March 2005 Wayback

Was Bush Right?

I’ve been seeing a lot of articles about how those who opposed the Bush administration’s policy on Iraq are coming to terms with the fact that he might have been right to go to war. With Egypt’s President Mubarak announcing that multi party presidential elections will be held for the first time since `81 and the election of moderate Mahmoud Abbas as the new leader of the Palestinian people just being two examples, it seems that president Bush may be responsible for a wave of elections and demorcratic change all over the middle east.

Independent Online: Was Bush right after all?

Slate.com: Was George Bush Right About Freedom and Democracy?

Washington Post: Is Bush Right?

By Dawn’s Early Light: Could Bush Be Right (The Left Reconsiders)

National Review Online: When Good News Strikes

Stuff I meant to post yesterday

Can’t spend much time but wanted to post a couple of links.

First news that there’s no end in sight for Moore’s law. Looks like CPU’s will keep getting faster for the next decade or so. AMD’s top of the line cpu uses 90 nanometer dies, Intel’s CEO Craig Barrett says that they have developed the technology to bring it down to 5.

Disinfo has an article about nanotech food.

More info on spyware developers increasing their attention to Mozilla. One blog I read stated that it will be a test to see how well Firefox stands up to these attacks.

Personal ads and the great porn conspiracy

So I’ve been checking out a few personals sites in the past and have finally decided to plop down my $19.99 to get access to Yahoo’s site. I was looking thru all the ones in Newport News and picked one to contact. Here’s the chat log:

[17:35] [me]: hello
[17:35] [she]: What’s cookin, good lookin
[17:36] [me]: glad to see you’re in a good mood
[17:36] [she]: hehe
[17:36] [me]: i scoped you off the personals site. I hope you don’t mind
[17:36] [she]: What do you do for a living?
[17:36] [me]: i run a computer store
[17:36] [me]: computer renovators over in richneck. you?
[17:37] [she]: Figures, I get a good conversation going and I have to let my friend have her comp back. Can I have your email address, so I can email you later and we can pick up again..

[17:38] [me]: [my email removed] or just add me to your buddy list, i’ll be here till 8 tonight and from 10 to 6 tomorrow… c ya
[17:38] [she]: I will be sure to send pictures with my email too :) xx

So I say goodbye and go about my day. I notice that she never goes offline.

Sure enough today I’ve got an email from her that goes like this:
Hi! Sorry it took so long to get back to you. I am
sneaking a message off at work, my boss doesn’t get in
until later in the afternoon. How are you doing? I am
ok, just trying to get through the day, I am so tired

today for some reason. Anyways, I don’t know if you
remember me but we chatted the other day on Yahoo. We
had a really short conversation while I was at my
friends house. Sorry I logged off so quick, my friend
needed to use the computer. Anyways lets pick up where
we left off..

More about me: I have long brunette hair and green
eyes, I’m 5′7″ and 125lbs. Alot of people have told me

I have very soft skin. I also have a tattoo of a
butterfly on my back and my belly button pierced. I
play tennis (I’m very active) and I love to experience
new things and meet new people. I strongly believe
that intimacy is a very important part of a
relationship, along with honesty and trust. But, I
want to know someone before I become intimate. After I
get know the person I’m with…then I want it all the
time, hope I am not too much for you! :P

I have to admit that I feel a little weird looking
through personal ads to meet a guy, but the ones that
I’ve met at bars are usually just putting on an act.
Either that or they are too busy trying to act cool in
front of their friends. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an
outgoing and social person but that scene gets old
very fast.

Well, if you’re interested then we should get to know

each other better. Let’s get together sometime? Maybe
for drinks? I have been working alot lately, so I’m
not sure when I will have some free time, but whats
your schedule like? Maybe we can work something out..

Write me back soon! Oh and I attached a pic to the
email (I was on my friends profile when we talked. I
hope I’m still your type and that you are not mad, I
just didn’t have a chance to tell you), let me know if

you get it ok. I also have some pics on my site.. It
is kind of playground while I am taking this intro to
HTML class. Here is the link:
[link removed]
I was kind
of bored the other night, so I put some new pics up.
Please don’t give the site to anyone, it would be
really embarassing if someone from work or my family

saw it!

Hope to talk to you soon,
xoxo ~ Jenny

PS My yahoo name is the same as my email, message me
sometime!

ATTACHMENT part 2 image/pjpeg name=mepool.jpg error:
could not be displayed. File size exceeds limit.

Is it just me or does this seem a little generic?

So I check out the site. It starts out ok, a few pictures of her and her cat, a few links to some of her interests, and then this:
To see the rest of my pic gallery you have to verify you are over 18, my website host asked me to use the site below..
Sorry to make you do this, I know it is a hassle :(
and then a link to an adultfriendfinder (NSFW) type site called SweetHeartsConnection (NSFW).

Clicking around the site I became convinced that it was a fake. I ran a whois lookup on them to discover that they’re based out of Cyprus, and became convinced that the whole site is a scam for an all access porn portal called Adultbureau.com, which is based out of New Zealand which pays $15 to the referring webmaster.

By now I’m pissed. Taking a closer look at the picture of the personal that I replied to and the website from the email reveals that the pictures are from two different people. The domain hosting the page is a play on easyspace.com or webspace.com, the kind of site that offers people free web hosting. Going to the root domain for “Jenny’s” page however reveals a directory listing in which Ms. Jenny page is the only one hosted on the thing. The domain registrant is listed as someone in Chicago, IL. There’s no telling how far the rabbit hole goes on this one.

I fired off another IM to “Jenny”, asking me for some more information to clairify that she’s really who she says she is. Of course I expect no reply. I do expect to start seeing a lot of spam start coming to the email to which I gave her. I will also report the ad to Yahoo, and it will be interesting to see what they do about it.

I am just awestruck at the many levels of this thing. I can easily imagine someone signing up for several hundred screen names, creating fake personals ads to go along with them, and then creating a customized chatterbot to reply to incoming messages as above. The email gets sent out automatically and the person behind the scam gets rich off of those unfortunate enough to to fall for the scam.

Referrer spam whores and links for today

I recently added this site to Technocrati and blo.gs and ever since then I have been getting horrible referrer spam. It’s totally messed up any idea I have of how many people are actually coming to the site. Sex sites, personals sites, they’re all making me think that they’re linking people to this site but they’re just trying to get more traffic to thiers. Whores.

Anyways I’m looking for a new place to live right now, if anyone has a nice house in Newport News and they’d like to rent a room out, please let me know.

Anyway this is what I’ve found today:

This guy is a dick. He wrapped everything, I mean everything in his sister’s bedroom in aluminum foil while she was away.

How Many Names Hath God? My fave: The archangel Gabriel was summoned by the will of God. Gabriel bowed his head and replied, “How may I serve you, Jimmy? I mean, Lord?” Thus followed the awkwardest silence in the history of heaven.

It’s written all over your face . Using thermal imaging of bloodflow to the eyes, MRI’s of brain activity and eye tracking as the new polygraph.

Firefox spyware infects IE? A visit to a particluar website turns ugly for one person. A must read if you have Sun Java Runtime Environment installed. Also affects other web browsers.

Firefox extensions

One of the great things about Firefox is the extensions that you can add to it. I added Auto Copy to copy text to the clipboard just by selecting it, Foxy Tunes to control Winamp, JustBlogIt for easy posting to this site, and Tabbrowser Preferences , which allows you to edit some of the hidden options allowed within Mozilla.

Ah, the beauty of open source.

[update] Also check out Spell Bound, which allows you to run a spellcheck on forms within a webpage, so that you can check that message board or blog entry before posting it.

Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash

Found a great page that has mp3’s of Johnny Cash playing with Bob Dylan. I’m listening to it right now, but you have to download each song individually. I went ahead and made a zip file so you can download all the songs at once. Also a .torrent file here.

Check the rest of the site also, it’s got tons of other great stuff like Hendrix jamming with BB King and gossip and other news.

[update] I had to take down the .zip file becuase my server got overloaded, and I fixed the torrent file so that it actually works now.

Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” Flash animation

Just the thing to get me going this morning. Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ set to animation by Michal Levy.

[update] Fixed the broken link.

Last few days links

Here’s all the stuff I’ve been clipping these past few days.

Researchers in Siberia have been trying to domesticate foxes thru selective breeding for the past 45 years. They are now at the point where the foxes wag thier tails and respond to human cues. Check out the pictures and you will want one.

How stuff works has a nice writeup on what’s so special about Firefox. I’ll be emailing it to a few people I know, as it clearly explains what I have so far been unable to articulate to everyone.

The music industry thinks it is winning the battle on file sharing becuase they’ve sued a bunch of people and Kazaa’s popularity has waned. Not to mention the fact that Kazaa sucks anyways and this is the reason why people aren’t using it anymore.

Vonage is having problems. Makes me wonder as my kit hasn’t come in the mail yet. There’s also the fact that they’re having problems handling 911 calls.

A Kent State student sold some Microsoft products on ebay and was then sued by MS. He’s representing himself and seems to be doing well. Here’s the details from TechDirt.

Interesting info on the current reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field and possible effects of it on our world.

The Seattle Times reports that Paul O’Neill is proposing a new Social Security plan that would give all newborns $2000 each year up to thier 18th birthday, which with the compounded interest on such an account would enable every American to retire a millionaire.

RSS Overload

I’ve been experimenting with RSS feeds lately, using Mozilla Thunderbird as an RSS feeder instead of Bloglines, as it doesn’t seem to be correctly keeping track of which feeds I’ve read. It seems to have some kind of problem remembering which articles I’ve already seen. Thunderbird downloads each entry as a separate mail message, and so I can ‘mark as read’ whenever I’m done with a particular feed. Thunderbird however, seems to have a problem downloading the feeds. For example on my Metafilter feed, the latest item is from the 5th of this month, whereas Bloglines correctly shows it up to date. Of course the best thing about Bloglines is that you can access it from anywhere, which is the main reason I’ve used it over Thunderbird. Bloglines also lets you clip an article or post it to a blog, and right now I’m trying how to set it up to post it to this blog here. There was an interesting hack on how to change the ‘post to blog’ link to ‘post to del.icio.us’ instead, but I havent’ found it yet.

Enter BlogBot. It syncs Bloglines with Outlook, or you can sub to any other feed that you want. It also has a ‘post to blog’ button that I haven’t quite gotten to work yet. I’m not sure how much I like working in Outlook, so I downloaded the trial version of FeedDemon, which has a much more elegant interface, and also will sync with Bloglines.

There’s also another site called NewsGator that is very similar to Bloglines. I’ll be testing it out here in the next few days.

Been a long time

Wow. what a week. I finally got around to my annual reinstallation of windows. My destop system became so unstable, and I had no choice. I used BartPE to copy everything on my root drive to a sub folder and then I reinstalled Windows. It’s something I recommend that everyone does after a year or longer; your system gets so bogged down otherwise.

It’s a real pain in the ass trying to get all of your stuff transfered back to the point where you can get some work done, but it ’s worth it. It’s nice seeing my computer running like it should again.

To help make things easier
I put together a folder of programs in one download that should be run right after reloading windows. It includes copies of AVG Antivirus, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird; Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative, two installations removed of all the bloatware; Microsoft Antispyware; Winrar, a winzip alternative; the Java installer, Azureus bitorrent client, and the popular mp3 player Winamp. I also discovered Executive Software’s Diskeeper. It’s a ’set it and forget it’ defrag program. After almost 2 years it was amazing how messed up my drives were.

I’m going to try and post the package up soon. I’m need to create a self extracting .zip file and then it will be ready.

Somebody might have noticed that dahifi.net is now no-www compliant, meaning that all traffic to www.dahifi.net gets silently redirected to dahifi.net. It is annoying to type in a web address without the www. and get a 404 error. Just bad webmastering I say.