the blog quebecois

Hmmm. My apologies to anyone viewing this with a Netscape browser. I just noticed the problem a couple of days ago and had to do a bit of research to find out what was going on.

In fact, I usually use Netscape myself, but I post to this site with IE, because the WYSIWYG interface requires it. Because I'm a dunce with HTML. (Though I can throw acronyms around with abandon.)

A Netscape browser will show the pages with question marks dispersed randomly throughout.

This is because Crimsonblog was written on some MS software that apparently interprets some characters incorrectly. I didn't suspect this because my earlier blog on Crimsonzine worked fine with either browser.

A slightly more technical explanation:

It's people writing web pages with Windows software that uses the wrong character for apostrophes. Instead of the ' character, it uses a Windows specific character set that pretends to be iso-8859-X compatible but has characters in the "non printable control code" part of the ISO character sets. That's why you see them as question marks.

It's all a part of Gates' evil plan to destroy Netscape.

Although Netscape is doing a fine enough job of doing that all by itself. Its bookmarking function alone is enough to make you tear your hair out. And in any case, Netscape is pinin' for the fjords, according to Paul Kedrosky of the National Post.

AOL Time-Warner and Microsoft settled their lawsuit last week. The agreement amounts to a death sentence for Netscape, the former Internet browser kingpin. While that wasn't the avowed purpose of the deal, the result will be no different than if it was.

If this payment constitutes defeat, Microsoft would happily be defeated more often in future. After all, fear of Microsoft made AOL pay billions for a defunct Netscape, partly in hopes it could resuscitate the doomed company, but more to use the company as a legal stalking horse. But for its $8-billion investment, AOL received $750-million. That is a lousy rate of return in any economy.

Victoria Times-Colonist Apr. 25/2003

Even people who work in computer science at the university are not surprised that women are repelled. So the university is spending $30,000 to recruit and retain women in the field.

Uh, how? $30,000 worth of noseplugs and room freshener?

The 10:1 ratio of men to women in computer science is (drum roll) . . . all the men's fault!

If the women were as deeply interested in programming as the men are, they wouldn't notice. In fact they'd be pretty ripe themselves.

A letter writer to The Globe and Mail some years ago collected a lot of grief when he made the reasonable observation that women mainly used computers only as a tool for the task at hand.

Men were much more likely to tinker with them, whether that meant fiddling with the screen preferences or digging deeper into the system itself.

One outraged woman wrote in to say: "I've just finished installing a CD-ROM drive and a new sound card and I had to edit the AUTOEXEC.BAT file and..."

These are certainly praiseworthy accomplishments, though I doubt I'd be bragging about them to, say, a bunch of assembly-language purists.

I was most impressed with one guy I met in a Fidonet programming echo, who wrote a complete telecom package in GW-Basic, just to see if he could do it.

"It works okay, but it kinda sucks as far as speed goes," was his verdict.

This is why they invented the Internet. In cyberspace, no one knows if you're a dog or if you just smell like one.

If I had one wish it would be this:

World peace. No, scratch that.

I wish I could program computers at the level of Sid Meier (Civilization, etc.) or Will Wright (The Sims, etc.).

Then I could spend my evenings more productively than . . . er, whatever it is I spend them on now.

Lately I've been spending them on trying to migrate my Crimsonblog site to my homepage. I just now figured out how to get the archives to work but the formatting is still a mess.

This is a long way from barbarian armies gathering or angular women shim-shim-shimmying on the screen, but I do the best I can.

Weep not for gnotalex, for gnotalex will not weep for you.

I have no idea what that means, but the parallelism is irresistable.

And I must at all costs post, lest I be forgotten.

Via Hit and Run.

Are you a man or a woman?

male. Are you a man or a woman?

I am a female robot entity. Are you a man or a woman?

I am a male robot entity.

Thanks for telling me your gender, AFRObot. Male humans enjoy chatting with me.

I prefer to be a male.

I'm not sure if I would like to do it. What's it like?

Like one of the greatest pleasures you can imagine.

Interesting comparison.

I thought so too.

"Conversation" between two bots, ZolaOnAOL and AFRObot. The Turing Test postulates that if a human conversing with a remote computer could not distinguish it from another human, then a level of true artificial intelligence exists.

I suppose that the reverse of the Turing Test is already accomplished -- these bots have no idea whether they're talking to another bot or to a rather dense teenager.

baker baker baking a cake
make me a day
make me whole again
and I wonder what's in a day
what's in your cake this time

-- tori amos

Yes! Who needs a CD writer, when you could have this? For only $29.99, complete with:

* 1 replacement light bulb
* 1 additional tiny pan
* 6 Mixes for your PC Ez-Bake oven: Chocolate Cake, Vanilla Cake, Peanut Butter Cookie, Chocolate Chip Cookie, and Caffeinated Meatloaf (comes dehydrated)
* Special office friendly recipes including "Duck Sauce Packet Tart", "Vending Machine Casserole", and "Non-Dairy Creamer Creme Brulee"

Now the computer savvy among us can relive the fun of having your very own personal mini-oven with the PC Ez-Bake oven! It fits in a 5 1/4" drive bay and plugs right into your power supply with the included Molex connector. Also included is "PC Ez-Cook", the open-source oven controller software with hundreds of easy and creative recipes for your PC Ez-Bake oven, and even a fuzzy-logic cooking control system to precisely measure the doneness of your cake, cookie, or cheese souffle. The PC Ez-Bake oven can even be used to cook your Pop Tarts, Bagel Bites, or any tiny or flat food. YUM!

Q: Dear Ask Mr. Computer Guy,

Will magnetic fields destroy data?

Damned if I know. Try PC World.

For venerable floppies, this statement holds true. We placed a 99-cent magnet on a 3.5-inch floppy for a few seconds. The magnet stuck to the disk and ruined its data.

Fortunately, most modern storage devices, such as SD and CompactFlash memory cards, are immune to magnetic fields. "There's nothing magnetic in flash memory, so [a magnet] won't do anything," says Bill Frank, executive director of the CompactFlash Association. "A magnet powerful enough to disturb the electrons in flash would be powerful enough to suck the iron out of your blood cells," says Frank.

I'm going to be busy for the next few days. Back on Monday.

Via Fazed

d00d1111 th3s3 r so k00l i kant w8 to get one11111

Via Linkmachinego.com

Stuck with that last minute Christmas purchase for the guy who has everything? I'll bet he doesn't have this.

Yours for cheap on eBay -- the last bid was $5.50 US. It's a 300 MHz Micron Pentium II with a 2GB hard drive, 128 megs of memory, and a new install of Windows 98.

Via Fazed

Here's what I did on the weekend:

Unplug, unplug, unplug, unplug, unplug, unplug, unplug, unplug. Lift, strain, wrestle, wrestle. Unplug. Unscrew, unscrew, unscrew, unscrew, unscrew, unscrew, unscrew. Unclip, unclip, unclip, unclip, wrestle, wrestle, swear, wrestle, Boing! Unscrew, unscrew, unscrew, unscrew. Tug, wrestle, skin knuckles, swear, get pliers, tug, tug, Pop! Install, uninstall, install right way around. Plug, plug, plug, plug, plug. Clip, clip, clip, clip. Screw, screw, screw, screw. Wrestle, wrestle, push, swear, bang into place with fist. Screw, screw, screw, screw, screw, screw, screw. Lift, strain, wrestle, wrestle. Plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug. Boot. KEYBOARD NOT FOUND Swear. Plug. Boot. DEVICE NOT FOUND Swear.

Wait a minute. Did I forget to hook up the power supply again?

Repeat above, but with more swearing.

The story starts (I'm shortcutting here) with an [Please control your cussing] insulting everyone on the IRC channel. Most people there believed it was rather funny, but it got even more funny. For information: The dangerous hacker is called bitchchecker and the one being hacked and original author of the comments, who is talking here, is known as Elch. 127.0.0.1 is always the IP-adress of the computer you're currently using, any request there will return to your computer.

If you can follow 3l3t3 h4x0r d00d slang, this is pretty funny: Some loudmouth on an IRC channel threatening to wipe out someone's else's hard drive and managing instead to kill his own. (I have my doubts about this -- I've never accidentally or on-purpose reformatted my HD while online, but I'd think that the Internet connection would be severed early in the process. The dialogue seems authentic enough, though.)

Well, I finally solved my browser problem. I was working on something and looked up to see that the monitor display had rotated counterclockwise 90 degrees. It was as if I'd picked up the monitor and put it down on its left side. Uh-oh, thinks me. This could be a sign that something might be wrong.

Now the recommended fix for this problem is to indeed flip the monitor on its side so that everything's right-side up and there you go.

But part of me hungered for a more elegant solution. My first thought was that the monitor was blown, but it has an onscreen menu and when I brought that up it was correctly positioned. Windows booted normally until it loaded the Welcome splash screen, when it again went sideways. So it's the video card or the driver.

The video card reported that it was in tip-top shape, thankyewverymuch (and if you think it's a lot of fun checking these things out while tilting your head at an angle it was never meant to go -- well, you would be wrong). I reinstalled the video drivers with no effect.

Then I remembered that XP has something called "recover points," by which you can restore a working copy of the system if something goes wrong. I was under the impression that it was done automatically, 'cause, like, that's what the documentation says. Since my software seemed pretty stable and the only hardware I had installed on the machine was a second hard drive, I never thought of manually creating one. Guess I should have.

About the only thing left to try was reinstalling Windows. I hate doing that, because it takes a long time and if it fails you're truly hooped. I did it often enough with Windows 98, though, so I found the install disk and put it in the drive to learn to my horror that XP (or at least this particular eMachines distro) doesn't allow for a non-destructive install -- it wipes the C drive first.

So I finally figured out how to force it to boot into Safe mode and spent the next few hours copying files to my D drive. Fortunately for my irreplacable collection of midget porn porn illegally downloaded music irreplacable files, I had enough room.

I took a deep breath and started the install, which took surprisingly little time. And what do you know, my video problems went away. As did my FTP program and some other things I forgot to copy.

Could have been worse, much worse. Looking on the bright side, my browser now works flawlessly, too.

Uh-oh.

Reuters:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday warned of eight "critical" security flaws in its Windows operating system and Office software that could allow attackers to take control of a computer.

Microsoft, whose Windows operating system runs on 90 percent of the world's computers, issued patches to fix the problems as part of its monthly security bulletin. It was the biggest such update since February 2005.

The world's biggest software maker defines a flaw as "critical" when the vulnerability could allow a damaging Internet worm to replicate without the user doing anything to the machine.

Six of the critical flaws related to Windows and two affected Office. Microsoft also issued another two security warnings it rated at its second-highest level of "important" for Windows as well as one it gave a severity rating of "moderate."

The quickest way to get the patches is to click Start --> All Programs --> Windows Update. Microsoft has recently upgraded its installer, so you might have to download that first.

Easier still is to set your computer up for automatic updates. Here's how:

1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.

2. Depending on which Control Panel view you use, Classic or Category, do one of the following:

* Click System, and then click the Automatic Updates tab.

* Click Performance and Maintenance, click System, and then click the Automatic Updates tab.

3. Click the option that you want. Make sure Automatic Updates is not turned off.

Radar magazine attempts to play the interlocutor between Sgt. STAR, a US Army recruitment avatar, and Anna, an IKEA chat-bot:

Radar: What you got for guns, STAR?

Sgt. STAR: During basic training you will learn Basic Rifle Marksmanship and are required to qualify as marksman, sharpshooter, or expert on the M16A2 rifle to graduate.

Radar: Be honest, Anna. Would you rather have an M16A2 �- or some crappy drop-leaf table?

Anna: Please have a look at the tables.

Radar: I�m going to pretend you didn�t say that.

Anna: I have every confidence you will.

Mildly amusing, but I think it'd be funnier if Sgt. STAR and Anna "talked" to each other directly. The prejudices of the human (Bush = Bad; Gay = Good, etc.) gets in the way of machine-to-machine "communication," which can quickly achieve Zen-like weirdness. Maybe I'll give it a try or experiment with some different bots if I get the time.

Free, that is. 450+ freeware utilities and applications for Windows. All the links lead to the developers' websites, so there isn't much worry of spyware or viruses.

I can't vouch for all of them, but I've used quite a few, and they've all performed as advertised.

As a bonus, here's another 400 open-source programs.

Via Gadgetopia

The Telegraph:

Abraham Lincoln: A victim of buttbuttination?

Not an extract from an essay by a particularly poor history student, but a selection of the nonsense phrases created by automatic software designed to remove offensive words from articles posted on the internet.

The phenomena, known as “The Clbuttic Mistake” after a mangling of the word “classic” that is believed to be the first identified instance of the problem, can be found on tens of thousands of websites.

Vanity Fair:

As long as the lights were still on, though, the geek squads stayed focused on trying to figure out exactly what this worm intended to do. They were joined by a small citizen militia of amateur and professional analysts scattered across several continents, after private mailing lists for experts on malicious software posted copies of the worm’s voluminous, intricate code on the Web. In terms of functionality, this was the largest piece of malicious software that most researchers had ever seen, and orders of magnitude more complex in structure. (Malware’s previous heavyweight champion, the Conficker worm, was only one-twentieth the size of this new threat.) During the next few months, a handful of determined people finally managed to decrypt almost all of the program, which a Microsoft researcher named “Stuxnet.” On first glimpsing what they found there, they were scared as hell.

An interesting (not too technically-intimidating) look at the American(?)/Israeli(?)/Iranian(???) piece of mischief besetting the world's computers (or some small subset thereof).

National Post:

On Tuesday, the Opposition rejected Toews’ characterization.

Holding up his BlackBerry, NDP digital critic Charlie Angus said the bill would undermine the privacy of average Canadians.

“Now, every single Canadian citizen is walking around with an electronic prisoner’s bracelet,” Angus said after the tabling of the bill.

So that's what you're calling your Blackberry these days, Charlie? Helluva sales pitch. I'm sure AIM appreciates it.

As to the substance of Toews legislation: Meh.

Repeat after me -- the police are not your friend. The government is not your friend.

TrueCrypt is your friend. My password is estimated to take about 60 quadrillion years for a desktop PC to crack; a supercomputer might shave a few quadrillion off, but it still would take place sometime after the death of the universe and/or Lizzie May being elected PM.

The Register:

With the help of two graduate students, Halderman started to examine the software. Despite it being a relatively clean Ruby on Rails build, they spotted a shell injection vulnerability within a few hours. They figured out a way of writing output to the images directory on the compromised server, and of encrypting traffic so that the front-end intrusion detection system couldn't spot them. The team also managed to guess the login details for the terminal server used by the voting system. This wasn't exactly difficult, since the user name and password were both "admin".

GQ:

The hacker's eyes widened as the image filled his screen. There, without her makeup, stood Scarlett Johansson, her famous face unmistakable in the foreground, her naked backside reflected in the bathroom mirror behind her, a cell phone poised in her hand snapping the shot.

An interesting piece about Chris Chaney, the hacker* looking at a sixty-year prison sentence for breaking into the email accounts of various celebrities.

* It's probably inaccurate to label him a "hacker," as he has no specialized computer skills. He, like the guy who cracked Sarah Palin's Gmail account, did so by guessing correctly the challenge questions (What was your high school's name/favorite color, etc.) that the system queries of you if you need to retrieve a lost password.

Wired:

A massive, highly sophisticated piece of malware has been newly found infecting systems in Iran and elsewhere and is believed to be part of a well-coordinated, ongoing, state-run cyberespionage operation.

The malware, discovered by Russia-based antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab, is an espionage toolkit that has been infecting targeted systems in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, the Israeli Occupied Territories and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa for at least two years.

Dubbed “Flame” by Kaspersky, the malicious code dwarfs Stuxnet in size — the groundbreaking infrastructure-sabotaging malware that is believed to have wreaked havoc on Iran’s nuclear program in 2009 and 2010. Although Flame has both a different purpose and composition than Stuxnet, and appears to have been written by different programmers, its complexity, the geographic scope of its infections and its behavior indicate strongly that a nation-state is behind Flame, rather than common cyber-criminals — marking it as yet another tool in the growing arsenal of cyberweaponry.

The researchers say that Flame may be part of a parallel project created by contractors who were hired by the same nation-state team that was behind Stuxnet and its sister malware, DuQu.

I'll bet the Iranians are kicking themselves for not shelling out for the extended-warranty at Best Buy. They'd have the Geek Squad® on the job, killing that virus dead -- or more probably, wiping the hard drives and reinstalling Windows as many times as it takes. Sure, they're CIA; but they're quite pleasant and do good (well, acceptable) work.

Gizmodo:

Anonymous has never been a well-run organization—it's at its best and most fundamental when it isn't really organized at all. That's what used to make it so dangerous; thousands upon thousands of hiveminded hackers and hack-minded who would DDoS on command and break website security for the cause. Emerging from this mess was LulzSec, an elite and independent Delta Force of Anons, commanding respect among sympathizers and fear among corporations. They got things done—giant things, like embarrassing major credit cards, dumping gigantic data leaks like clockwork, and even knocking down the CIA's website.

And then everyone went to prison.

Today, Anon lacks the talent and semi-cohesion it once boasted across the net, and its most recent online crusade is an embarrassing reminder. This is less a war than the hacker equivalent of egging someone's house and then smoking weed behind a Denny's.

When I was in training to become a young hacker, I was warned (well, I just read it somewhere, but my initial description is much more hackerish) to never try to hack government computers. The people running them weren't the brightest on the block; but they could command unlimited money, time and resources to run any intruder to ground. And they don't have to be the best at anything -- they can bring in the hired guns (see above, "unlimited money") who are.

As it turned out, it was all rather a moot point, as I turned out to have the hacking skills (or skillz, if you prefer) of your average turnip.

At any rate, I doubt the Israelis are very much worried about this gaggle of clueless script-kiddies. They are the folks, after all, who probably wrote the Stuxnet worm.