“Technology confuse lizard! Lizard no like!”

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I can’t figure out whether this is EPIC LIZARD-BRAIN FAIL or simply hilarious. Maybe I’ll settle for both. I especially find it amusing when, between rounds, the lizard looks up at the guy behind the camera, as if he really wants to convey his disgust at the proceedings.

Here is a short clip of a toad (frog?) playing the same game. Be sure to watch it through to the end, where the toad expresses his own disgust in a rather more active way. 😉

(Around Halloween this year, I suggested that GoddessJ should get a program we saw for her iPad that showed a spider that ran away from wherever you touched, and let the cats play with it. She declined because she was afraid our lard-arsed felines would break the iPad.)

“Sony sued over PlayStation Network no-suing rules”

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It’s about time someone called corporations on this type of self-serving rule change. As a business owner, I can’t blame them for trying to limit their liability. I’d probably do the same thing in their shoes (though I hope I’d find a way to be more fair about it). But as a consumer it always infuriates me when a company high-handedly says “we’re changing the rules, like it or lump it.” Especially as the changes are always detrimental to the consumer in some way, and every company out there always includes the “we’re allowed to change the rules any time we want, and you just have to take it” rule.

I understand the economic reasons why it could never happen, but I really wish there were a way for the individual consumer to hold companies to their promises, rather than relying on large groups of us to get pissed off enough to file a class-action suit.

“How Much Sleep Do You Actually Require (and Why)?”

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I’ve always wondered about people who only sleep a few hours a day. I’ve found that I need at least seven and a half hours a day to feel rested (which usually means an afternoon nap since I can rarely stay asleep more than six hours at night). But it seems that a single brain chemical is responsible for it all, leading me to hope that there will eventually be a pill to reduce the time I need to sleep.

“Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy”

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In the small mid-western hick community where my family spent the early- to mid-eighties, you didn’t dare let people know you were different in any way. Fifties McCarthyism was still alive and well, but no communists presented themselves, so it was turned on anyone who was different in any way. Kids who couldn’t fit in were labeled “queers” and “fags,” and harassed daily and beaten up on occasion — and that was for little differences, like doing better than most in class or not liking football. God help anyone who was really thought to be gay. Being non-Christian wasn’t even a concept.

I don’t know how common that was elsewhere, or is today even in that backward community, but with that background it makes perfect sense to me that you keep anything the least bit different about you hidden, and only reveal it to the handful of close friends that you know you can trust. That’s why I find today’s kids so baffling, and I suspect why many others of my generation and older do too. And the kids apparently find us just as strange.

Kids, when you hear your elders making ridiculous noises about privacy, please re-read the above paragraphs and understand that the world was a much harsher and less accepting place when some of us were growing up. I’m glad you can be so much more open with your lives today, even if I don’t really grasp how you can do it.

“Assessing Terrorist Threats to Commercial Aviation”

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I’ve talked more than a few times about terrorists, terrorism, and the TSA on this blog, often quoting security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier. He’s posted links to a new article by a former airline advisor which sums up the problems with the TSA’s responses to date, and offers suggestions about how to do things more smartly and less annoyingly. Which will likely be roundly ignored, since ignoring expert advice is what the TSA has shown the greatest skill at to date, but we can always hope that with enough repetition from enough people they’ll start to get the idea.

“The cure for US job woes: More immigrants”

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I’ve been baffled by this for the last couple days.

I’m not sure I follow their numbers, but I’ll accept them on faith for the moment. The thing that baffles me is the source: a very conservative think-tank.

Political conservatives have railed against anyone who was different practically since the ink was dry on the Declaration of Independence, if not before. Blacks, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Mexicans, Irish, or most recently, Muslims. When they get bored fearing and hating Muslims, they’ll inevitably find some other “different” group to fear and hate. Just about the only thing uniting all those groups is that they come from Somewhere Else. (The only hated home-grown groups that I know of have been hippies and gays, or when all else fails, the ever-useful generic label of “liberals” — the conservative definition literally being “anyone who doesn’t look, think, and act like us.”)

So when conservatives publicly announce that the US needs more immigrants, despite both their hundreds of years of ideology and rhetoric against the whole concept and the ascendant frothing-at-the-mouth Tea Party movement… well, either we’ve entered some kind of bizarre mirror-universe, or things have gotten so bad that reality is starting to penetrate even the well-protected innermost enclaves of willful ignorance.

Things are bad, but conservative will is strong, so I haven’t decided which it is yet.

Spambots Revisited

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Back at the beginning of April, I killed about a thousand spambot accounts on this blog and added some new defenses against them. Those defenses helped quite a bit; I was still getting about ten attempts a week, but any spambot that gave an invalid e-mail address got blocked, as was any that gave a known blog-spammer address. As a result, in the nine months since that, only twenty or thirty spambots managed to register an account.

That was still more than I liked, so over last week or two I’ve been playing with a few settings. Using a plug-in called Register Plus Redux, I tried making the “About Yourself” field required. No luck — any spambot smart enough to get past my existing defenses was also programmed to handle such standard fields.

My second attempt was adding a new field to the registration page, one that’s labeled “I am a…” and has two choices, “human” and “spambot”. It’s a required field, you’ve got to choose one or the other or you can’t submit the form.

Since I added that, I haven’t had any new registrations. That’s pretty much what I wanted. I don’t require registration for anything, so there’s no reason for a human to register, but spambots are programmed to register just because some blogs require registration before someone can leave a comment and some anti-spam software is easier on logged-in users.

As a defense, it’s very weak. A human can beat it with less than a second’s thought. A spambot-writer could program his spambot to defeat it with five minutes of work. But it’s unique. No such person is going to bother adding that stuff if it’s only going to work on a single blog with a handful of readers. If enough blogs start using the same sort of defense, and spambots start getting adapted to it, I’ll change it to something else unique, like “how many legs does the average horse have?” or “what part of the human body contains the brain?”

That’s the trick: you just need to make something that is slightly different, just different enough that it would require a little extra work from a spambot-writer, and change it as necessary. It wouldn’t work for a very popular blog, but for most people — myself included — it’s sufficient.

“US spy drone hijacked with GPS spoof hack, report says”

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Ever since I heard the report about the captured US spy-drone earlier this week, I wondered how it could possibly have happened. Well, my curiosity was satisfied today: it was reputedly caught by sending it false GPS signals — a vulnerability that military officials have apparently been aware of since at least 2003, and one that’s ridiculously obvious in hindsight, not to mention ridiculously easy to exploit.

That brings up a fact well-known in security circles: an attacker only needs to find a single vulnerability, while the defender must block all the possible attacked vectors. Miss even one, and you might as well not have wasted your time protecting any of them.

I hope there weren’t any really important secrets in that drone.

UPDATE: It seems that smart guys are saying this is implausible because it would be hard to do. Hate to break it to you, guys, but “hard to do” just means that nobody on your side has put in the effort to figure out how to do it yet. As such, it may still be how it was done.