Archive for Dumbass
Author: Dave Lewis
May 12, 2008 at 1:58 pm · Filed under Dumbass, Wireless
Ah the joy of the first panicked post departure phone call. Today is my first day away from the office and my now former day joy called. It turns out that an old wireless router that had been sitting in a box in my office had been pinched soon after I left. That’s fairly typical. Someone exits the company whether on bad or, in my case, good terms, they leave things behind in their office.
Well, the router was one of them.
An old Linksys.
Damn if someone didn’t just pinch it. No. They had to go one step further. Some knothead plugged it in. Suffice as to say the hunt is on. Good luck folks.
Pity the half wit that thought it would be a good idea to plug it in.
Author: Dave Lewis
May 2, 2008 at 8:42 am · Filed under Dumbass
Sweet Jeebus in a birch bark canoe. This guy managed to keep his job after he was caught surfing p0rn from the office. If ever there was a case for content filtering in an office this guy is the poster boy.
From BBC:
A local council employee in Japan has been punished after it was discovered he had accessed porn websites at work more than 780,000 times in nine months.
His superiors were alerted to the problem only when his computer became infected with a virus.
The 57-year-old man, who has not been named, works for the city of Kinokawa in southern Japan.
He held on to his job, but has been demoted and his wages have been cut by about 20,000 yen ($190; £80) a month.
At one point this guy was averaging 10,000 pages a day! Everyone and their brother has checked out an adult website at one point or another…FROM HOME. But, this guy is an absolute marvel. It really is amazing that he managed to keep his job.
Article Link
Author: Dave Lewis
April 24, 2008 at 8:15 pm · Filed under Dumbass, News, Spam/Phishing
Wow, how stupid do they think I am?
It’s a rhetorical question wise guy.
Here’s a phishing email that I received this evening.
——————–
From: Chianelli, Russell R.
Date: Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 8:05 PM
Subject: UNICEF ORGANISATION DONATION AWARDED PIN NUMBERS U-777-1815, D-01-47 CONTACT INFOS (**********@yahoo.com.hk)
To: undisclosed-recipients
UNICEF ORGANISATION DONATION.
Unicef Organisation
Concern.
The Unicef Orgnasation, Would like to notify you that you have been chosen by the board of trustees as one of the final recipients of a cash Grant/Donation for your own personal, educational, and business development. The Unicef Orgnasation was formed in 1947 after WWII to help children displaced by the war. It was then called the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund. The United Nations Organization (UNO) and the European Union (EU) was conceived with the objective of human growth, educational, and community development.
To celebrate the 27th anniversary program, The Unicef Organisation is giving out a yearly donation of One Million Four Hundred and Seventy Thousand United States Dollars. These specific Donations/Grants will be awarded to 70 lucky international recipients worldwide; in different categories for their personal business development and enhancement of their educational plans. At least 17% of the awarded funds should be used by you to develop a part of your environment. This is a yearly program, which is a measure of universal development strategy.
Based on the Continental selection exercise of internet,data base websites and millions of supermarket cash invoices worldwide, you were selected among the lucky recipients to receive the award sum of US$1,470,000.00 (One Million Four Hundred and Seventy Thousand United States Dollars) as charity donations/aid from the Unicef Orgnasation and the UNO in accordance with the enabling act of Parliament. (Note that all beneficiaries email addresses were selected randomly from Various internet Job websites or a shop’s cash invoice around your area in which you might have purchased something from).
You are required to contact the Permanent Secetary below for qualification documentation (ed. note: emphasis added) and processing of your claims. After contacting our office, you will be given your pin number, which you will used in claiming the funds. Please endeavor to quote your Awarded pin numbers (U-777-1815, D-01-47) in all discussions.
Permanent Secetary- Mr. Peter Geroge
Email: *********@yahoo.com.hk
Finally, all funds should be claimed by their respective beneficiaries, no later than14 days after notification. Failure to do so will mean cancellation of that beneficiary and its donation will then be reserved for next year’s recipients. On behalf of the Board kindly, accept our warmest congratulations.
Happy New Year.
Regards.
Sir. williams Charlton
(Online Coordinator)
Happy New Year…riiiight.
Now, call me crazy but, I’m fairly certain that Unicef doesn’t use Yahoo for their email. In all seriousness if you receive an email like the aforementioned, delete it.
Now, where’s did I leave that whack-a-mole mallet?
Author: Dave Lewis
March 28, 2008 at 7:27 am · Filed under Dumbass, Hacker
What a dumbass.
From the Associated Press:
A computer hacker was sentenced to three years in prison for placing a phony 911 call that led a SWAT team to storm a family home at gunpoint.
It marked the first prosecution in Orange County for a prank known as “swatting” that involves sending SWAT teams on wild goose chases, said county district attorney’s spokeswoman Farrah Emami on Thursday.
Randal T. Ellis, 19, pleaded guilty Wednesday in Orange County Superior Court to five felony counts, including computer access and fraud, false imprisonment by violence and falsely reporting a crime.
He was given prison time and ordered to pay $14,765 in restitution, most of which will go to the county Sheriff’s Department.
Wow…this could have cost someone their life. Read on.
Article Link
Author: Dave Lewis
March 3, 2008 at 8:59 am · Filed under Administravia, Dumbass
Saturday morning on our way home from the grocery store my beloved Mazda 3 met with its end on the QEW. A jackass going way too fast slammed into the back of us and rammed our car into a minivan in front of us. The 3 became an accordion and the airbags deployed. Did that suck. That’s a smell I can safely do without ever encountering again. My wife was taken to the hospital but, she was discharged an hour and half later with a clean bill of health, thankfully. I’m sore as hell but, I’m in my normal foul mood. So, things are looking up. The assclown was charged and now we wait to see if the 3 will live again. Although I’m not optimistic.
The part that simply amazed me came after the accident. Once the dust settled, literally, I got out of the car. I heard car horns and I assumed it was one of the other cars with the horn stuck…but, no. There I stood next to my car on the shoulder and there behind me in the lane was a guy who had just finished or was starting his shift at the local Ford plant (he was wearing Ford coveralls beneath his brown coat, gray beard and sunglasses). I thought I was hallucinating for a moment as I was sure he was giving me the finger. I looked again and sure enough…he was. I looked down to see a tire from one of the other vehicles was in the road blocking him.
(rant begin)
Heaven for fend. I, and the other accident victims, had the unmitigated gaul to block this Ford employee as he tried to get on with his day. I kicked the tire out of the road and gave him a verbal opinion of his family tree. He continued to flip me off. The other drivers saw this and were absolutely floored. I never held an opinion about Ford cars in my life one way or the other. But, I can say here and now that due to his absolute disregard for anyone else (the accident had just occurred) that I will NEVER OWN A FORD. And anyone who talks to me about buying one…I will give them a link to this article.
(rant end)
Insert levity; Two bottles of milk lost their lives in the accident.
I hope everyone else had a better weekend.
Tags: Bad Luck, Car Crash, Bad Drivers
Author: Dave Lewis
January 22, 2008 at 8:40 am · Filed under Dumbass, Email, Politics
From the Washington Post this morning I read this headline “White House Has No Comprehensive E-Mail Archive”.
WTF?
From the Washington Post:
For years, the Bush administration has relied on an inadequate archiving system for storing the millions of e-mails sent through White House servers, despite court orders and statutes requiring the preservation of such records, according to documents and technical experts.
So, what you’re telling me is that my Mom has a better email archival process than the White House? Cheebus.
President Bush’s White House early on scrapped a custom archiving system that the Clinton administration had adopted under a federal court order. From 2001 to 2003, the Bush White House also recorded over computer backup tapes that provided a last line of defense for preserving e-mails, even though a similar practice landed the Clinton administration in legal trouble.
It’s amazing how the Bush White House seems to feel that the law doesn’t apply to them. So, thousands of emails have been “lost” that could land a lot of people in a court room? How convenient. I do find amusement that the OMB is now “looking” into data security. And then this passage:
In the presidential offices, for example, not a single e-mail was archived on Dec. 17, 20 or 21 in 2003 — the week after the capture of Saddam Hussein. According to the study summary that the committee released, e-mails were not archived for Vice President Cheney’s office on four days in early October 2003, coinciding with the start of a Justice Department probe into the leak of a CIA officer’s identity, which later led to criminal charges against Cheney’s chief of staff.
I’m at a loss.
Article Link
Author: Dave Lewis
January 17, 2008 at 9:47 am · Filed under Dumbass, Legal Aspects
My brain just hurts right now.
From SpamSuite.com:
I’ve (ed. Mickey) been watching Sierra Corporate Design, Inc., v. David Ritz, for a long time. You haven’t seen it here because the documents are not kept online and are, therefore, not accessible. However, a decision has been reached in that case and the clerk of court in Fargo was kind enough to fax me a copy of the findings of fact, conclusions of law, and order for judgment.
In 12 pages of bad law, a North Dakota District Court judge has declared that using the “host” command with the “-l” option constitutes computer hacking. The “-l” option, which effects a DNS zone transfer, is only available to computers and maybe administrators, with the prior written consent of Major League Baseball. That means that pages mentioning the potential for use by non-administrators like this one should probably go away since it’s teaching people how to “hack”. And, of course, this also means that the manual pages on all Linux, *nix, and *BSD machines include hacking instructions thanks to the inclusion of a man page for host which mentions the -l option
I should point out that David Ritz is facing criminal charges in this case. My (insert deity), I think that we have fully discovered where the real crime lies. And to add a little more info for the non-*nix readers here is an excerpt from a linux man page for the “host” command:
List mode is selected by the -l option. This makes host perform a zone transfer for zone name. The argument is provided for compatibility with older implementations. This option is equivalent to making a query of type AXFR.
I had to grab a new keyboard. I busted my old one with my forehead.
Article Link
Tags: Illegal DNS Requests, Bad Law, David Ritz, Sierra Corporate Design
Author: Dave Lewis
January 14, 2008 at 9:53 am · Filed under Crime, Data Security, Dumbass
No, no. Not the kind that makes a ticking noise.
Every time I read one of these stories I’m stunned by the brain dead aspect of the perp. In this case the convicted party is one, Yung-Hsun Lin.
They are usually armed with just enough knowledge to be dangerous. The malice of forethought and the absence of prognostication. By which I mean, they are just like any garden variety criminal. They plan the crime but, never take into account the “escape”. Lin, as with others such as Roger Duriono (who got 8 years) weren’t smart enough to see beyond their own petty complaints. The difference being in this case that Lin could have negatively affected the health care of some of the patients.
“This case is unique in that it touches on the public health system,” said assistant US attorney Erez Liebermann, who prosecuted the case.
The logic bomb, designed to delete “virtually all of the information” on Medco’s servers, was written by Lin and planted in multiple scripts on the company network, according to court documents.
The malicious code was initially set up to be triggered on April 23, 2004, but it failed because of a coding error. Lin reset it to deploy a year later, but a co-worker discovered and disabled the bomb, Liebermann said.
This type of criminal activity demonstrates that some folks are sharp as a bag of marbles. Ah, Darwin.
Article Link
Tags: Logic Bomb, Medco Logic Bomb, Yung-Hsun Lin, Medco
Author: Dave Lewis
November 30, 2007 at 11:24 am · Filed under Dumbass, Physical Security, Terrorism
If ever there was a case for handing out prophylactics and saying “for the love of (insert deity) let it end with you”, this is it. An art student, Thorarinn Jonsson, from the OCAD placed a fake bomb behind the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in what was apparently part of his final school project. The police were alerted to the device which resembled several pipe bombs strapped together. He affixed a note to the device that said “this is not a bomb”.
Indeed.
From Citynews.ca:
The 25-year-old remains relatively unrepentant about an escapade that also cost police hours of their valuable time and an equal amount in rustling up the necessary experts and equipment to defuse the phony explosive.
“I expected the police to immediately realize what they were dealing with,” he claims. Two videos surrounding the hoax were posted on YouTube, one here, the other here. One shows a girl going through the ROM when an apparent explosion takes place. Jonsonn calls it part of his final assignment for the school.
“I’m taking something that’s clearly a sculpture. It’s clearly not a bomb. But by taking it out of context and putting it into another context, by leaving it lying around … it suddenly takes on a different meaning.”
Does he feel bad about the effect it had? “I think the piece is pretty important … Police waste their time all the time doing all kinds of things.”
Yes, police do waste their time with these type of things because morons like Jonsson do stupid crap like this.
The video one and two
Article Link
Tags: Moron, Fake Bomb, Pipe Bomb Art Project
Author: Dave Lewis
November 2, 2007 at 8:27 am · Filed under Crime, Dumbass
Luck of the Irish holds true. Even for the crushingly stupid.
From the Register UK:
An Irish man who was kidnapped after falling for an email fraud scam was rescued when police raided a hotel in the capital of Ghana where he was being held captive.
James Lafferty, 49, from Ennis, Co Clare, had been held hostage for about five days while kidnappers demanded money for his safe return. He was freed after police received a tip.
Dumbass.
Article Link
Tags: Irish 419 Victim, 419 Victims, James Lafferty
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