Ever since I saw the wonderfull goodness of my brother's free iPod, I have been especially wanting one. Please help me get my Free iPod, and while you're at it, my Free designer handbag, also I would really like a Free Digital Camera, a Free iPod Shuffle, and a free Mini Mac.
Tonight, I sent my brother an IM telling him 'hi,' he replied with "Die Microsoft." Because of a little mishap (computer on top bunk, computer falls to floor), he had to get his harddrive replaced, which means he had to install his unpatched version of Windows XP, and like a good computer user, he installed Zone Alarm before connecting to the internet to download all of the Windows Updates. It didn't help. Almost instantly, he got slammed with all kinds of trojans and spyware. Next up, install updates, but oh wait, SP2 crashes near the end of the install, and when he gets it shut down (which of course he has to do manually) he gets all kinds of error messages upon restart, tries to get SP2 to finish installing, but instead XP totally crashes and won't even boot and he has to run the XP repair install to get it to run. At the time I sent the IM, he was still trying to get it to work, everything kept crashing and he was about ready to kill somebody (in case the feds are reading this, it's figurative not literal). Instead of killing anyone, he's having me download SuSE Linux for him so I can burn it and mail him the CDs, because he can't do it himself because his computer keeps crashing, and in the meantime he's partitioning the harddrive then reformatting and doing a new Windows installation with another partition ready for SuSE to be installed when he gets the CDs.
He's vowed that his next computer will be a Powerbook.
I love my Mac because it is not Windows. I love it because it's just so darn cool.
That is all. peace out.
What I find more interesting than the fact that Paris Hilton's phone was hacked or what was on it is how the information made it out from the dark underworld of the internet into more mainstream channels. Best I can tell, news that the phone was hacked and the link to the hosting site first made it out on IRC, which is too be expected. This would have been some time late Saturday. From there, it seems to have gone to the LUElinks message boards, which I will not link to, but which my brother has access to because users spun it off from a gaming message board he visits--the people who started it wanted to be able to do whatever they wanted without having to worry about moderators. My brother rarely visits it anymore because there is apparently a lot of illegal stuff that goes on, but when I came across mention of the board I asked him to go on and find out what was what. Anyway, the news of the hack first hit the LUE boards around 1 am Sunday morning, and at that point it mustn't have spread very far because the message board denizens apparently were successful at calling and getting through to at least some of the people in the address book. One person kept answering her phone, which doesn't exactly make sense to me, when you're being bombared by calls from teenage males talking about LUElinks, most people with common sense will set their phone to ring to voice mail. It seems that it was through LUElinks that the hack filtered out to the rest of the internet, so Feds, if you're reading this, you might want to see how the people posting on there knew so soon after it happened that it was posted by someone who connected to the internet through an open wireless network and who went through a Spanish (I think that was the country, I can't remember for certain) relay to hide their trail because that isn't exactly common information (assuming it's true).
I've been wanting to switch to a Mac for a while, and combined with the money I've been saving and the educational discount that I get since I'm taking spanish at the community college and thus am technically a student, I was able to buy a 12 inch Powerbook tonight from the Apple store. Man is it sweet. Finally, no more Windows! whoo hooo!
I must say that the best part of my shopping experience is that for once I was able to walk into a computer store and be treated as a first class citizen--other computer stores I've gone to act as though a female looking for a computer is an interloper, but they didn't. Way to go in the customer service department, Apple.
I want this shirt. I think that the worst thing about having a degree in computer science is that whenever anybody you know has a computer problem, no matter how small, instead of trying to fix it themselves, they come running to you. I feel like I'm enabling people in their computer illiteracy when I help them, because they're never going to learn if somebody does it for them, and the reason I know how to fix things is because I had to learn or else it wasn't going to get fixed. Ok, I'm done ranting, I feel better now.
A few weeks ago I installed the Adblock plugin for Mozilla, and it's been wonderful to be able to visit my favorite websites and not have to deal with gaudy animated ads taking up half the page. I had to use IE for something, and it really made me appreciate how nice it is to browse and not see ads all over. This is yet another reason to switch to the Mozilla browser (if faster browsing, tabbed browsing, and fewer crashes than IE wasn't reason enough).
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new study out on internet usage. According to the summary 44% of internet users have posted content of some kind or another somewhere on the internet. The study found that 10% of those surveyed have posted something on an online newsgroup, and 2% have blogs. These numbers seem like they might be low, so I'm wondering if the data is skewed downward by the fact that the survey was conducted by telephone. There has been some indications that young adults are less likely than the rest of the population to have land line telephones and rely on cell phones instead, and this, combined with the fact that young adults are historically the hardest group to accurately survey suggests that they may have failed to get a good survey of the people most likely to be blogging and posting on newsgroups.
Some little punk kid from this youth Bible study that my brother has been going to decided that he was going to hack my brother's e-mail and instant messenger accounts. My brother logged onto his yahoo mail this afternoon and found a message in his inbox asking him to confirm a change in e-mail address for his AIM account, so he went to log onto AIM and found that the kid had changed all the buddy list folders into a message about how "you didn't believe me when you sat in my chair and I said I'd own you, now you see what a great hacker I am," or something like that. The kid clearly think's he's an excellent hacker, and goes around bragging to everyone he knows, but it's pretty obvious that he's a luser 5cr1p7 k1dd13.
When my brother found out what the kid had done, he called up the kid's parents, who told my brother that they would deal with the kid when he got home, but whatever they did to him didn't sink in real well because when he was made to call and apologize, all he did was defend himself and insist that it wasn't illegal or morally wrong.
I can't believe how stupid the kid is--he tells my brother he's going to hack him and then he goes and does it and brags about, even going so far as replying to a message my brother had gotten from someone they both know, identifying himself, and going on about how he's such a great hacker. He's the kind of kid who, if he's not stopped, is going to get a bigger and bigger ego, and next thing he knows, he's going to find the FBI at his doorstep because he tried to hack a government computer or something. Luser script kiddie.
I think the following quote from Gone in 60 Seconds is appropo (replace "gun" with "script" and "stealing a car" with "hacking"): "Why, you lazy-a** bully! Any a***h*** can pull a gun on somebody! You do not know the first thing about stealing a car! Boy, you need a role model!"
This article is a hilarious spoof of Mattel and Barbie. Also, check out Hacker Barbie.
Now, if only they did have a Barbie Linux. It sure would be better than those dumb Barbie computer stuff that they do have--it might actually teach girls something about computers, unlike those dumb Barbie fashion games that Mattel puts out.
I was watching Cavuto on Fox News this afternoon and caught the story about IBM's new Linux ad which will start running this weekend during NFL football and the US Open men's final. The ad is pretty slick, and ends with "Linux. The Future is Open."
So the feds have caught one of the people who created a variant of the Blaster worm. The media (at least on cable news) is making it seem like the kid is a much bigger fish than he actually is--the first report I saw on Fox News made it sound like they caught the creator, and only when you look at the details do you discover that this Jeffrey Lee Parson kid isn't much more than a script kiddie. All he did was make a couple of small changes to the worm, and his variant only infected about 7,000 computers, which is nothing compared to the number of computers infected by the original worm. Parson wasn't too bright, because he had his variant contact his website, which he registed using his real name and address. In other words, the feds barely had to do any work to catch him.
The thing is, the only people who ever get caught are teenagers who don't do a good job of covering their tracks, which gives people the impression that the only people who commit these sort of computer crimes are bored and isolated teenage males. We don't know who the people who don't get caught are, and I wouldn't be surprised if the people who don't get caught do not fit the teenage-male-as-hacker/virus-writer demographic. The teenage males aren't the ones I'm worried about, they aren't good enough to avoid getting caught. The people I'm worried about are the ones who are criminally minded instead of just bored/curious, and who have the skills to really create a mess. I don't think that we've really seen the extent of what could be done by dedicated criminals or terrorists.
