random neuron misfires

In other news, it looks like the Ministry of Truth was just born. From the article:

The Pentagon has set up a new unit to focus on promoting its message across 24-hour rolling news outlets, and particularly on the internet. […] A Pentagon memo seen by the Associated Press news agency said the new unit will “develop messages” for the 24-hour news cycle and aim to “correct the record“.

A spokesman said the unit would monitor media such as weblogs and would also employ “surrogates”, or top politicians or lobbyists who could be interviewed on TV and radio shows.

This is the same government that has stolen elections, runs military detention camps in other totalitarian regimes simply to skirt the law requiring trials in America, and many other illegal activities.

When you have the power to rewrite the laws to make your previously illegal acts legal, where does the power end?

Congress has allowed our spy agencies to watch American citizens without probable cause.

The Executive Branch has condoned and practiced torture of untried suspects without due process and will continue to torture to any person with senses intact, which the perpetrators would never submit to themselves, and the American public has quietly accepted this without any resistance.

Now we’ve suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus and given the President the power to deploy troops domestically. What possible reason would Bush have to deploy troops inside US borders? We’re not in danger of being invaded…

Prediction: Perhaps the suspension the 2008 elections because of the “War in Iran” (not Iraq) might be one reason? There would be a revolution, a second Civil War, if that happened, and I’m sure .gov would want to retain order and control within the borders. Invading Iraq so we could secure ground space for an air attack on Iran, was not a smart move… There’s more of us than there are of you.

We know what you’re doing…

How is spreading pro-US government-sponsored propaganda any different than what Al-Jazeera is doing every day? Hint: It isn’t.

I believe we should have to engage with our own government. That is precisely what makes a democracy work. Democracy is based on a belief that includes removing and constantly checking those in power. Our current administration will fight to the death (including killing our own citizens to drum up support for a war) to make sure that we don’t remove the power they think they’ve gained through their illegal efforts.

Democracy by definition is a representative government and the majority of the citizens support laws that are in agreement with their beleifs and lifestyles. Since these laws aren’t being passed in accordance with those beliefs, we are not in a democracy any longer, and so we should continue to fight to get our government back.

These people took an oath when they entered office and they have repeatedly broken that oath, and they should be punished for their crimes.

Don’t let them take the last 200+ years of fighting for democracy and throw them in the trash. Once we lose these rights and liberties, we cannot gain them back.

Don’t let them slip away!

Another blow was struck yesterday, as illegal, warrantless wiretaps were basically made legal.

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.

We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

Now do you begin to understand me?

You are now seeing the beginning of the end, as the last tatters of our Constitution are shredded and used as fuel to burn the Judicial system to the ground.

No really, think about it.

Terrorism has but one objective, a political one.

The “Muslim” terrorists broadly want to establish Muslim governments (or governments that are more fundamentalist) in the countries where they live or operate. They target Westerners purely as a means to that end; to deter Western governments from propping up non-Muslim governments.

If you’re inconvenienced, killed, afraid, paranoid, lose civil liberties; they really don’t care. Its not their goal or objective.

If the US withdrew from the Middle East you would probably see the domestic threat of attacks decrease or stop entirely.

But now because of this threat they’ve “disrupted“, we can no longer carry some useful and standard items on a plane, especially a long, 8+ hour flight from the Uk to the US.

“Passengers in Britain faced delays as tighter security was hastily enforced at the country’s airports and additional measures were put in place for all flights. Laptop computers, mobile phones, iPods, and remote controls were among the items banned from being carried on board.”

No audio, no video, no laptops, no phones, no music, no toothpaste, no breath mints, no hairspray and many other things.

The terrorists have already won.

If you’ve tried installing VMware on a recent Linux distribution (such as Ubuntu Edgy Eft), you’ve probably seen the following:

Using 2.6.x kernel build system.
make: Entering directory `/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only'
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.17-5-686/build/include/.. SUBDIRS=$PWD SRCROOT=$PWD/. modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.17-5-686'
  CC [M]  /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.h:20,
                 from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:49:
/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/./include/compat_wait.h:37:5: warning: "VMW_HAVE_EPOLL" is not defined
/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/./include/compat_wait.h:43:5: warning: "VMW_HAVE_EPOLL" is not defined
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.h:20,
                 from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:49:
/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/./include/compat_wait.h:60: error: conflicting types for â
include/linux/poll.h:62: error: previous declaration of â was here
/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:145: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:149: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.17-5-686'
make: *** [vmmon.ko] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only'
Unable to build the vmmon module.

To fix it, follow this procedure (or grab the script I wrote to make it easier, here)..

Uncompress vmnet.tar and edit vmnet-only/Makefile.kernel as follows:

vm_check_build = $(shell if $(CC) $(CPPFLAGS) $(CFLAGS) $(CFLAGS_KERNEL) \
        $(EXTRA_CFLAGS) -Iinclude2/asm/mach-default \
        -DKBUILD_BASENAME=\"$(DRIVER)\" \ # add this line
        -Werror -S -o /dev/null -xc $(1) \
        > /dev/null 2>&1; then echo "$(2)"; else echo "$(3)"; fi)

Do the same for vmmon.tar in vmmon-only. mv the existing tar files out of the way and tar these two directories back up and re-run vmware-install.pl from the top-level directory.

It should complete cleanly and without any errors.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t just supply the 1-line fixes as a diff, its because Ubuntu Edgy Eft broke patch(1), and it doesn’t patch back in cleanly… so I used the Swiss Army Chainsaw; perl!

I just wanted to say a quick comment regarding how the US government wants into VoIP at any cost:

You are innocent.

You have done nothing to give the government the right to investigate you or collect your phone records with the intent to prosecute you.

If you’re an American, take a few hours to protect what so many people have fought and died for: your rights to privacy and being innocent until proven guilty.

Use strong encryption, protect your rights, your families, and everything your forefathers died to grant you.

It looks like the lawsuit filed by the ACLU against AT&T was dismissed by the Federal judge yesterday.

Another notch in the belt of our current administration to violate the Constitution once again. Its ok, this is just a prelude to a massive, ongoing civil war within these borders. Not to worry, fair citizens, everything is proceeding as planned.

I found this comment interesting:

“Even if AT&T — or the government — is successful at having the suit dismissed, the onus will be on similarly situated corporations to develop safety mechanisms ensuring that they do not face the same type of scrutiny and potential lawsuits as AT&T is facing now,” said Sean P. Melvin of LaSalle University.

The official court opinion is pretty revealing on the matter.

From the Chicago Tribute article:

“First, the Terkel plaintiffs cannot establish whether AT&T has unlawfully disclosed their records in the past,” Kennelly wrote in a ruling issued Tuesday.

..because the plaintiffs were denied access to the records, as required by law, under the guise of “state secrets”, an excuse used far too frequently lately.

“Second, the plaintiffs cannot establish whether AT&T is currently disclosing their records, which would tend to show that there is a real and immediate threat of repeated injury.”

Let me try to sum this up:

1. We are not conducting such surveillance, nor have we done anything illegal.
2. The reason we have not done anything illegal is because you cannot demonstrate that AT&T provided records to the government.
3. Forcing the government to provide such evidence might alert the terrorists that this surveillance program, which does NOT exist, is watching them, making us less safe.
4. Therefore, this case should be dismissed.

That about covers it. Any questions?

I was just turned on to something called PowerCranks today while reading a story about high-tech Tour de France. This product really seems like it could be a winner in a lot of areas.

From their website:

• Fully train the hip flexors and hamstring muscles that are otherwise difficult to train
• Enable neuromuscular changes that improve cycling efficiency and running form
• Balance the muscle effort and improve the coordination in lower extremities and core which can lower the risk of injury
• Improve running ability while training in a non-impact environment
• Act as a rehabilitation tool since the good leg cannot assist the bad leg (thereby utilizing all the major muscle groups in the legs).
• Nothing beats a PowerCranksâ„¢ workout! Twice as many muscles exercised results in increased basal metabolic rate compared to standard biking or spinning

Basically its a crank with a clutch that takes the backpressure off of the stroke, forcing you to use both legs to power the bike, all the way around the stroke, removing the dreaded “dead spot” in the stroke.

They’re definitely NOT cheap, but if you’re interested in top-performance from your legs, and you’re training to get better, this seems like a solid way to do that. (There’s even a set on eBay right now for $200.00, and they’re the xLite model).

The other interesting application for these, is rehabilitation. If you’ve hurt or damaged your leg in any way, you can’t push the bike with the same power as the ‘good’ leg. Having the independent clutch in the cranks will let your legs work at their best, even if they aren’t equal.

I wonder if these are allowed in by the UCI for racing events…

If you’re using the ATI driver (fglrx) on your Linux machine and are suddenly getting these errors:

FGLTexMgr: open of shared memory object failed (Permission denied)
__FGLTexMgrCreateObject: __FGLTexMgrSHMmalloc failed!!!
fglX11AllocateManagedSurface: __FGLTexMgrCreateObject failed!!
FGLTexMgr: open of shared memory object failed (Permission denied)
__FGLTexMgrCreateObject: __FGLTexMgrSHMmalloc failed!!!
fglX11AllocateManagedSurface: __FGLTexMgrCreateObject failed!!
FGLTexMgr: open of shared memory object failed (Permission denied)
__FGLTexMgrCreateObject: __FGLTexMgrSHMmalloc failed!!!
fglX11AllocateManagedSurface: __FGLTexMgrCreateObject failed!!
FGLTexMgr: open of shared memory object failed (Permission denied)
__FGLTexMgrCreateObject: __FGLTexMgrSHMmalloc failed!!!
fglX11AllocateManagedSurface: __FGLTexMgrCreateObject failed!!

But your 3D/OpenGL application works as root, the fix is to add the following line to your /etc/fstab file:

tmpfs   /dev/shm   tmpfs   defaults   0   0

Then type “mount tmpfs” to mount it:

Voila! No more errors.

I’ve been seeing a sharp rise in the amount of “Gutenspam” sent to my mail servers lately. It started as innocent garbage paragraphs buried in HTML comment structures, so if you viewed it in a normal mail client that “rendered” HTML (dangerous), it wouldn’t be visible. If you viewed the source of the email, you’d see the random snippets of public poetry, books and other materials.

Here’s an example:

perturb this carport this open phony plant crawl I eyeful
these when beograd ex place ivy them befit good income
muncie differ sheep prophet eyeful match made bull one merritt
stonecrop downpour degrade four sheep adolescent does spoon place proust
match head by about electrolyte inconsolable turn z's great pastor
baylor off sheep downpour cabinetmake ywca boy income change bull
furl calendar wreak when sis throaty change deliquesce word berserk
downpour build tribesman cubicsis inexperience late persia line muncie
z's many mud answer chef sony city ridgway now brownell

This does nothing at all, except to possibly try to confuse the filters which are searching for ‘spammy’ words, by lowering the threshold of the Bayesian filtering schemes. In the case of dspam, it does absolutely nothing, and dspam happily catches all of them and marks them as spam, quarantines them and users never see them.

But I see 100-200 per-day now, coming in. 99.514% of them are caught, but some are slipping through.

There was a story on NPR the other morning about how these spammers are just taking public works from projects like Project Gutenberg and including them in their email body.

But they’re not selling anything.

No links to some Viagra site in Singapore.

Nothing useful, except garbage random snippets from etexts and other literary works on the web.

Gutenspam.

The other funny trend I’ve been seeing, as more and more people are exposed to spam, is the emails which come across looking like this:

Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 10:50:11 -0400
From: "Al B. Sure" 
To: David A. Desrosiers 
Subject: RE:%%SUBJECT%%

%%BODY%%

The funny part about this, is that it too has no useful content at all, just some unpopulated macros. Its like there are more people trying to use some of the newer spam applications, and these people don’t have a clue what they’re doing with them.

They’ve probably forgotten to add their text to the e-mails to fill in these macros, or are just not reading the documentation on how to successfully send their spam to people.

What a waste of perfectly good oxygen recycling organisms.

I was pointed to this interesting writeup describing how spammers are now using a sophisticated “host cloaking” technique to hijack valid IP addresses to send their spam through web tunnels to the outside world, thwarting detection and having their accounts deleted/disabled.

It goes like this:

1. The spammer obtains a dedicated server at the victim service provider. The server shares a subnet with other customers.
2. The spammer runs a special daemon program on the dedicated server. The daemon places the network interface into “promiscuous mode” so that it will snoop on all network packets, spying on the local subnet.
3. The daemon determines which IP addresses on the local subnet are not in use. It also determines the addresses of the network routers. One or more unused IP addresses are commandeered for use by the spammer.
4. ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) responses are sent from the daemon to the routers, binding the unused IP addresses to the server. This allows the spammer’s server to “steal” those IP addresses. The daemon does not answer ARP requests from any other source, so the stolen IP addresses remain invisible to all other systems and diagnostic equipment.
5. Finally, GRE and IPIP tunneling (a method used to connect two private networks together) is used to connect the stolen IP addresses to the spammer’s real servers hosted elsewhere.

“The end result is that the spammer has created a server at an IP address which not even the owners of the network are aware of.”

I’ve been using dspam for a few years now, with great success, but over the last month I’ve noticed a trend… After 3-4 years of not a single spam slipping through to a mailbox, I am now seeing 10-15 of them per-day getting through. The filters are still reporting a solid accuracy rate (MUCH higher than SpamAssassin), but spam is slipping through.

Overall accuracy (since last reset)     99.590%
Spam identification (since last reset)  99.395%
Spam ratio (of total processed)         48.265%

I’m also actively blocking IPs of known spammers through the firewall rules:

# iptables-save | grep -c "dport 25"
13165

That’s over 13k unique IPs that have reached our server trying to send spam, malware and other garbage to our users. Normal mail from valid hosts is still flowing in and out, as it should…

I’ll have to see what else I can do to slow it down or stop it again.