Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

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.

Does anyone have experience with Austin nursing homes? Who to avoid, who’s good, who’s depressing, who’s cheerful? I’d appreciate any comments you have to offer.

I’ve been looking through the Nursing Home Ratings in Texas and it’s just depressing. There are degrees of bad things nursing homes can do. “Actual harm with potential for minimal harm” is worse than “Actual harm with potential for minimal harm that is not immediate jeopardy”. Keeping residents strapped down, known as “The facility did not keep each resident free from physical restraints, unless needed for medical treatment”, qualifies as “No actual harm with potential for More than Minimal Harm that is not Immediate Jeopardy”. In order to be in compliance with state standards, errors in dispensing prescription drugs must be less than 5%. That includes wrong drug, wrong dose, and wrong time. Like what happened to this woman, who was prescribed chlorpromazine for depression, but the pharmacy gave her chlorpropamide, which lowers blood sugar, instead. She died.

If you’re caught in that middle land between wealth and poverty, you’ll end up paying $150/day out of your pocket. Medicare doesn’t cover nursing homes. If it’s just one member of a married couple going in, you can divide your assets in half, and the spouse who’s going into care has to spend every dime before Medicaid will cover costs. And if you have more than $180,000 in assets, you can’t get Medicaid at all. Older people have been working and saving all their lives, working full time for 50 years or so. Are there that many who really have less than $180k?

It’s a depressing concept, but necessary for some. No need to make matters worse by putting a loved one into a facility that beats patients. So on behalf of a friend, I’m searching for recommendations.

Today we headed north of town to a gun range, where we met up with a bunch of people and shot guns all day. We got to the range around 10:30 and stayed until they closed at 5. Luckily we brought a canopy for shade, since there wasn’t a shelter in sight and it was around 100 degrees. At one point I thought I was about to pass out – I couldn’t breathe and I stopped sweating. Bad. Chugged 2 bottles of water and let the car AC blast me – better. For the second time, hub broke a pair of Flexon(tm) unbreakable glasses. The boy has talent.

I’m pretty disturbed by the fact that for the past 4 months, I’m shooting low with every single handgun that I try. Normally I’m a very good shot. I can’t fathom what’s gone wrong. I don’t feel like I’m flinching, I don’t feel like my stance or grip have changed, I’m making a conscious effort to put the front sight dot on top of what I’m aiming at. I’m low at short and long distances. I’ve tried slow and fast trigger pulls. Today at 25 yards I shot a nice group, maybe around 8 inches around, 8 inches underneath the bullseye. This is so frustrating to me! It’s making me really discouraged. Luckily I’m still a dead aim with a rifle. Hopefully all is not lost. I’m just going to have to get a group of people watch me shoot (hello, nervous) and critique me. What a bummer.

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.

So I forgot to buy Blue Man Group tickets. They’re sold out now. The professional ticket scalpers are selling them for $120 a piece, when they retailed at $35. Guess we’re going to miss out on the concert. Someone tell me how it was!

This summer was the first reported death in Travis County from West Nile Virus. We live in a particularly mosquito-y neighborhood. Last month I walked into the back yard at dusk. In the space of 90 seconds I had 13 mosquito bites.

Last night around midnight I let the dogs out and saw something moving around over by a bag of old dog food we have by the garage and keep forgetting to throw away. I eased closer and saw that it was a bird. Odd, I thought, to see a bird out and eating at night, but maybe he just had the munchies. Well, he ended up staying around all night long, eventually camping out on the back steps and occasionally nibbling on a bug. He didn’t really fly, he just hopped around occasionally. He let me get within 2 feet of him with a camera. Needless to say, something wasn’t right with him. It finally dawned on me that he might have West Nile. Looking up the virus on the Department of Health’s web page, it says they’re particularly interested in blue jays who are found dead.

This morning he was gone. I don’t know if he wandered off to die. Hub searched the yard and didn’t find anything. We’ll have to keep an eye out for him. All I know is that I’m not going out at dusk without a liberal slathering of Deet. My vet said he thinks that infected birds have symptoms such as muddy thinking and inability to fly. Sounds like our guy.

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.