For the last decade, Ron Temple has loaded and unloaded bags for United Airlines in Denver, earning more than $20 an hour, plus generous health and flight benefits. On July 6, as management grappled with the rising cost of fuel, Mr. Temple and 150 other people in Denver were offered an unpalatable set of options: they could transfer to another city, go on furlough without pay and hope to be rehired, or stay on at reduced hours.

Mr. Temple and his wife say they cannot envision living outside Colorado, and they probably could not sell their house. Similar homes are now selling for about $180,000, while they owe the bank $203,000.

So Mr. Temple took the third option. He reluctantly traded in his old shift — 3 p.m. to midnight — for a shorter stint from 5:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. He gave up benefits like paid lunches and overtime. His take-home pay shrunk to $570 every two weeks from about $1,350, he said.

Mr. Temple’s wife, Ali, works as an aide at a cancer clinic, bringing home nearly $1,000 every two weeks, he said. But collectively, they earn less than half of what they did.

Suddenly, they are having trouble making their $1,753 monthly mortgage payment, he said. They are relying on credit cards to pay the bills, running up balances of $2,700 so far. Gone are their dinners at the Outback Steakhouse. Mr. Temple recently bought cheap, generic groceries from a church that sells them to people in need.

The problem is that their debt-to-income ratio before the cutback was already nearly 40% on just their mortgage alone. It should be 40% for all monthly "debts", including other debts, groceries, utilities, eating out, car payments, etc, making their financial situation precarious even before the cutback.

-janelane, homeowner

I see your story, and raise you a: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23241606/

I think the best quote is "They also cut monthly expenses by pawning a diamond ring and selling camera equipment he owed money on. And he's looking for someone to take over his $550 monthly payment on a gray BMW 335i he leased last April."

This is all so silly. These people lived WAY beyond their means, and now that everything isn't ideal, they're totally fucked. Honestly, the only thing I spend more money on than I should is bar tabs. I think people need to think a bit more before they rationalize buying their new car, house, etc, etc,etc.

A Hidden Toll on Employment - Cut to Part Time - NYTimes.com

Two of the world's biggest glassware makers, Libbey and Cardinal International, say orders of smaller beer glasses have risen over the past year. Restaurateurs "want more of a perceived value," says Mike Schuster, Libbey's marketing manager for glassware in the U.S. Glasses with a thicker bottom or a thicker shaft help create the perception. "You can increase the thickness of the bottom part but still retain the overall profile," he says.

Clearest proof yet we're in an economic contraction. The U.S. needs a pint law! Ah, the benefits of monarchy...

This injustice will not stand, man.

Beer sizes shinking - WSJ.com

I believe they found my google search history...I knew it was only a matter of time until i was exposed.

I think they found my google search history...

An exploit in standard parlance is a program that can get control of another program, not just crash it. Crashing a program is known as producing a proof-of-concept. It's the difference between screaming "Haberdashery!" at someone until they go away and convincing them with reasoned argument.

Move over dancery and hateration. Thanks to Dave, I'm adding "Haberdashery!" to my general vocabulary.

This is basically what I had to say about this paper the day it came out. I'm glad something like this has finally made its way to the likes of SecurityFocus.

Dave Aitel: "Haberdashery!"

Both Qatar's oil minister and the head of OPEC can see oil hitting $200 a barrel before the end of the year and one analyst says gas could reach $7 a gallon within four years. That could mean cataclysm for the global economy.

This obviously relates to the other article about the decline of suburbia. But like the conversation chris and i had earlier today, the people who are going to hurt most are the people sitting in traffic for hours because of the mcmansion lifestyle. these are the same people who don't want the train system to reach out to their neighborhoods. oh well, that just means my house value will go up and why more people are moving back in town.

I agree with you. I take the train a majority of days to work and live in town. It really works out well for me. Its nice to go up to the Lanier Dam and fish on the weekend, but I sure as hell don't want to live up there. I saw houses 'Starting in the low 300s' last time I was up there. I really couldn't help to laugh...

Gas to Hit $7 a Gallon?

>Uncle Sam
Today I stole a sticker from a little girl at Disney World and made her cry.

>rezidew
you monster

>Uncle Sam
That was her father's contention.

My contention was that I thought the sticker was garbage, as it was a free promotional piece of crap, and was in the floor of an abandoned Disney stroller in a pile of popcorn and napkins.

We did not find common ground.

>rezidew
lmao
you're gonna get ejected from diney world

>Uncle Sam
Yeah
It was like an episode of Larry David
The guy was screaming YOU STOLE THE STICKER
I can't decide if his daughter really cried, or if he exaggerated for effect.
Either way, I felt super guilty.
I was like, "Isn't that a free sticker?" He was like, "IT DOESN'T MATTER YOU STOLE IT!" I was like, "It was in a pile of garbage in the floor. I thought it was discarded." IT DOESN'T MATTER YOU THIEF!
If his daughter cried, I forgive him his anger.
But if he made it up for effect to justify his materialism, I object.

>rezidew
lmao
LMAO
it was on the floor?

>Uncle Sam
Whats more... why was he hauling his kid around in a stroller filled with garbage?
Dude, it was in a pile of popcorn and napkins.
And the stroller was not in a stroller parking area, it was just sitting there.
It was a DISNEY stroller.
1) If it was not a disney stroller, I would never have taken the sticker.
2) IF the sticker was not obviously free, I would not have taken the sticker.
3) If the sticker was not obviously (to me, at the time) garbage, I would not have taken the sticker.
4) If I had thought anyone could have actually been upset at me taking the sticker... I would not have taken the sticker.
morally, I think I'm clear
Woman disagrees because "I couldn't be SURE it didn't belong to someone."
But I say that wasted material should be liberated, and that takes priority at some point once the odds of it being owned drop below a certain point. My error was in not realizing that kids love fucking stickers in my estimation of that equation.

>rezidew
LMAO

>Uncle Sam
There was a roll of 8. I took the blue donkey.

>rezidew
so did they see you take the sticker?

>Uncle Sam
His contention was that his daughter was attached to those stickers big time, and that she learned that men are evil because of me.
No. He came up to me 20 minutes after I took it.
It was on my chest.
Who the fuck steals 1 out of 8 stickers and puts it on his chest and remains at the scene of the crime?
THAT IS WHAT I WANT TO KNOW.

>rezidew
lol
who leaves their stroller unattended for 20 min?

>Uncle Sam
Everyone, at Disney. But most people park them in designated areas.
Actually that is the weak part of my argument: there were 2 other strollers nearby, but they were not Disney.
But because the thing was FILLED with garbage, I thought it abandoned.
Who the fuck hauls a kid around in garbage?
THAT is outrageous.

This is fucking killing me lol

I made a little girl cry by stealing her sticker at Disney World

Acidus wrote:

In the automatic patch-based exploit generation problem, we are given two versions of the same program P and P' where P' fixes an unknown vulnerability in P. The goal is to generate an exploit for P for the vulnerability fixed in P'. More formally, we are given a safety policy F, and the programs P and P'. The purpose of F is to encode what constitutes an exploit. Our goal is to generate an input x such that F(P(x)) = unsafe, but F(P′(x)) = safe.

... ... !!!

There is something humbling about seeing hours work (reading the Microsoft security bulletin, using IDA and BinDiff, discovering the security changes, performing the needed "magic" like unicode evasion, no null's etc) reduced to a math equation.

Well well well....I've seen this discussed before, but never in an academic paper. I believe this paper to be dubious at best for multiple reasons, but I'll only list a few here

1) As they state in their first paragraph, it doesn't cover all threats, and I believe it covers less than they think
Proprietary network protocols, amongst other things

2) The times of generic exploit writing are coming to an end. Exploitation will be on a more application to application base.
ASLR, stack cookies, NX.

3) A PoC/Crash ISN'T an exploit in my opinion.
Botnets aren't formed on the concept of crashing IE.

4) Modern threats such as the Slammer worm have empirically demonstrated that once an exploit is available, most vulnerable hosts can be compromised in minutes [27]
Hello 2003, my name is 2008, it sure is a pleasure to meet you

RE: Automatic Patch-Based Exploit Generation is Possible: Techniques and Implications

Hey Billy,

Just wanted to know if you wanted to speak @ summercon. I swear we won't try to kill you (as much) this year. Let me know, I'll put ya on the schedule.

P.S. We need to meet up for beers sometime, corporate synergy and what not ;).

Please keep checking the site. We plan to have preregistration up soon. We're updating it everyday!

Summercon 2008 Official Announcement | summercon 2008

We're hoping to have a great crowd this year!

Request for Papers | summercon 2008