somethin' stupid

Whee, I have a new electronic dictionary!

I love how I update this thing every death of a pope (a saying in Italian, meaning very rare :P) with things that really mean very little to my life. I might start using my blog as a blog and my friends as friends (instead of semi-vice-versa.)

Time to read some brand new überdark manga!

Oh! je voudrais tant que tu te souviennes
Des jours heureux où nous étions amis
En ce temps-là la vie était plus belle,
Et le soleil plus brûlant qu'aujourd'hui
Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle
Tu vois, je n'ai pas oublié...
Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle,
Les souvenirs et les regrets aussi
Et le vent du nord les emporte
Dans la nuit froide de l'oubli.
Tu vois, je n'ai pas oublié
La chanson que tu me chantais...

C'est une chanson qui nous ressemble
Toi, tu m'aimais et je t'aimais
Et nous vivions tous deux ensemble
Toi qui m'aimais, moi qui t'aimais
Mais la vie sépare ceux qui s'aiment
Tout doucement, sans faire de bruit
Et la mer efface sur le sable
Les pas des amants désunis.

Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle,
Les souvenirs et les regrets aussi
Mais mon amour silencieux et fidèle
Sourit toujours et remercie la vie
Je t'aimais tant, tu étais si jolie,
Comment veux-tu que je t'oublie?
En ce temps-là, la vie était plus belle
Et le soleil plus brûlant qu'aujourd'hui
Tu étais ma plus douce amie
Mais je n'ai que faire des regrets
Et la chanson que tu chantais
Toujours, toujours je l'entendrai!

"In 1893, the Royal Academy of Science were convinced by Sir Robert Ball that communication with the planet Mars was a physical impossibility, because it would require a flag as large as Ireland, which it would be impossible to wave."

I can't wait until our wave of science is shown to be bullshit : )

Microsoft's attitude to critical security issues in their own operating system: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/912840.mspx

"Upon completion of this investigation, Microsoft will take appropriate action to help protect our customers. This will include providing a security update through our monthly release process or providing an out-of-cycle security update, depending on customer needs."

Doesn't look like they're taking it very seriously, does it? :P Now hear what SANS has to say (everyone should check the SANS website regularly anyway, cause it's l33t):

http://isc.sans.org/

They have released an unofficial patch for the issue (just showing how possible it is, even for people who don't even have the source code to Windows) but a lot of people aren't going to trust something that isn't made by Microsoft, so I'm sure several hundred thousand Windows computers are going to be infected before Microsoft gets its act together and releases a patch.


This reminds me of the good ol' days of Blaster :P For those of you who don't remember, Blaster was the first major no-user-intervention-needed infection. I had never gotten a virus on my Windows box in 9 years of use (despite never having installed any antivirus software, either... being careful used to be enough) before Blaster came along. But all it needed was for you to be online. I heard about it and WHILE I WAS DOWNLOADING THE UPDATE, I got infected. Both the Windows computers we had at the time were infected in no time. It was really frustrating because the vulnerable service was completely essential to Windows' operation. If you do shut down the RPC service (not easy to do manually, but somehow Blaster managed to do it in a flash) you can't drag and drop, use the clipboard, use explorer, or do countless other things that you'd expect (although I should've probably known what to expect from Microsoft's "architecture" by then) to be completely unrelated to RPC. *le sigh*

So anyway, Microsoft, not wanting to lose its reputation, obviously decided to give the patch one of its usual undescriptive numeric names, lest it be too easy to find by desperate people whose computers are shutting down as they search for it. And of course, the patch was only very superficial. It fixed Blaster, but obviously they looked no further in the RPC code for similar vulnerabilities, as one might expect after such a terrifying discovery. But no. They knew perfectly well that their operating system was unusable without RPC, that RPC was sitting on an open port on any network connection the OS was connected to, but decided nonetheless that it was too much bother to see if there were any other problems with it. So then Welchia came along, and did what Blaster did all over again, even to "patched" machines. Except that unlike Microsoft itself, Welchia tried to patch up the hole it came through and download updates :P so it was a benevolent worm : ) but it was still a pain and it shouldn't have been necessary in the first place. A buffer overflow is a common bug and a hard-to-find one during debugging. But it is unacceptable to leave vulnerable something so intrinsic to the operation of the computer! :P Something that they have complete control over, even!!!

Gotta love it : )

And then you have Apple, who regularly (there were 9 or 10 releases during 2005) release security updates even when no one has ever exploited their system. It's impossible to write a bug-free program, but you can be proactive (Apple) or reactive (Microsoft)

It's frustrating! But I'm done with my rant, finally : )

I think I'm secretly (that is, until I click the submit button and broadcast it on the internet) a woman from another planet that's identical to ours, but whose moon has semimajor axis of about 0.396 of ours :P

I think I belong in a gay disco in the 70s : ) can y'all see me in one? :P or maybe I should just be a Spanish gypsy in a smoky bar in the dark alleys of Granada, who spontaneously breaks out into Flamenco clapping, guitar, and eventually dancing : ) I'm in love

Clap Cla-Cla-Clap Clap Cla-Cla-Clap Clap Clap Clap Cla-Cla-Clap Clap Clap Clap Clap

Chicken Little and Absinthe, all in one night!

Minesweeper, logic, Ps and non-Ps etc:

http://www.claymath.org/Popular_Lectures/Minesweeper/