Arrr. Why do we need an International Talk Like a Pirate Day?

Make no mistake. We do. But it’s a little hard to articulate why, especially when you’ve made the mistake of referring to your wife as a scurvy bilge rat and tried to order her back into the galley.

Talking like a pirate is fun. It’s really that simple.

It gives your conversation a swagger, an el?n, denied to landlocked lubbers.

http://www.talklikeapirate.com

On my way to my first million I plan to buy a Chevy Impala and use the number plates “Vlad”.

From NTBUGTRAQ:

I expect this will be all over the web shortly.

This tiny bit of code will apparently crash any component of Windows that uses the IE rendering engine. That includes IE, Outlook Express and the Explorer itself.

[html]
[form]
[input type crash]
[/form]
[/html]

I’ve replaced the standard HTML tag characters with square brackets to make sure it can’t DoS you Microsoft Victims.

It seems to crash explorer.exe when the .html file containing the
code is copied into any folder.

Technical details:

IE tries to compare the type of the input field to “HIDDEN”, to see if it
should be rendered. When there is no type string, a null-pointer is used. mshtml.dll calls shlwapi.dll#158 @ 0x636f0037 with a pointer to a static unicode string “HIDDEN” and a null-pointer. shlwapi.dll#158 does a case-insensitive comparison of two unicode strings:
it reads from address 0×0 because of the null-pointer and thus causes an exception.

This is not exploitable, other then a DoS because there is no memory mapped @ 0×0 and even if you could load something there, you could only compare it to “HIDDEN” which gets you nowhere.

Plain HTML is a dangerous language

My mail server rejects HTML email – and I’ve been criticised for being so “anal” about it. I guess things like this just validate the block.

Washington, D.C. – In what is believed to be its strongest travel advisory ever, the U.S. State Department today warned Americans abroad not to act like Americans.

The advisory was issued simultaneously in Washington by State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, and in The Hague by a man who, in halting Dutch, denied he was U.S. Ambassador Clifford Sobel.

Unlike previous alerts, which have warned Americans to keep a low profile or avoid certain destinations, the new advisory notes that it is now unwise to come across as American at all. As a result, the State Department cautions U.S. citizens to avoid behaviors that could cause them to be singled out as obviously American. These include:

* the wearing of white socks and tennis shoes.

* complaining if asked to share a bathroom.

* threatening to sue over bad service, television reception, or weather.

* hegemony.

In addition, U.S. citizens attempting to speak a foreign language are urged to curb their Americanisms.
For example:

Correct: Est-ce que vous l’avez aux autres couleurs?

Incorrect: Est-ce que vous, like, l’avez aux, like, autres couleurs?

The advisory immediately created turmoil overseas, particularly for U.S. military personnel, who pretended to be French and were forced to surrender.

The alert also caused confusion at home, as it seems to contradict the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which has warned Americans not to act un-American. In a press briefing this afternoon, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer attempted to unravel the paradox.

“What we are saying is, when you are in America, you need to behave like an American, particularly if you are not American, or are Colin Powell. But when you are outside America, you should not behave like an American, unless you are not American, in which case we urge you to act American. Here I refer specifically to the NATO representatives from Germany, France, and Belgium.”

The advisory, Fleischer added, applies to all Americans, including President Bush. “When the President is traveling abroad, he will only act American while aboard Air Force One or in the company of U.S. media. At all other times, he will attempt to come across as Kosovian or Grecian.”

Reached for comment in Brussels, U.S. Ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns said, “Qing wen, ren min gong yuan zai na li?”

Lifted From: BBspot

As Dave Barry says, “Here’s yet another way to remind you what a loser you are”.

Link: What other people did by your age

Triple J – Australia’s Youth Radio Network has their own take on the Liberation efforts.

Like most youth oriented groups, they’re unabashedly left-wing and entirely anti-war.

Nevertheless, this clip forces a wry smile…
http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/breakfast/grabbag/baghdad.mp3

It’s good to know Optimus Prime is out there fighting for truth, justice and the American Way(tm).

http://www.wkyc.com/news/news_fullstory.asp?id=3828

Yeah OK, I’ve been ego surfing. I went to AllTheWeb (a worthy contender for Google in the best search engine stakes) and searched on my own name.

Very interesting results. I’m a Deputy Sheriff, A Rock Star, A Convicted Criminal, A Karate Champion, A Tuba Player, An Anti-Censorship Advocate, a gay pr0n star, a cartoonist and even a Tornado Chaser.

Who knew I led so many different lives?

I wonder how much of this I should take credit for?

NEW YORK – Responding to recent events on Earth, God, the omniscient creator-deity worshipped by billions of followers of various faiths for more than 6,000 years, angrily clarified His longtime stance against humans killing each other Monday.

“Look, I don’t know, maybe I haven’t made myself completely clear, so for the record, here it is again,” said the Lord, His divine face betraying visible emotion during a press conference near the site of the fallen Twin Towers. “Somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that I want them to kill their neighbor. Well, I don’t. And to be honest, I’m really getting sick and tired of it. Get it straight. Not only do I not want anybody to kill anyone, but I specifically commanded you not to, in really simple terms that anybody ought to be able to understand.”

Here’s an interesting story lifted from news:alt.folklore.urban:

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

“We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“We can’t send mail more than 500 miles,” the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte. “Come again?”

“We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles from here,” he repeated. “A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther.”

“Um… Email really doesn’t work that way, generally,” I said, trying to keep panic out of my voice. One doesn’t display panic when speaking to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like statistics. “What makes you think you can’t send mail more than 500 miles?”

“It’s not what I *think*,” the chairman replied testily. “You see, when we first noticed this happening, a few days ago–”

“You waited a few DAYS?” I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice. “And you couldn’t send email this whole time?”

“We could send email. Just not more than–”

“–500 miles, yes,” I finished for him, “I got that. But why didn’t you call earlier?”

“Well, we hadn’t collected enough data to be sure of what was going on until just now.” Right. This is the chairman of *statistics*. “Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it–”

“Geostatisticians…”

“–yes, and she’s produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can’t reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius.”

“I see,” I said, and put my head in my hands. “When did this start? A few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that time?”

“Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it. But I called him, and he said he didn’t touch the mail system.”

“Okay, let me take a look, and I’ll call you back,” I said, scarcely believing that I was playing along. It wasn’t April Fool’s Day. I tried to remember if someone owed me a practical joke.

I logged into their department’s server, and sent a few test mails. This was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to my own account was delivered without a hitch. Ditto for one sent to Richmond, and Atlanta, and Washington. Another to Princeton (400 miles) worked.

But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles). It failed. Boston, failed. Detroit, failed. I got out my address book and started trying to narrow this down. New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence (580 miles) failed.

I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity. I tried emailing a friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle. Thankfully, it failed. If the problem had had to do with the geography of the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken down in tears.

Having established that — unbelievably — the problem as reported was true, and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file. It looked fairly normal. In fact, it looked familiar.

I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory. It hadn’t been altered — it was a sendmail.cf I had written. And I was fairly certain I hadn’t enabled the “FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES” option. At a loss, I telnetted into the SMTP port. The server happily responded with a SunOS sendmail banner.

Wait a minute… a SunOS sendmail banner? At the time, Sun was still shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8 was fairly mature. Being a good system administrator, I had standardized on Sendmail 8. And also being a good system administrator, I had written a sendmail.cf that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark codes that had been used in Sendmail 5.

The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the dregs of my now-cold latte. When the consultant had “patched the server,” he had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so doing *downgraded* Sendmail. The upgrade helpfully left the sendmail.cf alone, even though it was now the wrong version.

It so happens that Sendmail 5 — at least, the version that Sun shipped, which had some tweaks — could deal with the Sendmail 8 sendmail.cf, as most of the rules had at that point remained unaltered. But the new long configuration options — those it saw as junk, and skipped. And the sendmail binary had no defaults compiled in for most of these, so, finding no suitable settings in the sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero.

One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the remote SMTP server. Some experimentation established that on this particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.

An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched. An outgoing packet wouldn’t incur a router delay until hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays.

Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:
$ units
1311 units, 63 prefixes

You have: 3 millilightseconds
You want: miles
* 558.84719
/ 0.0017893979

“500 miles, or a little bit more.”

From boingboing

An ISP has decided to ban routing to the RIAA’s IP block from its network, on the grounds that the RIAA will attempt to hack its customers’ computers.

Due to the nature of this matter and RIAA’s previous history, we feel the RIAA will abuse software vulerabilities in a client’s browser after the browser accesses its site, potentially allowing the RIAA to access and/or tamper with your data. Starting at midnight on August 19, 2002, Information Wave customers will no longer be able to reach the RIAA’s web site. Information Wave will also actively seek out attempts by the RIAA to thwart this policy and apply additional filters to protect our customers’ data.

Information Wave will also deploy peer-to-peer clients on the Gnutella network from its security research and development network (honeynet) which will offer files with popular song titles derived from the Billboard Top 100 maintained by VNU eMedia. No copyright violations will take place, these files will merely have arbitrary sizes similar to the length of a 3 to 4 minute MP3 audio file encoded at 128kbps. Clients which connect to our peer-to-peer clients, and then afterwards attempt to illegally access the network will be immediately blacklisted from Information Wave’s network. The data collected will be actively maintained and distributed from our network operations site.

With the RIAA suing backbones to block MP3 distribution sites in China and ISPs blocking access to the RIAA’s IP block, you gotta wonder, is this the end of the end-to-end principle? Maybe if everyone blocked the RIAA’s IP block, just sent them away into bad netizen coventry, the rest of the net could get on with it.

Visit Information Wave

Lifted from www.boners.com

My local does a weak curry. I need to move.