Blackmoor Vituperative

I read Now, Discover Your Strengths today, and took the “StrengthsFinder” quiz. Circuit City is in love with this book, and they give a copy to every employee.

Of the five “themes” which ostensibly are my strongest talents, two are correct, one is so-so, and two are completely, absurdly wrong.

Like most personality tests and fad self-help books, this one is 30% common sense, 30% BS, and 40% a sales pitch for the publisher’s other products. Don’t waste your time on this one.

People are so damned guillible. If I was a little bit more evil, I’d start a religion or become a politician, and capitalize on it.

Quantum cryptography (QC) is still in a very early stage and there are very few commercial products available. But this doesn’t prevent researchers to look at new solutions. For example, physicists from the University of Wien, Austria, are testing qutrits instead of the more common qubits. These qutrits can simultaneously exist in three basic states — instead of two for the qubits. This means that QC systems based on qutrits will inherently be more secure. But if QC using qubits has been demonstrated over distances exceeding 100 kilometers, the experiments with qutrits are today confined within labs. For more information, read this abstract of a highly technical paper[…]

(from ZDNet, Quantum cryptography using qutrits)

Fantasmo Cult Cinema Explosion
Episode 15: Bad Moon Rising
Friday, June 2, 2006 – 19:30

Werewolf films have progressed a long way since the days of Lon Chaney, Jr. While The Wolf Man is an absolutely amazing film, the werewolf genre really came into its own in the early 1980s. Groundbreaking films like the Oscar-winning An American Werewolf In London kicked off an era in which transformation special effects truly sold the concept to startled audiences across the globe. Unfortunately, most of the modern werewolf classics began and ended in the 1980s. The 1990s saw the majority of werewolf films churned out with lousy computer effects and even lousier plots. Your Team Fantasmo has therefore sifted through the muck and mire and plucked two of the best werewolf films out there… one from the early 1980s and one from the new millennium! We guarantee that seeing these on our GIANT screen will be a life-altering experience you simply cannot afford to miss!

Between the real films, Craig T. Adams (one of the demented and talented folks who brings us Dr. Madblood on SKY4) will (mis)treat the audience with a werewolf film he made in 1966, at age fourteen! (Oh, the humanity!)

Chesapeake Central Library
298 Cedar Road, Chesapeake, VA 23322
(757) 382-6591

I have been listening to Concrete Blonde’s Mojave. It’s an odd album. One review I read describes it as “desert gothic”, and that almost fits. I might also call it “gothic blues”. Really, I’m not sure why “gothic” even belongs in there, but I don’t know of a better way to describe something with such an undertone of spookiness. It’s a good album, though. You should buy it. I learned some things about coyotes while listening to it, and that’s not something you can say about most albums.

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have spotted what they believe is the first virus for OpenOffice, the open-source rival to Microsoft’s Office productivity suite.

The virus, dubbed Stardust, is capable of infecting OpenOffice and StarOffice, which is sold by Sun Microsystems, a Kaspersky Lab researcher wrote on the Russian company’s Viruslist Web site on Tuesday.

“Stardust is a macro virus written for StarOffice, the first one I’ve seen,” the researcher wrote. “Macro viruses usually infect MS Office applications.”

The pest is written in Star Basic. It downloads an image file with adult content from the Internet and opens that file in a new document, according to Kaspersky’s posting.

(from ZDNet, Stardust virus lands on OpenOffice)

So someone wrote a StarBasic macro that can download an image and display it in a new document.

Excuse me if this is an obvious question, but why, exactly, is this considered a virus? I suppose it could, theoretically, be a trojan, if you created a bunch of OpenOffice documents and gave them misleading names. But hell, you can do that with a text document. “Oh, no, that X-Men 3 script I downloaded is actually Catcher In The Rye! Gasp!”

It’s a macro that downloads an image. It is not a virus. It does not download a virus.

Does the macro execute a virus? Does it do any damage to the system? Install anything? Is it capable of infecting other documents or systems? Until it does at least one of these things, this is a total non-issue.

Not a virus, and not news.

I do like the way the article ends, though:

So far, Stardust is a proof-of-concept virus, which means that it was created to demonstrate that an OpenOffice virus is possible. The virus has not been sent out in the wild and is not actually attacking people’s systems.

The story is different for Microsoft Office applications: A yet-to-be-patched security hole in Word has been exploited in at least one recent cyberattack.

(from ZDNet, Stardust virus lands on OpenOffice)

It’s official: “it’s to fight terrorism” has replaced “it’s for the children” as the one-size-fits-all excuse for any abuse of power the US government wants to get away with.

In a radical departure from earlier statements, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said that requiring Internet service providers to save records of their customers’ online activities is necessary in the fight against terrorism, CNET News.com has learned.

Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller privately met with representatives of AOL, Comcast, Google, Microsoft and Verizon last week and said that Internet providers — and perhaps search engines — must retain data for two years to aid in anti-terrorism prosecutions, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity on Tuesday.

“We want this for terrorism,” Gonzales said, according to one person familiar with the discussion.

Gonzales’ earlier position had only emphasized how mandatory data retention would help thwart child exploitation.

In a speech last month at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Gonzales said that Internet providers must retain records to aid investigations of criminals “abusing kids and sending images of the abuse around the world through the Internet.”

(from CNet, Terrorism invoked in ISP snooping proposal)

I suspect that a few years from now, we’ll look back on the days of “it’s for the children” with fond nostalgia.

As if we needed another reason to switch to OpenOffice…

In the wake of at least one targeted attack that exploits a new flaw in Word, Microsoft is advising users to run the application in “safe mode.”

Running Word in the restricted mode will not fix the vulnerability, but it will help block known modes of attack, Microsoft said in a security advisory published late Monday. The software maker is also developing a security update for Word, which should be available on June 13 or sooner, as warranted, the company said.

(from ZDNet, Microsoft advises ‘safe mode’ for Word)

Someone in my family alerted me to this before I read it about it in the trade news, actually. Here is what I told her:

Get your company to switch to OpenOffice, and this sort of thing will cease to be a problem (OpenOffice can create, open, and edit MS Word files, but it is immune to the many, many security vulnerabilities of MS Office).

You would also save your company hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of dollars (depending on how many employees they have).

And if they switch their standard internal document format to OpenDocument, you will no longer be subject to Microsoft’s version extortion — you can be sure that you will be able to open those documents in any OpenDocument-compliant program for many years to come (OpenOffice is the most well-known, but there are several others, and it is a standard format that will be around for a long, long time — Microsoft changes its formats periodically so that people will have to buy upgrades in order to open old documents).

You would be a hero!

I sent a similar email to the “Workplace Productivity” department where I work:

Circuit City currently uses Microsoft Office for its office productivity software. I suggest migrating the entire enterprise to OpenOffice.org. The advantages of OpenOffice.org are:

• more cost-effective (open source = no licensing fees at all, ever)
• minimal user training (user interface is very similar to MS Office)
• increased security (MS Office is a notorious security risk; OpenOffice is open source, which means fewer security flaws, and any that are found are fixed almost immediately)
• backward-compatible (OpenOffice can read and edit existing Circuit City MS Office documents)
• forward-compatible (MS uses closed-source proprietary formats which can and do change with each version of their software; OpenOffice uses the ISO standard OpenDocument format, ensuring that Circuit City’s documents will remain accessible in the future)
• greatly simplifies Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements (open source)

The response from both quarters was effectively the same. I can’t say much more about that without insulting my family and the place I work.

A lawsuit filed Wednesday accuses the Motion Picture Association of America of hiring a hacker to steal information from a company that the MPAA has accused of helping copyright violators.

The lawsuit (click for PDF), filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California by Torrentspy.com parent Valence Media, doesn’t identify the man the company says was approached by an MPAA executive. But the suit calls the man a former associate of one of the plaintiffs and alleges that he was asked to retrieve private information on Torrentspy.com, a search engine that directs people to download links.

Torrentspy’s complaint includes claims that the man whom the MPAA allegedly paid $15,000 to steal e-mail correspondence and trade secrets has admitted his role in the plot and is cooperating with the company.

(from ZDNet, MPAA accused of hiring a hacker)

Software patent campaigners have reacted with surprise to an apparent change in the European Commission’s stance on those patents.

The Commission said last week that computer programs will be excluded from patentability in the upcoming Community Patent legislation and that the European Patent Office will be bound by this law.

“The EPO would … apply and be bound by a new unitary Community law with respect to Community patents,” the Commission said in a statement. “The draft Community Patent regulation confirms in its Article 28.1(a) that patents granted for a subject matter (such as computer programs), which is excluded from patentability pursuant to Article 52 EPC, may be invalidated in a relevant court proceeding.”

(from ZDNet, Europe: No patents for software)

This is a change from what the EC said last year. I am curious what the explanation for that change is, but really, anything that moves away from patenting software and algorithms is a good thing.

I’ve been working on a javascript combat tracker for D&D. I like to think of it as an interactive DM screen, akin to the piece of scrap paper I usually keep handy for writing down health totals and such. It features an intuitive drag-and-drop interface to reorganize things as you please, such as by initiative order, and a method of saving the characters and their layouts (limited by the JavaScript that powers it; it requires copying a text box that pops up, and pasting into a defaults.js which comes with the software). There’s also a method of adding custom rolls to characters, such as spot checks.

I hope you and your readers will find it helpful!

Play with it online at http://www.asmor.com/scripts/CombatTracker/combattracker.html

Or download it to your computer from http://www.asmor.com/scripts/CombatTracker/combatTrackerv0.1.zip

Unfortunately, it only runs on Firefox.

(from: Role Playing Tips Weekly, Ian Toltz, itoltz@gmail.com)