... the purpose of my first or 2nd program in an new language is to bend/circumvent a law of some kind?

With Virgil's lecture on Datamining (complete with Cat Schwatz topless), and a shakey but growing knowledge of Perl, my global jacking of content-that-probably-wasn't-meant-to-be-indexed begins.

Disk is cheap and my Downstream is idle... I should have most of the Internet by Thursday!

Final tool I needed to make the switch to Thunderbird complete!

Evolution DB/Vcard to Thunderbird CSV Converter

] wgrab is a perl script that can be used to selectively
] download parts of a foreign website and store things in
] the local filesystem.

Much better than my collection of shell/Perl scripts

wgrab - Perl grabber for comics, etc

] Summary
] Kino is a non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux. It features
] excellent integration with IEEE-1394 for capture, VTR
] control, and recording back to the camera. It captures
] video to disk in Raw DV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV
] and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings.

Linux Video Editing

Thank you,
Sherri Maksin
CNN Radio
Supervising Producer

... Apparently I know something or other about Identity Theft. Just need to make sure the show isn't live and they corner me as being an evil hax0r.

Outerz0ne pics are up. In Wilpig's gallery, Anna's pic is currently the top viewed! Grrrrrrrrrrowl!

Wilpig's Gallery :: outerz0ne :: Anna

] The authority to make that decision has fallen to those
] closest to the person who cannot make their own views
] known. First come husbands or wives, then adult children,
] then parents and other relatives.
]
] That is why Michael Schiavo, despite all the hatred that
] is now directed against him, has the right to decide his
] wife's fate. The decision about Terri's life
] does not belong to the U.S. Congress, President Bush,
] Rep. Tom Delay of Texas, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the
] Florida Legislature, clerics in Rome, self-proclaimed
] disability activists, Operation Rescue founder Randall
] Terry, conservative commentators, bioethicists or
] Terri's parents. The decision is Michael's and
] Michael's alone.
]
] Remember the recent debate about gay marriage and the
] sanctity of the bond between husband and wife? Nearly all
] of those now trying to push their views forward about
] what should be done with Terri Schiavo told us that
] marriage is a sacred trust between a man and a woman.
] Well, if that is what marriage means then it is very
] clear who should be making the medical decisions for
] Terri: her husband.

Sanctity of marriage = Michael Schiavo's decision

] PingPongPlus is a digitally enhanced version of the
] classic ping-pong game. It is played with ordinary,
] un-tethered paddles and balls, and features a "reactive
] table" that incorporates sensing, sound, and projection
] technologies.

MIT acoustic triangulation project

MIT Tangible Media Group | Projects - PingPongPlus

] You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand it,
] but it sure helps.

I started a new project (shit I have too many...) that involves triangulation. This serves as a nice intro into some of the problems with triangulation (ie syncing clocks, moving sources, clock drift, etc).

Granted my application will not need atomic clocks, but you need a really fast sampling time when the object is only a couple inches from your sensors.

GPS Explained

] The paper reports that, using that database, e-mails
] coming from a computer on the spam list are sent directly
] back to the computer, not just the e-mail account, that
] sent them.
]
] "We're doing it to shut this guy down," Stuart McIrvine,
] IBM's director of corporate security strategy, told the
] paper. "Every time he tries to send, he gets slammed
] again."
]
] This anti-spam offering is IBM's first major foray into
] the anti-spam market. Its executives argue that trying to
] capture spam with filters or discard it as quickly as
] possible isn't enough.

... ... But thats exactly what you are doing! You have to ID the email as Spam. Sure you have a Database with IPs or Razor hashes or whatever. But you still have to evaluate the Spam. Once you ID it, how is it faster to send back a message to DoS them than simply discard it. Assuming you even can knock the spammer off with this tactic.

] IBM will have to be careful not to violate anti-hacking
] laws, which prohibit gaining unauthorized entry to a
] remote computer system, even in order to stop it from
] harming yours, according to the paper. But IBM executives
] said their service will not violate that law, nor other
] prohibitions on increasing network traffic under "denial
] of service" rules.
]
] "Yes, we are adding more traffic to the network, but it
] is in an effort to cut down the longer-term traffic,"
] said McIrvine.

... ... This is retarded. First off all I cannot see how this will not violate DoS laws. You are generating traffic for the sole purpose of degrading or denying some target network access. You also assume that this traffic will knock the Spammer offline.

While the article is not clear on how they are DoSing the spammer, most spammers don't have anything running on their host to DoS! He will not have an SMTP server listening for you to half-open TCP to death. Unless they are PING/Smurf/Bouce attacking him, (All layer 3 or 4 attacks) nothing is going to happen. Chances are good the spammer has an asymmetric connection. At worst you will flood his downside pipe. IPTables that only accepts any traffic from the open proxies/zombies the spammer is using would pretty much defeat this.

Am I missing something here or does this not make any sense?

IBM set to use spam to attack spammers