unwilling to develop the technical skills it would take to get these gigs. Why? Because it's not art. I think people expect that, somehow, writing should be unlike other jobs. Other jobs subjugate you to the will of the employer, but writers are creative. Bollocks. Creative on your own terms doesn't pay the bills, for most of us.

Left to my own devices, I doubt I would ever write in the style used in the "For Dummies" books. Offered enough money to make a month's car payment, I'll write in that style. It's that simple. That's what makes this a "job", not a "hobby". Without that, no, I wouldn't be earning a living. I might have sold the book, but that wouldn't exactly feed me for a year.

This is not an essay. I have no thesis statement. I just wanted to ramble a bit, and while I'm at it, gloat about the apparent success of my plan to earn a living writing. It's not glamorous, but, for now, it's paying the bills. That's something.

What if Eve tempted the serpent?

One of the things that people often wrestle with in Christian theology is the question of where, exactly, evil came from. Why was there anyone around to tempt Eve? What purpose had this evil thing in being?

Although it's not part of the Biblical account, I have seen many claim that Satan fell because of pride; because he couldn't stand being told that humans, small, smelly, imperfect in knowledge, and ephemeral, were somehow more important than he was. And yet, they were. Humans were, in some inexplicable way, the pinnacle of creation; the point behind the whole exercise. And why?

It all comes down to the question of what it means to be made in God's image. Humans were like God in a way that nothing else was. In Genesis, God does two things; He creates things, and He judges things. These two things, humans do - but demons and angels don't. Those are what make us interesting; the potential to say "I conceive of a world which is not this one, and I will it to be so".

So... Bundled with all that free will is a terrifying option. We may choose poorly. Angels, flawless and complete in their knowledge, know the outcomes of their choices. We don't. We make mistakes. But, for every mistake, there is an improvement; our failure to apprehend the world as it is causes us to change it, and those changes are beautiful.

What if, frustrated with God's strict orders, the first people conceived of a world in which there was someone who didn't follow them? What if they demanded someone to appeal to them, to offer them a way out, an excuse? Perhaps the real reason the demons hate us so is because we require them, and they know what they have become, but lack the ability to deny us the dichotomy we are so dependent upon.

What if Eve tempted the Serpent? "Tell me another story," she says. "I want you to make it so I can eat the apple."

Lies, and the lying liars who lie about the people who tell them.

I heard Al Franken on the radio last night. I didn't take notes, but here's roughly what he said that caught my attention:

During the time of the Bush administrations, zero net jobs have been created. That means that, if the Bushes had been running this country since it was founded, no one would have a job.

I got the words wrong, I'm sure, but the essence was quite clear. Premise, conclusion.

There's a few things that bug me about this. See, there's a lot of hidden premises here. One of them is that Presidents create jobs. I don't know that this is the case; my guess is that, if government does it at all, it's legislators, not presidents. Another is that, unless there are more jobs now, everything is bad. You can't just get a better job; that's not a new job, because you're still just one person with one job. If everyone's salary improved, but the same number of jobs were out there, then that wouldn't be progress by this metric.

Worse is the more serious assumptions. Are we to conclude that the circumstances we are now in are completely typical? I would easily believe that, no matter who was in office, if we were to be in the couple of years following the Internet Bust, we would have very few "net" jobs - which is to say, a lot of people would be losing jobs, even as new jobs are coming into being. But I don't think it's fair to blaim Bush for the crash of internet companies.

Did the government play a big role in the internet boom-bust cycle? Not really. I don't think that a different president would have made the "business models" of the internet age work. I don't think anyone could have, least of all some guy who signs and vetoes bills. Honestly, if we had to point fingers, I think the DMCA would be where to point them, but that's not the real issue here.

The real issue is that Franken's attack on Bush is totally meaningless. It's stringing a meaningless statistic together with a vehement hatred, and that's all there is. "Net jobs" are not a useful metric for much of anything, without a lot more information. For instance, what jobs are being lost? What new jobs are turning up? Don't say "created" - that implies that there's some agency in the world, some central source of jobs, which mills them out on an assembly line. It's not like that.

I'm one of the jobs lost this year. According to official statistics, I went from an employee of a tech firm to some unemployed guy. On the other hand, it looks pretty likely that I'll be able to make a living as a writer. That moves me to "not having a job". Permanently. It moves me to working flexible hours, getting slightly lower pay, and having the world's coolest boss (although he did make me work on Labor Day). The "loss" of a job there isn't exactly crippling the economy; in fact, I'm still producing things, and I'm still getting food. People like me look bad for economic statistics, but we're just fine.

So, the statistic, even if we assume it's true, is pretty much meaningless. Worse, even if it were assumed to be meaningful, it wouldn't tell us anything about the topic of the vitriol -- Mr. Bush -- because he hasn't got a damn thing to do with it. He's not the one making hiring decisions. Between Congress, terrorist attacks, the internet bust, and accounting fraud -- none of which, so far as I can tell, was done by Mr. Bush -- I see plenty of reasons for our economy to be a bit slow; in fact, it may even be sort of good for us to take a breather.

So, then, what do we learn? We learn that Al Franken, like everyone else in the industry, is also one of the "lying liars". He said that a lot of readers were demanding that he be angrier again; they really liked his earlier Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. (And hey, I can't argue with that conclusion.)

What bugs me is that he said, in this radio interview, that he, unlike "them", was honest. And that's bullshit. Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh are sides of the same coin. They're people with a message, and the message is important enough that they lie to make people believe it. Maybe it's not lies; maybe they're stupid. Maybe they're just so enthralled by the visions of sugarplum futures that they can't be bothered to stop and ask simple questions like "is there any reason to believe that the internet bust wouldn't be bad for the economy no matter who was president?", or "what the hell does gay sex have to do with the fact that heterosexuals are, by and large, willing to cheat on their spouses and then dump them?" These questions would take away good rhetoric, and the rhetoric, not the truth, is where the money is.

This isn't to say that everything Al Franken says is wrong. He's right some of the time. But you know what? So's Rush Limbaugh. So's George Bush. Clinton said a few things which were neither lies nor evasions. But all of them are interchangeable demagogues, trying to push people into adopting their own positions, and too passionate about it to care about inconvenient facts or reason.

So, Mr. Franken, a suggestion: Include yourself on that list. Look closely at your own motivations, at your own rhetoric, and at the way you let your assumptions change your interpretation of the facts you're so proud of checking. You're no different from the rest.

Would you buy a used car from this man?

So, one of the weird things about getting a shitload of junk faxes is that you never actually read them all. Who has time? I have seven hundred pages of these things. Mostly, I don't see them when I have a lot of spare time and I'm looking for something to do; I see them when I'm looking for a specific fax on my fax machine, and all that's there is a stack of unwanted shit, helpfully shoveled by our junker friends. ("friends" is perhaps a euphemism here.)

So, until I started getting involved in court cases, I'd never read most of these. I'm glad. The resulting loss of faith in humanity has been a real shocker. I always thought I was cynical; it turns out I've been hopelessly naive. People who send junk faxes lie. They play games. They do all sorts of stuff to try to make you not hate them, even while they're harassing you. (A fax a week for almost two years is "harassment" in my book.)

So, for instance, I have a fax which has a Red Cross logo. Nothing to do with the Red Cross - they just have the logo to make you feel nice. A lot of them do stuff like this. We also get "missing children! we love missing children! help us find missing children by sucking our eleven inches of fax paper and swallowing the toner". Those aren't the words they use, but that's what they mean.

There's a lot of signs to look for that should raise big red flags. Never buy from someone who has to tell you that a system comes with full manufacturer warranty; that's a big red flag for a dealer that may do a fair amount of grey-market equipment, or maybe brand-name boxes with generic parts in them. Never, ever, buy from someone who does the "prices reflect a cash discount". The chances are, their contract with the credit card companies prohibits this bait-and-switch tactic. The chances are, they don't care what their contract says. Do you want a contract with them? No, you don't. Never buy from someone who has to explain what he means by "free". A favorite is the November 14th, 2001 fax from CaDan corporation. (For those keeping track, it was sent at 5:58 PM on Wednesday, November 14th.) I'll try to reproduce this for full effect:

FREE

COMPUTER HARDWARE

FREE

COMPUTER SOFTWARE

FREE

COMPUTER SOFTWARE

* O.K. the hardware & software isn't free, but it's darn close! The service is free for all in house service between November 16th and November 30th 2001.

Note that there's no asterisk on the word "free". Also note that, when service contracts come in full years, we're talking about a two week period of free service. That's one full part in twenty-six of the smallest service contract you can normally buy! Wow! Most products come with 90 day warranties... Why do they have to tell me that I'm getting a 14-day warranty?

It gets better, of course. They aren't free; the fax says that, even if it says it in teeny-tiny print. And yet, under oath, Dan Rogers sings a different song, saying the stuff in question was definitely free:

Q: I want you to turn to the one that is dated November 14, '01. I'll show you my copy. I'm looking at this one.

A: Okay.

Q: Now, does this one have any price list on it?

A: No.

Q: Does it have any prices at all on it?

A: No, because they're free.

Q: So, it's free computer hardware, free computer software and free computer service. How does CaDan stay in business giving away stuff for free?

A: That was a promotion that -- we had just brought in two new technicians, and to instill business relationships with existing clients, we wanted to promote their services at no charge. If you notice on the bottom, it's got between November 16 and November 30.

Q: Okay, and this was meant to go only to existing clients?

A: Only existing clients, yeah.

Q: As far as you know, has Peter Seebach ever purchased anything from you?

A: You know, I've got to be candid. The name is so familiar, and as I said to my attorney, if I could only see a picture of him, I'm confident that we must have done business somewhere along the line.

Of course, we've since met (he was at my deposition, where I mistook him for an incompetent law clerk until my lawyer told me who he was), and no, we haven't done business. He later claims he may have discussed hosting with Plethora Internet -- but they're not one of our customers, and I have no reason to believe they ever even talked to us, or indeed, ever saw our web page before this suit commenced.

This is typical for junk faxers. As you might expect, people who are willing to break a federal law and tell thousands of people about it are not sticklers for following rules. And they use the word "instill" incorrectly.

Who's Kiki, anyway?

I dunno. Kiki was this one chick. Back when there was a Mandy's, we used to go there late at night to have coffee. Sometimes, Kiki would be there. It was a great little place. We saw Joel Hodgson there a couple of times. Once, when someone played a ballad on the jukebox, a couple of people did the "holding lighters in the air" thing for a while. Everyone there was always your friend, even if you had no idea who she was.

Which brings us to Kiki. Kiki was this chick who was related, somehow, to one of the people who owned Davanni's, or so I think I remember. One day, she was talking about how she wanted to learn guitar, but her left hand was too small for it. I had a guitar with a small neck, so I lent it to her, right then. We (and "we" was a fair number of people) all walked over to our apartment, found the guitar, found a bag for it, and she walked home with it.

Years later, it occurred to me that I don't have any idea how to get in touch with her, should I want my guitar back. It was a Peavey T-60, according to a bit of googling. I remember liking the sound on it a lot. So, Kiki, if you're out there, can I, like, have my guitar back? Ten years is long enough to decide whether or not you're interested enough in guitar to buy your own.