Archive for Dumbass
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
Author: Dave Lewis
October 21, 2007 at 8:44 pm · Filed under Dumbass, Legal Aspects
This was one of the dumber things I have read in recent memory.
From Techdirt:
Greg Beck writes in to let us know that the law firm that was recently challenged for claiming that it was a copyright violation to post its cease-and-desist letter also has some other interesting ideas about copyright, including banning people from looking at the firm’s source code. You can view the entire user agreement, but the amusing part is:
“We also own all of the code, including the HTML code, and all content. As you may know, you can view the HTML code with a standard browser. We do not permit you to view such code since we consider it to be our intellectual property protected by the copyright laws. You are therefore not authorized to do so.”
Tonight on Fox, “When Lawyers Attack”. Fuckwittery at it’s best
Read on.
Article Link
Tags: Dumbass Lawyers, Legal Crap
Author: Dave Lewis
October 17, 2007 at 6:10 am · Filed under Dumbass, Freedoms
Say it ain’t so. So, is Yahoo going to have to grab its ankles?
From CNN:
Yahoo misled Congress regarding information the Internet company gave to Chinese authorities about the journalist Shi Tao, Democratic Rep. Tom Lantos said Tuesday.
Lantos, a California representative and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, asked Yahoo Inc. officials to testify about the company’s role in a case that sent Chinese newspaper writer and editor Shi to prison on a 10-year sentence.
Lantos asked Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang and Senior Vice President and General Counsel Michael Callahan to appear November 6.
“Our committee has established that Yahoo provided false information to Congress in early 2006,” Lantos said in a written statement. “We want to clarify how that happened, and to hold the company to account for its actions both before and after its testimony proved untrue. And we want to examine what steps the company has taken since then to protect the privacy rights of its users in China.”
Yup. They’re boned.
Article Link
Tags: Yahoo Misled Congress, Yahoo In China, Chinese Dissidents
Author: Dave Lewis
September 15, 2007 at 3:57 pm · Filed under Data Security, Dumbass
Here is an article about MediaDefender (an anti-piracy group) that has had its email leaked. 700MB of email has been made public.
From TorrentFreak:
When we reported in July that an Anti-Piracy Gang Launches their own Video Download Site to Trap People and that the company was called Media Defender and, as anyone who aims to be a credible news resource would, we checked and double checked our sources. We said, with some confidence:
Media Defender, a notorious anti piracy gang working for the MPAA, RIAA and several independent media production companies, just launched their very own video upload service called “miivi.com”. The sole purpose of the site is to trap people into uploading copyrighted material, and bust them for doing so.
However, in comments made to Ars technica, Media Defender’s Randy Saaf chose to rubbish our claims, calling it an ‘accidentally un-secured internal project’.
From the emails we cannot be sure that it’s an entrapment site or that it is related to the MPAA (perhaps it’s a legit a P2P video client?), but it does look suspicious.
Unfortunately for Media Defender - a company dedicated to mitigating the effects of internet leaks - they can do nothing about being the subject of the biggest BitTorrent leak of all time. Over 700mb of their own internal emails, dating back over 6 months have been leaked to the internet in what will be a devastating blow to the company. Many are very recent, having September 2007 dates and the majority involve the most senior people in the company. Apparently this is not the first time that a MediaDefender email leaked onto the Internet.
Read on for more on the emails.
Article Link
Tags: MediaDefender, MediaDefender Email, TorrentFreak, Torrent, Email Leaked, Data Security
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