From infosthetics.org:

animated visualization simulating the US & coalition military fatalities that occured in Iraq, shown in the context of time & (geographical) space. the animation runs at 10 frames per second, one frame for each day, with data taken from icasualties.org. might be interesting to overlay this with a similar chart consisting of Iraqi casualties over the same timeframe?

...

April and November of 2004 really stand out in this kind of visualization. There's also sound that varies in volume to go along with the plots.

Iraq War Coalition Fatalities

Decius wrote:
Bunch of jackass college students get on I285 in Atlanta and actually do the speed limit. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

That statement is a bit ironic really. The common myth of speed limits is that they are set with public safety concerns in mind. Yet four people obeying the speed limit enraged some other drivers to the point that they dipped onto the shoulders, one even clipping a parked vehicle and coming close to causing a bad accident.

I wonder who would have been faulted if it had been on the bad side. Would the law see the four law abiding drivers as "contributing factors?" Based on bizzaro world principles of lawsuits, my guess is yes.

I have seen police cruisers do this occasionally, weave back and forth across lanes of traffic with their lights going to "pace" the flow of traffic in Nashville. There was no particular reason I could see other than flow control. I think I even experienced this once coming out of Atlanta, but that was for tending to a wreck up ahead.

RE: A Meditation On the Speed Limit - Google Video

There's a blurb on the SANS handler's diary about a report of packets leaving a freshly built Check Point firewall. I wonder if this will turn out to be a hoax.

There were rumors long ago that the NSA found an IP address in Check Point code, presumably an artifact of unremoved debug code. If this new report turns out verifiable, I wonder how much truth those past rumors may have had after all.

Surreptitious phone home, faulty debugging, or hoax?

...

Published: 2006-02-10,
Last Updated: 2006-02-10 22:24:05 UTC by Lorna Hutcheson (Version: 1)

One of our readers, Jeff Peterson, submitted to us a packet capture that was coming from a newly built Checkpoint Firewall, Build 244 . Here is what he observed in his own words:

"This file is from a freshly installed Checkpoint Firewall 1 VPN gateway. This machine was off-line until installation was completed and policy pushed.

Once the service starts and the first login attempt is completed the interface of the machine starts blasting the captured information to two targeted destination IP's.....Installation is from a Checkpoint supplied CD."

I did ask about the base OS being a fresh install and here are his comments as well:

"Yes. In fact I've built the server twice from scratch using only the checkpoint supplied CD which includes the OS and Firewall. Ie: SecurePlatform. The outcome was the same both times"

Here is a short synopsis of the traffic being observed:

There are 4 UDP packets being sent to one IP address then switching to the other and sending 4 more. This repeats itself over and over. The one IP 48.28.223.239 doesn't appear to have anything assigned to it but belongs to Prudential Securities Inc. The other IP 152.96.109.99 belongs to:

descr: HSR Hochschule fuer Technik Rapperswil
descr: Rapperswil, Switzerland

Dst Port is 57327/UDP
Src port is 32768

If you would like to see two example packets, you can view them here:
http://isc.sans.org/diaryimages/packets for checkpoint.txt

The issue went away with new CDs being obtained from the vendor.

This is the only report we received about this so far. If you have observed similar traffic or have any ideas, please let us know.

Check Point Outbound Traffic Mystery

Abu Dayya sources some of his flags from suppliers in Taiwan, but he buys Israeli flags from a merchant in Israel, even though he sells them to be burnt at anti-Israeli rallies.

...

What a zany world we live in. This could be lifted straight out of The Onion.

Gaza shopkeeper stocks up on Danish flags to burn

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash.

Boing Boing: Wasp performs roach-brain-surgery to make zombie slave-roaches

/*
*
* Winamp 5.12 Remote Buffer Overflow Universal Exploit (Zero-Day)
* Bug discovered & exploit coded by ATmaCA
* Web: http://www.spyinstructors.com && http://www.atmacasoft.com
* E-Mail: atmaca@icqmail.com
* Credit to Kozan
*
*/

/*
*
* Tested with :
* Winamp 5.12 on Win XP Pro Sp2
*
*/

/*
* Usage:
*
* Execute exploit, it will create "crafted.pls" in current directory.
* Duble click the file, or single click right and then select "open".
* And Winamp will launch a Calculator (calc.exe)
*
*/

/*
*
* For to use it remotly,
* make a html page containing an iframe linking to the .pls file.
*
* http://www.spyinstructors.com/atmaca/research/winamp_ie_poc.htm
*
*/

Winamp 5.12 Remote Buffer Overflow Universal Exploit (Zero-Day 2006-01-29)

Decius wrote:

Iran has started moving its foreign exchange reserves out of Europe in a bid to shield the country from the threat of sanctions, reports suggest.

9/11 may have caught you by suprise, but whatever goes down with Iran, say you knew it was coming...

Iran is opening its own oil exchange in March. All petrochemicals will be priced in Euros.

Iran - A threat to the petrodollar?

Another smart move on Iran's part.

RE: BBC NEWS | Business | Iran 'moves assets out of Europe'

Uhh... You're an idiot. Those yellow speed signs on ramps -ARE THE SPEED LIMIT- not an "advisory speed".

You shouldn't merge left going faster than traffic already in the left lane. If you do that you're going to driver hell.

--timball

You know, this is one of those things I've wondered about, but never really followed up on. I've always held the belief that advisory speed signs were just that.

When I see "You're an idiot," though, I guess that makes we want to dig further, since vicariously, I am being called an idiot. Therefore, I did some research this time.

Link to something I found from the TX DOT site.

Laws will vary from state to state of course, but here's what Texas has to say about it:

* * *

Regulatory Versus Advisory Speeds

Advisory speeds are determined primarily by physical and design characteristics of the roadway. The setting of regulatory speeds, while also affected by physical and design factors, is determined in large part by existing free flow traffic speeds.

A Transportation Commission minute order, city ordinance, or county ordinance is not required for advisory speed zones but is required for regulatory speed zones. Therefore, advisory speed zones are more flexible in that they can be changed without revising existing commission minute orders or city or county ordinances.

From the standpoint of enforcement, when a regulatory speed zone has been established and signs are posted, the speed values shown on the signs are the maximum lawful prima facie speeds. An advisory speed sign serves to advise drivers of safe speeds that are recommended for certain roadway conditions, such as horizontal curves. It does aid the enforcement officer, however, in determining reasonable and prudent speeds. A driver might be cited for exceeding the posted value of an advisory speed zone on the grounds that they were driving at a speed that was not reasonable and prudent for the conditions existing at the time and location.

* * *

Ultimately, it is up to the officer's discretion as to whether the advisory speed is regarded as a regulatory speed.

Idiot? I guess it depends on the state you're talking about.

RE: Driving Habits

janelane wrote:

Newflash! Not everyone who's gullible is stupid!

I cut the manager some slack, but the girl's mother should have taught her better. Lesson 331: Don't get naked in McDonald's.

-janelane, backhanded

I still don't see how this is possible. I'll give benefit of doubt to the actual stripping, even though I don't see how anyone would just do something because random person on the phone asked them to. But the sexual abuse? They did that because they wanted to do it and this was their excuse. Anyone with a basic sense of right and wrong would not do that just because someone on the phone told them to. It would be different if there was an armed robber standing right there with a gun barking orders or some similar situation where threat was imminent. But this was just someone on the phone.

RE: Newsflash! People Are Stupid!

Perusing the 2.6.14 kernel changelog, ran across "DCCP." Hadn't heard of this before.

This sounds like a good thing for VOIP, especially on wireless networks. An attempt at a connection oriented datagram protocol.

I like this idea. Instead of everybody and their brother custom coding their own congestion workarounds into the apps, have it built into the protocol. Would make network troubleshooting a lot easier. Instead of having to understand each app's quirks, you know one common method.

I'd like to see a UDP vs. DCCP bakeoff. Maybe take Asterisk, VideoLan and Quake3 builds, one using UDP, the other DCCP, and run them through standardized network congestion scenarios. See how UDP vs. DCCP fares in each app.

Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP)