As I’ve transitioned over the course of my life as a software developer/systems engineer, from an exclusively Windows oriented work life to a mix of MacOS, Linux and Windows, I’ve come to appreciate how incredibly brain dead the Really Smart Kids at Redmond are when it comes to computer security. Windows, simply put, is unsafe at any speed. I say this fully realizing that Unix/Linux and MacOS (which is Unix down in its kernel), isn’t bullet proof either. But as there is a difference between driving a Mercedes-Benz or a Volvo and driving a 1960 Corvair, there is a difference between running a Unix like OS and Windows. I could point to a number of different Windows inanities that continue to bother me, but here’s the one that’s got my attention now: autoplay. And here’s why:
It’s time to add digital picture frames to the group of consumer products that could carry computer viruses and Trojan horse programs.
In the past month, at least three consumers have reported that photo frames – small flat-panel displays for displaying digital images – received over the holidays attempted to install malicious code on their computer systems, according to the Internet Storm Center, a network-threat monitoring group. Each case involved the same product and the same chain of stores, suggesting that the electronic systems were infected at the factory or somewhere during shipping, said Marcus Sachs, who volunteers as the director of the Internet Storm Center.
"When (the first incident) pops up, we thought it might be someone that was infected and blamed it on the digital picture frame," Sachs said. "But this is malware – and malware that does not seem to be very well detected. You could plug in a device and infect yourself with something that you would never know you had."
And that’s possible in large measure, because of autoplay…something build into Windows that isn’t in other operating systems because most software engineers think allowing executable code to be automatically run from any media you happen to insert into a drive or port is just plain nuts. And because Microsoft thinks doing that is such a really really neat idea, there is no easy way to turn the goddamned thing off. You have to attack it in the system registry. Here’s a sample registry script for turning off autoplay that I run on all my Windows 2000 and Windows XP boxes:
If you’re still running 95/98/Me the value of "NoDriveTypeAutoRun" should be BD 00 00 00.
For those of you who don’t want to deal with directly editing the Windows system registry (and you should absolutely leave it alone unless you know what you’re doing!), there is an article Here on how to use the Windows Policy Editor. However that only works on Windows XP Professional, and I assume the pro grades of Vista. If you don’t have either of those, there is a little application from Microsoft called TweekUI you can download Here.
Vista, apparently has a new dialog you can access from the control panel that lets you configure each device and also individual media types. I haven’t worked with it myself so I can’t comment on how simple or intuitive it is, but apparently you can just uncheck a box at the top of the dialog and that turns it off for all media and devices.
The motivation here of course, is to make installing new software and new hardware devices more convenient. But convenience can end up being more hassle then its worth. It would be more convenient if you didn’t need a key to start your car too. Then you’d never need to worry about loosing your car keys. Just your car.
So…according to this young cuteling I met in a D.C. bar last night…I’m a Throwback.
I’m quietly standing at the balcony rail of the outdoor smoker’s lounge of this gay bar, puffing on down one of my mini-cigars while some local friends of mine are inside chatting. I don’t smoke often, but lately I’ve been going for after dinner cigar walks and right now I feel like a cigar between the B-52s I’ve been downing.
This kinda cute young guy walks over to me and gives me a look…
Me: Hi.
He: Are you a throwback?
Me: Sorry?
He: You lived through the sixtes? You know…the hippies and that stuff…?
Me: Yeah…but I wasn’t a Hippy. There were a lot of different things going on back then. Most of us were just along for the ride.
He: I know…I’ve read all the books.
Me: Throwback?
He: You know…from back then…
Me: I don’t understand your use of the term.
He: You’re about my mother’s age…
The reason I’m a computer geek is that computers never baffled me as much as people do…
A pet dog missed the family’s dead cat so much that he dug up his grave and brought the body back into the house.
When Oscar’s owners woke up the next morning they discovered the dog curled up beside Arthur, the late cat, in his basket.
His owners, Robert Bell, 73, and his wife, Mavis, of Wigan, Greater Manchester, believe that the dog had licked the cat clean before falling asleep.
Mr Bell said that the two pets were constant companions. Arthur, who was a large cat, used to help Oscar to climb on to the sofa.
Oscar, an 18-month-old Lancashire Heeler, had watched Mr Bell dig a grave in the garden and then lower the cat into the hole.Mr Bell said: “He had managed to climb out through the cat flap in the night, obviously with the intent to get Arthur back. Bearing in mind that Arthur was a huge cat, Oscar must have used all the strength he could muster.
“Then he pulled him into the basket and went to sleep next to him. Arthur’s coat was gleaming white. Oscar had obviously licked him clean. It must have taken him nearly all night.”
Poor thing. And they say animals have no feelings. This is why I can’t own a dog…they’re just too nakedly emotional and I’m already bad enough that way myself.
DUBLIN – A teenager attacked a woman he mistook for a gay man because of her hairstyle, a court has heard.
The State was given more time to complete a book of evidence in the case against the boy who launched a serious attack on the woman, and a man. He mistook both for two gay men.
Thinking the couple were men because of the woman’s hairstyle, he attacked them on one of Dublin’s busiest streets, calling them "f***ing gay bastards".
The 16-year-old boy has been charged at the Dublin Children’s Court with assaulting the man, and assault causing harm to the woman on Middle Abbey Street on the evening of January 26 last.
In November, Judge Anne Ryan held the case was too serious to be dealt with in the Children’s Court and should be sent forward to the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, which can impose lengthier sentences.
The case had been remanded until this week to allow the State to complete the book of evidence. However, Judge Ryan was told that it had not yet been completed and the prosecution was seeking further time.
The west Dublin teenager, who is on bail and was not present because of illness, was remanded further in his absence, to appear again in early February when he is to be served with the book of evidence and sent forward to the Circuit Court.
Outlining the allegations, Store Street Garda Jamie Jordan had said the teen approached the man and woman.
"He asked ‘are you two gay guys?’. He then hit the man on his face and knocked him to the ground. He attacked the woman, threw her to the ground and kicked her in the back and stomach. He then jumped on the man’s back."
When the woman, who had been repeatedly kicked, got to her feet, her face was punched. She suffered bruising but both she and her boyfriend made a full recovery.
Earlier, the court had also heard that the comments made about them being gay men arose from the woman’s hairstyle, and during the attack he still thought she was a man.
"Throughout the attack, he made similar derogatory comments, something like ‘f***ing gay bastards’," the court had been told previously.
Defence solicitor Michelle Finan had told Judge Ryan the boy had never been in trouble before. She said he was admitting that he attacked the couple after he got heavily intoxicated.
Alcohol doesn’t make you hate people. It just lets the hate you already bear out.
Dig it. This was an opposite sex couple, and they still got the crap beaten out of them because their attacker mistook them for a same sex couple. Learn this: When politicians and clergymen stoke up passions toward gay people, they aren’t just attacking gay people. They are attacking humanity. They are calling down violence against everyone. They are unleashing the beast within, and that beast doesn’t follow orders.
I was reading Google News and this caught my eye in because I was driving down in that part of Florida recently, although not on that particular stretch of highway. Basically, yesterday there was a horrible 50 car pile-up on I-4 south of Orlando. It was almost certainly the result of fog and smoke from a nearby brush fire. I was watching video off the Orlando Sentinel website, which had been taken by helicopter, and when the camera panned away from the accident scene and up and around the area, I could not believe how dense the fog/smoke was all over a very wide area around the highway. How, I wondered, did the highway patrol not know there was a dangerous situation around that part of I-4? Well as it turns out…they did.
My family in California has to deal with these killer fogs all the time and it’s something I watch for while driving cross country. Sometimes you see visibility warnings on the highways about things like dust storms and such. But the danger…and I really worry about this…is that you’re driving down the road and you see an approaching fog bank or something and you don’t really know how bad it is in there until you actually drive into it and then it’s too late.
The warnings came long before metal slammed into metal on a moonless, socked-in Interstate 4 early Wednesday.
Before sunset Tuesday, National Weather Service meteorologists issued a fog alert based on a scale of one through 10. Experts consider seven or higher to be risky for drivers. The forecast for north Polk County was a 10.
A few hours later, the state Division of Forestry told the Florida Highway Patrol to expect dangerous conditions because of a particularly stubborn and smoky wildfire at I-4 and County Road 557. The blaze escaped from a controlled burn meant to get rid of dangerously dry brush.
The warning was not a routine call. Only once or twice a year do forestry officials, who rely on sophisticated computer models, tell FHP to be on guard for a smoked-in highway.
In all, those and other warnings of horrendous visibility caused by smoke, fog or both were unmistakable. Yet as it turned out, FHP troopers would find little to be concerned about, and the state Department of Transportation installed just one warning sign in each direction.
When I read this I thought, maybe they don’t get a lot of these down in Florida like they do in California. But no…they know perfectly well what can happen down there when they get the fog warnings this time of year. I didn’t know this…
But fire and weather experts in Florida say tons of tiny smoke particles roiling from a wildfire are a powerful magnet for water molecules. Smoke doesn’t create fog; it dramatically thickens it.
The two often go hand in hand this time of the year, Florida’s fog season. This also is the time of year for setting "controlled burns" to thin out grass, leaves and brush in forests.
So a little smoke can make a fog bank vastly more dangerous then otherwise. And those conditions are no stranger to that part of Florida.
I hadn’t known any of this. Along the California coast I know to watch for fog and I just won’t drive through a fog bank I see coming off the ocean. I had no idea it could be even worse in central Florida, well inland.
They should have closed that highway until the danger passed. I know…closing highways creates major traffic messes elsewhere. But they had to close I-4 anyway, when the cars and trucks started slamming into each other, and people started dying. One trooper later said he watched a man burn to death. They should have closed that highway.
Apparently Dan Savage appreciates the kind of male I do…at least judging by the ribbing he gets every now and then on Slog. Yes, I am well aware that tastes such as mine (and apparently his) are not all that well respected, anymore then the guys themselves are. I am reminded of this fact every year when the new calendars come out, and all I see on the racks at the gay bookstores are Chippendale types, or super models with body builder torsos, or big furry bears dressed in odd leather accessories.
I can say for a fact I’d fare better at seeing what I like reflected in gay culture in other parts of the world, particularly Asia and South America. But here in America men, both gay and straight, have to be double-plus Y chromosome Manly or they’re…well…you know…faggots. Look…I can appreciate how after generations of having our maleness called into question by prejudiced straights, gay men have been busy reclaiming that manhood thing for themselves ever since Stonewall. And that’s not a bad thing, really. Unless it descends into that same sterile brain dead fear of femininity thing that’s got the KulturKrieger here in the U.S. all worked up. Then it gets tiresome. It wasn’t the Manly Men who fought back at Stonewall…it was the drag queens and the girly boys.
Matthew Yglesias points out that Mitt Romney is ahead in delegates:
I saw some sentiment on TV last night that Michigan is must win for Romney, but I don’t really see it that way. Second place finishes are survivable for Romney as long as different people are beating him in different places and as long as he keeps picking up delegates. The GOP side has more winner-take-all primaries than does the Democratic side and, clearly, you can’t lose all of those. But basically while Romney’s not in good shape, he’s in at least okay shape.
I strongly doubt it’s going to be McCain. It’s either Romney or Huckabee. My guess is that Huckabee will take it. They won’t trust Romney as much as they’ll trust Huckabee. All those church buses full of primary voters the movement conservatives have been using to keep the moderate wing of the GOP on the outside looking in…? They’re going to run their own damn candidate this year, and to hell with what the establishment wants them to do. After all…it’s their party now…
[Update…] Looks like this was yet another Milt Romney ad-hoc rewrite of the facts…
Explains Berman, "the way they are doing this is by simply not counting Iowa. They say that Iowa’s delegates are not technically committed through the caucus process, and so, instead of extrapolating how the delegates would be apportioned (which is what media, such as ABC News and the Associated Press, do) they just pretend like Iowa did not happen."
Right. Like he’s pretending all those nice things he said about gay equality while he was governor of Massachusetts didn’t happen…
NEW YORK – Two men wheeled a dead man through the streets in an office chair to a check-cashing store and tried to cash his Social Security check before being arrested on fraud charges, police said.
David J. Dalaia and James O’Hare pushed Virgilio Cintron’s body from the Manhattan apartment that O’Hare and Cintron shared to Pay-O-Matic, about a block away, spokesman Paul Browne said witnesses told police.
"The witnesses saw the two pushing the chair with Cintron flopping from side to side and the two individuals propping him up and keeping him from flopping from side to side," Browne said.
The men left Cintron’s body outside the store, went inside and tried to cash his $355 check, Browne said. The store’s clerk, who knew Cintron, asked the men where he was, and O’Hare told the clerk they would go and get him, Browne said.
Alex Shevchenko has been arraigned for a hate crime tied to the assault and eventual death of Satender Singh in July. According to prosecutors, Mr. Shevchenko and Andrey Vusik taunted Mr. Singh in a park because they thought he was gay. Mr. Vusik eventually threw a punch that toppled Singh, dashing his head, they charge.
Gay leaders in Sacramento say the incident followed several years of escalating tensions with some Slavic immigrants.
"The gut feeling of the [gay] community is that preaching among the local Russian evangelical community is breeding hate and that something would happen. And Satender was the something that happened," says Ed Bennett, a gay Democratic activist.
While Slavic leaders say their community is being unfairly scapegoated for legitimate political protests and deeply held religious beliefs, some monitors warn that an emerging group called the Watchmen on the Walls may be fomenting a dangerous atmosphere within the ranks of Slavic immigrants here.
I’ll say it’s dangerous. Scott Lively, one of the group’s founders, is also the author of The Pink Triangle…a Holocaust revisionist book that argues that the Nazis were basically a homosexual movement and that rather then being among the victims of the Holocaust, homosexuals were the primary instigators of it. Consider that Lively is now preaching this message to Slavs in what was the eastern Soviet bloc at one time…a people who suffered a staggering loss of life at the hands of the Nazis during world war two…
Videos of Watchmen conferences abroad suggest some leaders are less modulated, and their audience less against violence. One video shows Lively giving a version of Singh’s killing different from reported facts, including the notion that Singh was undressing in front of children. The audience cheered twice as Lively recounted the punch and the death of Singh – a reaction Lively rebuked, saying: "We don’t want homosexuals to be killed. We want them to be saved."
The camera was on and Lively knew it. There is no way on God’s green earth Lively doesn’t know the impact his message that the Nazis were homosexuals and homosexuals are all basically Nazis has on this particular group of people. He knows Exactly what he’s doing. He has never publicly condemned the killing of Satender Singh by a group of young Slav men in Sacramento. There’s a reason for that.
The Great Orange Satan:
The more she’s attacked on personal grounds, the more sympathy that real person will generate, the more votes she’ll win from people sending a message to the media and her critics that they’ve gone way over the line of common decency. You underestimate that sympathy at your own peril. If I found myself half-rooting for her given the crap that was being flung at her, is it any wonder that women turned out in droves to send a message that sexist double-standards were unacceptable? Sure, it took one look at Terry McAuliffe’s mug to bring me back down to earth, but most people don’t know or care who McAuliffe is. They see people beating the shit out of Clinton for the wrong reasons, they get angry, and they lash back the only way they can — by voting for her.I don’t know if reaction to the media treatment of Clinton had anything to do with voter choices yesterday, but I certainly know people in real life who a) don’t want Clinton to win and b) are tempted to vote for her every time they’re exposed to the way she’s treated by the deeply broken monsters in our mainstream media.
Given my druthers I would rather not see Clinton as the democratic nominee. She’s weak on gay rights issues, weak on the Iraq war, weak on corporate accountability. I’m afraid she would govern by triangulation much like her husband did, to the bitter regret of a lot of people who voted for him. But the vitriolic hate being directed at her and her husband from certain quarters (Hi Andrew!) recalls me back to the whole goddamned impeachment fiasco and if there is one thing the republicans and their news media enablers should be avoiding more then Bush’s record this coming election, it’s reminding people of all that.
Nobody cares how much you hate the Clintons Andrew, except the KulturKrieger and…geeze grow a brain willya…they hate you too. Remember what Truman Capote said about homosexual gentlemen.
The Human Rights Campaign Foundation has once again named two San Antonio companies among the country’s best places to work for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender workers.
Media company Clear Channel Communications Inc. (NYSE: CCU) and telecommunication company AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) earned spots on the 2008 "Best Places to Work for GLBT Equality."
The designation is given to those companies that earn perfect scores on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index. It is a measurement, the organization says, that ensures that 10 million employees have protections on the job on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
Yay! Let’s hear it for Gay Friendly Clear Channel!
Clear Channel, rejecting Howard Stern’s claims that he was canned for slamming President Bush, says its radio network does not have a political agenda.
But new political contribution data tell a different story about Clear Channel (CCU) executives. They have given $42,200 to Bush, vs. $1,750 to likely Democratic nominee John Kerry in the 2004 race.
What’s more, the executives and Clear Channel’s political action committee gave 77% of their $334,501 in federal contributions to Republicans. That’s a bigger share than any other entertainment company, says the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Mitt Romney founded Bain & Co. in 1984, and today its spinoff — Bain Capital — is the third largest private equity firm in the country. Today they boughtClearChannel, a company that owns over 1100 radio stations and 30 TV stations.
This is why media consolidation issues are so important. One rich guy who wants to be president can buy a media empire overnight. Now of course, Romney will argue that he didn’t buy Clear Channel, his private equity company Bain Capital did. And of course, there is no conflict of interest because Romney doesn’t tell Bain Capital what to do as he’s no longer officially with the company.
Still, seeing as how Clear Channel hosts Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity and controls over 1,000 TV and radio stations nationwide, does anyone here really think Romney won’t use this newfound pedestal to promote his candidacy, however subtly?
Sounds kind of like Romney’s relationship to Bain is like Dick Cheney’s to Halliburton. There certainly was never any problem there.
Okay…let me get this straight… The Human Rights Campaign Fund has given its award for "Best Places To Work For GLBT Equality" to a company whose executives works tirelessly to promote the party that works tirelessly to deny GLBT people equality in the workplace. A company that is owned in part now by a leading republican candidate for president, who has declared his opposition to just about any and all gay rights initiatives, Including the Federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act…
Lopez: And what about the 1994 letter to the Log Cabin Republicans where you indicated you would support the Federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) and seemed open to changing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the military? Are those your positions today?
Gov. Romney: No. I don’t see the need for new or special legislation. My experience over the past several years as governor has convinced me that ENDA would be an overly broad law that would open a litigation floodgate and unfairly penalize employers at the hands of activist judges.
This is the company HRC is giving an award to for "Best Places To Work For GLBT Equality"…and giving them a perfect score no less…???
Look…I appreciate that they want to be seen as non-partisan. But when you have two parties, one of which will at least consider supporting gay equality, and the other adamantly opposed to it, there isn’t much you can do…except sell out your membership for the sake of appearances…and invitations to cocktail parties in Georgetown and Chevy Chase.
So with Jan. 6 come and gone, everybody seems to have taken down their Christmas lights. We have an Epiphany and the world gets darker — that seems backwards.
At Saturday night’s Republican debate, Mike Huckabee used a word he emphasizes quite a bit: “vertical.”
“I think we also ought to recognize that what Senator Obama has done is to touch at the core of something Americans want,” Huckabee said. “They are so tired of everything being horizontal — left, right, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican. They’re looking for vertical leadership that leads up, not down. He has excited a lot of voters in this country. Let’s pay respect for that. He’s a likable person who has excited people about wanting to vote who have not voted in the past.”
A few hours earlier, Josh Marshall noted that “vertical” is a Huckabee favorite, with the former governor’s website arguing, “I think the country is looking for somebody who is vertical.”
Can anyone explain what the hell that means? Vertical? I guess if you’re main opponent was Fred Thompson you might push the fact that you spend most of your time standing up. But seriously, is there something I’m missing here? Or is this the weirdest campaign I’ve ever heard?
What Marshall was missing was one of the current fundamentalist tropes. He wouldn’t know, because he doesn’t live in that stifling environment…
This probably won’t come as too big a surprise given Huckabee’s faith-based campaigning, but this “vertical” talk seems to have dog-whistle implications.
This is definitely dog-whistle politics — that is, a message delivered in coded terminology and targeted to a particular subcultural group. Conservative evangelicals often talk about the need to prioritize their vertical relationships with God first and foremost before worrying about horizontal relationships among people. It’s the individualized “get right with God” approach of conservative Protestantism.
In contrast, progressive people of faith reject the vertical-horizontal dichotomy as a false one, saying that in interpersonal relationships one’s faith and spiritual teachings are made manifest. Such an outlook is wishy-washy, watered-down liberal theology in the minds of conservative evangelicals. Southern Baptist minister Huckabee knows this, and speaks evangelical-ese with his words. In fact, he’s got it up on his website as well.
I know this is so because I’ve been present a number of times when “vertical” rhetoric — the exact word — has been used in evangelical circles. It’s indeed a way of speaking one hears in many churches, part of the faith vocabulary of the evangelical and fundamentalist subculture.
And from “The God Strategy: How Religion Became A Political Weapon in America”:
That’s the power of narrowcasting. Targeted, under-the-radar messages denote who is part of the club. It’s like a secret handshake, writ large and electoral: politicians who narrowcast religious cues are assigned considerable credibility by voters in the targeted constituency.
Something to keep an eye on.
Andrew Sullivan, who is no Huckabee fan, was quoting Rod Dreher, who admits now that he was bamboozled by Bush and is ready to be bamboozled now by Huckabee…
I don’t get why Andrew calls Huckabee’s rise a sign of "the perils of fundamentalist politics." For one, Huckabee is not a fundamentalist. He’s more of a Rick Warren Evangelical…
No, and No. If he’s not actually a theocrat, he’s certainly willing to give actual theocrats everything they want so long as they get him elected. Jim Burroway, as always, has done some homework on his past, and the folks he likes to hang out with…
We reported earlier on Southern Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s fundraising event at the home of Houston multimillionaire Steven Hotze, a well-known Christian Reconstructionist. Pastor Rick Scarborough, who also maintains Reconstructionist beliefs, was there as well. Since then, we’ve learned that Huckabee’s ties go far deeper than mere acquaintances and financial backers. He has a history of working very closely with some very well-known Reconstructionists over the years. In this report, we will examine two of Huckabee’s closest Reconstructionist colleagues.
Go read the whole thing. There is no mistaking Huckabee for what he is. It’ll be interesting to see if the corporate news media, which is horrified at the prospect of a Huckabee nomination, actually delves into any of this…
The use of the insecure NEDAP voting computer which has proven to be susceptible to manipulation is not contested in Hesse only.
By taking this step, the CCC [The Chaos Computer Club] is attempting to bring about a voting procedure that is reliable and plausible for all voters before the state elections on 27th January. Recourse to the court has become necessary since the Hesse state government evidently does not have the required expert knowledge to understand the technical security and transparency flaws of the voting machines, nor the will to act accordingly.
This comes from Germany, where state elections are scheduled to be held later this month. So Europe is having to deal with the same voting machine bullshit we are here in the U.S. now. But this is interesting…a commenter on Slashdot says…
Interestingly the main argument in the case at hand is NOT that the machines are faulty or can be manipulated.
Until now elections in germany are held in public. This means that anybody can come in and watch the votes beeing counted. However with the voting machines used the people are requested to believe the government that they operate correctly. This trust should be based on secret reviews of the machines hard and software conducted by the government.
I really love this approach to the court challenge! I hope they succeed. Yes. Yes. Voting needs to be absolutely positively transparent. Whatever the outcome of an election, everyone needs to know that the vote was fair. I’ve said it before…
Canada uses paper ballots. Yeah, they’re a smaller country, but that only means we have more people available to make it work here too. Yeah, it’s a lot of work. But do you want to keep your democracy or not? Nothing is more important then a fair and honest vote. Nothing is more important then everyone generally knows the vote was fair and honest. You win, you loose, there is always the next election. When the votes stop being counted, when trust is lost in the voting process, there may be no next election. Paper trails are not the answer. There must be No Software in the process.
…and I can’t say it often enough: Paper Ballots! Paper Ballots!
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