Security gone amok

Phone call yesterday afternoon:

Him: “Paul, you know that computer you were sitting at down in the lab earlier?”
Me: “Yeah, what about it?”
Him: “I got a call from Corporate Security. Evidently it was pinging the corporate network.”
Me: “Yeah, I was looking for a machine connected to the network so I could read my email.”
Him: “Well, they want you to stop pinging.”
Me: “I did about 3 pings of relay.foo.com, and then when I saw it was connected, I telnetted to it.”
Him: “Well, I’m going to have to disconnect that machine from the network.”
Me: “DUDE! WTF?”

So I’m down in the lab again, doing this test that takes over an hour to run, and using a different computer to check my email. And this time I was careful to test its network connectivity by attempting a telnet, rather than using one of those evil nasty pings.

I needed that like I needed a hole in my head

A few days ago the sysadmin at the National Capital Freenet emails me to ask if the news system relies on any files in the /, /usr or /var partitions, because he wants to upgrade to the latest and greatest Solaris and doesn’t want to blow anything of mine away. I said no, I don’t think so. Ok, he tells me, I’ll be doing that on Thursday.
Continue reading “I needed that like I needed a hole in my head”

Imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever

1984 arrived 20 years late last night. It didn’t come with violence and guns and tanks, all it took was an unholy alliance between three things:

  • a political party that will do anything to win, from lying to massive voter disenfranchisement, and which is so full of their own lies that they use “reality based” as a perjorative.
  • a media that follows the orders of their owners, who know that they personally are better off even if the country and the world are considerably worse off under that political party.
  • a public who swallows their lies and does what their told without thinking. A public that believes that one man is better on fighting terrorism even though it was his opponent that was fighting terrorism 20 years ago when he was snorting cocaine in Camp David, a public that believes that one man is a better war president even though it’s his sole and complete fault that we’re even in this war, that this war was entered because of his lies and every major decision he’s made on this war has been wrong, a public that thinks that because they got a $300 check a few years ago that they’re reaping the benefits of these tax cuts that are really only helping the incredibly rich (and whose economic policies are actually reducing their chances of becoming incredibly rich themselves).

I weep for America.

I wonder if I could get a job back in Canada.

Pimp my …. KAYAK?

I’m working on a decoration for my kayak. Preliminary sketches here and here.

It’s supposed to be a loon, but it looks more like a merganser to me. Actually, that design is too similar to the one I copied – I’m going to be changing the interior of the body some as soon as I figure out how to make smoothly curving lines in Photoshop.