Geek Drivel

“Once upon a time, children, there was a whole industry built on nothing but distributing music.”

“Grampa, what’s disturba… distrab…?”

“Distributing? It means that a person takes music that other people make and sells it to people who want it.”

“Why couldn’t people buy it from the people who made it, like we do?”

“Because it wasn’t always easy for people to find out about music then. There was no GlobalNet, no AI assistants to track down things for you, and people had to spend most of their own time doing things they didn’t want to just so they could get money for food.”

“I know, and you had to walk barefoot to school, in the snow, uphill, both ways.”

(A chuckle.) “That’s right, William.”

“So what happened to these disturbiters?”

“It’s distributors, Jeremy. They were greedy. For a century, everyone who wanted music had to come to them, and they’d gotten fat and lazy. The Internet came along, but instead of welcoming the chance to give people more of what they wanted for less cost, they tried to shut it down. They threatened artists who didn’t play their way, and sued the people who tried to listen to music too.”

“They sound mean.”

“They were, Alice.”

“So what happened to them?”

“They finally realized that they’d made a big mistake, but by then it was too late. More and more artists and customers were avoiding them, and their sales just kept dropping. Finally they all merged into one company, and it just kept shrinking until one day it just disappeared.”

“I’m glad their gone, Grampa.”

“So am I, Dierdre. So am I.”

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… a giant farm skyscraper?

I expect we’ll see these within the next couple decades. It just makes too much economic sense, not to mention environmental. And the higher fuel prices go, the more sense it will make.

I’m betting that these guys are going to go far. Anybody foolish enough to bet against me?

During a chess competition a chessmaster should be a combination of a beast of prey and a monk.
– Alexander Alekhine

I’m well known for being stubborn. Very stubborn. When I run into a problem, I pound my head against it until either my head breaks or the problem does. So far, it has almost always been the problem… my six-month attempt to compress random data streams is the only one that has out-stubborned me. Not surprising, since it’s impossible — something that I knew before I started — but doomed or not, I learned a heck of a lot from the attempt.

The latest irritations to get the cranial jackhammer treatment, and the reason this blog has been so quiet for the last little while, have all been related to Ubuntu Linux. The first of them was getting my laptop’s external monitor working.
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It seems that the “family member” spam that I’d talked about a couple days ago was a malware attempt, as well as (probably) a probe to confirm e-mail addresses.

More spam today, with a very similar modus operandi as yesterday’s bogus greeting card message. If you want to see the message itself, you can find a two-year-old copy here, word for word. The only difference is that my copy actually linked to a different .COM site with a nonsense name, though the visible text still said us-nma.com (which apparently doesn’t exist anymore).

And this time, I got two of them, from different accounts. One in the morning, one in the afternoon. Presumably from different spam-bots on the same botnet. But strangely enough, the URL contained exactly the same identifier — obviously either a way to identify the e-mail address that the message was delivered to, or more likely an encoded version of the address itself. This one was still running when I used a fake identifier to go there, and it ended up at a fake pharmacy site. Firekeeper didn’t notice any malware infiltration attempts, but that could well be because I’m not allowing the site to run any kind of scripting.

Add to that this article on what’s going on in the malware scene, and you’ve got every right to be paranoid.

At this point, anyone who’s not using Firefox with NoScript is just asking for trouble. And even those of us who are have good reason for paranoia. I think I’m going to set up a second VMware Linux machine just to do my browsing in, so my main machine can’t easily be compromised even if someone does come up with a Linux-targeted attack.

What I actually received was the message below, with the above-quoted subject line.

It smelled fishy. I’ve gotten these greeting-card messages before, but they’ve always included the name of the person sending the message. If the site didn’t have the person’s name, then how would it know that it was a family member? And what’s with the Hong Kong URL — the same place that a lot of the “MyCanadianPharmacy” spam has been registered to?
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Microsoft has really been spinning it’s wheels for the last six or seven years. With the exception of improving security, nearly everything it has done since Windows 2000 has been focused on sizzle rather than steak. The same operating system with prettier pictures. You can see it in the whole user interface, and you can see it even more clearly in the API, because they’ve been making ever-more-minor modifications to it.
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And I thought it was just Israelis who had interesting sports.

Neat idea.