Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

I feel like I would like to write a nice long entry tonight, but can’t think of what to write about. Similarly, I feel like shopping for something, but can’t think of what to buy. I guess I’m still feeling a little pent-up after Jo made me come home from Nordstrom early because she wanted to show off her red balloon to her sister.

Tonight as we were watching Seinfeld, Jo had a quizzical look on her face and said, “Mommy, are all people pink?”

What a lead-in for a good life lesson. I spent a careful 5 minutes talking to her about how people come in all different colors, from pink to reddish to yellowish to light brown to dark brown. “So you see, not everyone is pink, and lots of people come in other pretty colors too.”

“Like green! And purple!”

I guess you can’t win ’em all.

Speaking of diversity… Maybe I am just too damned sensitive. It’s not my battle to fight – is it? Why are people so damned awful about gays? I just can’t take listening to the crap about how ‘I don’t have anything against those homo-sexuals, you understand; I just don’t want to be in the same room with ’em and God help ’em if they get near my kids! But if they’re women, hey, send me a picture!’

Honestly. Why does anyone care? Do people really think that those there homo-sexuals are going to ass-rape their young son within 10 minutes if they’re in the same room together? Does anyone read the Leviticus passages in the context they were written? And why is it that it upsets me so much? Spending life on earth with some of the more ignorant, loud-mouthed sons of bitches who spout their arrogant and ignorant bullshit is starting to seem like a sentence.

Now I guess I’m Pushing the Gay Agenda(tm).

Here are agendas I’ll push:

The driver who cut you off is a dumb asshole, not a dumb woman driver, a dumb fag, a dumb coon, a dumb spick, a dumb wop, a dumb nip, or a dumb towelhead. That guy over there? He’s not an intelligent black man. He’s an intelligent man.

The part where Jesus says to love thy neighbor as thyself doesn’t have anything that says “unless” after it.

Assholes come in all shapes, colors, and creeds.

Other people have other ways of doing things.

If you think it’s not ok for foreigners to say bad things about the US while visiting here, it’s not ok for you to say bad things about their country while you visit it.

Not everyone who supports gun rights is a right-wing kook. Not everyone who supports abortion rights is a left-wing kook.

Categorize not, lest ye be categorized.

Just because you saw it on TV doesn’t make it true. Be a sport. Do your research, then develop an opinion about it.

A closed mind can’t learn anything.

Bitch about SUV drivers who drive dangerously if you like, but if I had a dime for every time someone in a tiny little car cuts my Suburban off so closely that our bumpers nearly kissed, I could retire.

I guess I had a post in me after all.

I took Jo to Nordstrom today. That is a dangerous place for me to go. I have a feeling I will be spending a lot of time (and money) there. Heck, it’s not even like going to the mall. I can pretend I’m in a stand-alone store like Steinmart, only bigger.

Salespeople hunt you down to greet you and ask if you need help, but are non-obtrusive and respect “No thanks, just browsing”. The shoe selection is insane. They carry the European comfy brands like Mephisto and Dansko, along with Kenneth Cole, Stuart Weitzman, and Kate Spade. Huge amount of kids shoes, and a giant aquarium in the kids area above a table with crayons and coloring books. Kid clothing, even boutique labels, is actually not that bad. The most expensive kid thing I saw off-hand was a Cach Cach Yeti coat for $68.

I checked out the Estee Lauder counter because I’d heard raves about the Advanced Night Repair cream from people on a rosacea mailing list. The salesperson was really helpful, mentioned that they had a free gift for purchases over $35 and the cream was in the kit, so I got some other stuff too. She whispered over Jo’s head to ask if Jo would like a balloon, and ran over to the kid department to get one for her.

Jo’s really a timid kid. I think we need to get her into some sort of pre-school. She’s intensely shy around strangers. Every time someone talks to her she turns bright red, mumbles, and hides behind me. She was afraid of the piano player and almost had a heart attack when I took her on the escalator – she clung onto my neck for dear life. I have a really bad feeling about Santa pictures this year.

Anyway, I think I’m going to apply for a Nordstrom card. Lord help us.

I’m all signed up for Journalcon 2003, and confirmed as a panelist in the session titled “Niches and Hoes: Specialty Web Sites”. When I went to the Programming page to see if my name was there, I saw that I was a moderator. Zoinks! Sure enough, that’s what I was asked to be.

Hopefully the panels won’t be as formal and structured as panels at other conferences. I’m a little anxious though – I don’t know many of the journal crowd, and here I’m going to be speaking. I hope it won’t end like all the school dances I went to: alone and crying in the bathroom. Okay, not all the dances were like that. Just middle school. Shudder.

Anyway, I’m scouring Google for ‘panel moderator tips’.

I really hated middle school. That’s another story for another day.

This is reprinted from the Austin Flashmob mailing list, with permission from the author.

Greetings mobbers. Please forgive any and all grammar and spelling blunders. It’s late. Last Friday, I awoke to find three men at my apartment’s front door. Not just men – detectives with the Austin Police Department, badges in hand. “Is your name (insert my real name here)?”, thus ending my half-second speculation that they were looking for a roommate or were at the wrong house.

“Um, yeah” I replied and immediately panicked. A death? Serious injury? Had I been followed on one of my nighttime dumpster-raiding adventures? I played it safe and asked if there’d been a death.

“No,” the only un-mustached cop said. “We’d like to have a word with you. Mind if we step inside?” I told them I’d step outside, which really seemed to irk them. I tried to go get a shirt, but I was told it could wait. Hmm. This seemed serious . I stepped outside and offered them a seat on my ratty old porch-couch. They said they’d prefer to stand.

“We’ll get right to the point. What do you know about “Slash Mobs”. Ha. Ha, ha. For those of you that don’t know, I am/was the moderator of this now nonexistan t Yahoo group: Slash Mob Austin. A quote from the main page (which I had to get from here, as the group is no more ):

“The Slash Mob Project is an interesting phenomenon where people gather at a determined point, kill all surrounding onlookers, and then disperse as fast as arriving, thus leaving the onlookers dazed, bewildered, and hopefully dead by what they just experienced… Join the group to find out what great ideas pop up around Austin, to show o ff your new fannypack, and to kill people.”   
 
“Slash mobs?” I asked. “Um, why are you asking me this?” I didn’t know what to do. Previous experience with law enforcement has taught me to not demand my lawyer (like I have one) right off the bat. It only pisses them off and makes it look like either you’ve got something to hide or you’re used to being questioned or both. No, it’s better for all parties involved to let ’em ask away, answer what you feel comfortable with answering, not incriminate yourself, and hope they go on their merry w ay with only a stern look and a lecture.

“Well, we received word that someone with your [looks at a little notebook I hadn’t noticed he was holding that he’s holding] IP address going under the handle [looks at notebook] ‘the beatles they rock’ was the founder of the [looks at notebook ] Yahoo group [looks at notebook] ‘Austin Slash Mobs'”. All right. They at least could’ve sent three dicks that’d heard about this crazy new sensation called ‘the internet’ before that morning. The cop looked tired. They all looked tired. All my sleepy brain could think about was boy, I’d hate to be a cop.

“Do you like the Beatles?” one of them *actually* asked in their best kindergarten teacher voice. Great. Good cop/bad cop begins.

“Ah, no. It’s a bad joke. Listen, yeah, I formed that group. I think I can see where this is going. It’s a parody of the flash mob phenomenon.” Blank stares, followed by:

“Care to explain?”

I ran through a brief (because there’s no other) history of flash mobs, from their orgins in New York way back in May to me being interviewed by a New York Ti mes reporter – true! She saw my posts I’d been spamming various flash mob froups with that held a link to the Slash Mob group. She claimed she was doing a piece on flash mob backlash, whatever that is. Everybody loves flash mobs, as far as I can tell. The piece has yet to run.

“Why did you pick Slash Mob? Why did you threaten to kill those not involved? That’s a serious crime, Mr.____. You know that, right?”

“It’s a parody! I thought satire was covered under the First Amendment, right?” I stuttered. when i’m nervous, I stutter and shake even more than I usually do.

“Yes, it is, and I don’t know that there’s a real crime involved here. We don’t want to have to visit you again, do you understand?” Un-mustache said.

Understand? I didn’t understand why I was paid a visit in the first place. “Wha – uh, yeah, I understand.” I’d love to say I argued, that I bravely stood up to these evil beasts, that I fought off their demons with a battle cry of “Censorship!”. At least mention my love of slasher movies. But I didn’t. they hadn’t mentioned some out-of-state warrants that I may or may not have, and I really wanted to keep it that way.

For some reason they gave me a card on the way out. I proudly stuck it to my refrigerator with a gob of spit. Weird thing is, it vanished later that day, same as my proud little Yahoo group. They claimed I violated their ToS, which I very well might have having stolen most of the text on my fromt page from the text on the front page of this group. Oh, and I threatened to kill a bunch of anonymous fictional people with my fictional group of Slashmobbers.

I just got an email from Jette of Celluloid Eyes, who is on the committee for Austin Journalcon ’03. She asked if I would be a panelist. I’m dumbfounded and really honored. I’d love to be a panelist, but just this afternoon we scheduled that weekend to go to the ranch. I’m trying to see if there’s a way I can weasel into both going to the ranch and going to Journalcon. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Geektalk alert!

Kenn asked if there was a way to patch against the hacks we’ve gotten. From the reading I did, nobody’s sure how the remote shell trojan gets onto the box. Some have speculated that it’s an ssh exploit. In our case, the mud binary was probably infected, and it got run. I don’t think there’s a patch against the trojan in particular, but here are my tips (I am not a linux guru by a long shot, keep that in mind!)

– Be careful of any binary you run. Make sure they come from trusted and clean sources.
– Do not run as root anything that you don’t need to. Log in as a regular user and sudo stuff if you need to.
– Keep a close eye on your /tmp directory. That’s where I found the installed hacks.
– Also keep a close eye on your logs, all of them.
– Also watch your lastlog. One of the mud people noticed that we had a user named “test” who logged on from AOL. He didn’t belong
– Check ‘netstat -l’ to see what ports are listening. Make sure there’s nothing listening that shouldn’t be.
– Download and run lsof. It’s a nifty program that tells you what processes are running, what ports they’re listening to, where the program is located, and what user started it.
– Try doing ‘find / -name “.*” -ls’. This command will search your computer for files that start with a dot, which don’t show up on a normal ls. It will come up with a ton of files, but just check to make sure there’s nothing that looks funny. I kept finding directories called ‘…’
– ‘ls -lat’ in your directories, especially /bin and /sbin, and make sure nothing has been modified recently.
– Take steps to harden your system, such as different partitions, noexec, denying users outside of the US (for example), and not running daemons that you don’t actually use.
– And of course make sure all your packages and your kernel are up to date.

There are tons of websites out there on linux security holes, as well as hardening your box. Glean information from them, and hit up your linuxgeek friends for tips. Just smile and nod when they tell you there’s no such thing as a linux virus.

I got the new linux box up and running and answering like it’s supposed to, and the coders got the mud moved over and working great.

Three days later I see we’ve been hacked again.

I have a sneaking suspicion that someone ran the binary from the old box, which was hacked. I don’t know if anyone will admit to it, but it’s my theory. I found out that we had one of the exceedingly rare linux viruses, a remote shell trojan. Then I had to go through the hassle of convincing linux people that yes, linux does have viruses, and the freaking reason why nobody talks about them is because of the hubris of the linux community who all says that linux can’t get viruses. Nobody ended up believing me, and implied that I did something wrong setting up the box. No matter of giving them links to the few summaries of RST.b would help, even though we had the classic symptoms (appearance of /dev/hdx1 and /dev/hdx2, a few binaries containing URLs to ping, etc.). So the virus gave someone root access, and then they ran a few scripts to do other shit to the machine (I really doubt that the actual clean binary /sbin/atd has “welcome bitch.” written in there, I really really do). Some penile AOL user had an IRC bot going. The list goes on and on.

So now the machine’s been wiped out and reinstalled, again. There was no real way to clean up the damage, and what’s more, the damned thing wouldn’t boot because of all the shit done to it. Hub did the installation this time. Now if something goes wrong everyone will shake their fingers at him. We’ve also got a hardware firewall which will hopefully help matters. If not, we’re saying fuggit to the box and someone else will have to host the mud.

Nordstroms is opening their first store in Austin next weekend. It sounds like a really swank place. I’m particularly excited about the shoe department, which carries ladies’ shoes up to size 14. There’s only one store in Austin where I can get a decent selection in my size 11, and their styles aren’t really my bag.

Anyway, Nordstroms has a special room for mothers that’s set up with comfortable chairs for nursing. Here’s a picture of it. Does anyone see the irony of the picture?