General

I’ll be visiting Vancouver early next month to meet with the team and see about the next step.

I’ve asked Absolute to consider letting me relocate to Vancouver. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I’d like to work on site instead of from home, and also because of the political climate in the US I’d rather live in Canada.

This is not major earth-shaking news, but I have a floater in my left eye. I called my optometrist back in California and she said that unless I see flashes of light it’s nothing to be concerned about. But it is totally annoying. I hate this thing. It looks like a big piece of hair is floating in my eyeball. [Scripting News]

I’ve had one in my right eye for a few months & it’s annoying as hell sometimes. I can sometimes ignore it but then I’ll notice it and it’ll get really annoying again.

Plastic::Politics::Politics:Dubya: “What we see is a President that puts his own personal faith and his own personal views on religion at the forefront of his agenda. Call it a messiah complex.” [Plastic]

A short, creepy yarn, and easily dismissed… “The loss of the Columbia space shuttle is suffused with symbols begging for attention. Columbia is named, in part, after Christopher Columbus and symbolically points to the very discovery of the American nation. Strangely, on the threshold of America’s preemptive invasion of Iraq to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction, the shuttle’s hold contained the first Israeli astronaut who in 1981 himself participated in a preemptive attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor to eliminate its capacity for developing weapons of mass destruction. An uncanny echo, but certainly not the only one…As we are on the precipice of a war with Iraq, the whole Arab world screams that it is not Iraq but America’s relationship with Israel and the Palestinian crisis that is the root cause of all Arab anti-American sentiment and certainly all terrorism. Suddenly the Columbia crashes with an Israeli astronaut over George Bush’s home state as debris rains down on “Palestine, Texas.” [metafilter.com]

E-terrorism over-rated. Journalist Brian McWilliams exposes the media whoring of fellow “reporter” Dan Verton and “security intelligence” company mi2g. He shows just how easy it is to fake a “terrorist” organization online and finally gives some exposure to the amount of FUD that gets spread around by some reporters and a lot of comp. sec companies simply to make money.

Though I don’t think Verton gets it:

“Although the hoax this week taught me a valuable lesson about the nature of information on the Internet, it’s less clear that McWilliams’ scheme has done anything to advance the understanding of cyberterrorism.”

Um…yeah Dan. He showed just how half-assed a job some people do in actually verifying sources and Internet-based information. Kudos to your anti-FUD efforts, Brian.

[metafilter.com]

This isn’t about whether the books are any good, it’s about people regarding these modern-day fairy tales as a threat to the moral fabric of the nation. [Morons Dot Org]

In a way, I’m actually glad this right wing columnist published this nonsense; the far right does much more to discredit themselves than I could ever do on my own… [Morons Dot Org]

It didn’t ever occur to me that Westboro would jump on this, but I can’t say I’m surprised. [Morons Dot Org]

Security Alert [The Register]

Broken queries are swamping US Internet servers with unnecessary traffic. A detailed analysis of 152 million messages received on Oct. 4, 2002 by one of the root servers in California showed that only 2 per cent of the queries were legitimate.

The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) which conducted the research is trying to understand why the roots get so many broken queries from Internet service providers.

DNS root servers provide a critical service to Internet users by mapping text host names to numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. The 13 roots are operated by a mix of volunteers and U.S. government agencies. The U.S. Department of Commerce is the agency responsible for managing the root system which serves most Internet users.

“If the system were functioning properly, it seems that a single source should need to send no more than 1,000 or so queries to a root name server in a 24-hour period,” said CAIDA researcher Duane Wessels. “Yet we see millions of broken queries from certain sources.”

CAIDA researchers speculate that 70 per cent of the bad requests are due to misconfigured packet filters, firewalls, or other security mechanisms intended to restrict network traffic. Twelve per cent of the illegitimate traffic however could not be explained and was for nonexistent top-level domains, such as “.elvis”, “.corp” and “localhost”.