Got a color Palm, Clie, Treo or Handspring? Go download my fun new demo for thanksgiving chuckles!

It's a proof-of-concet test of my onboard scripted animation, media and character interaction engine ("unScript").

Eh, you can also check the secret demo at unscript.unhacker.com (how secret is that?).

Turk E : Poultry in Motion: "Turk-E is the star of 'Poultry in Motion"

Happy thanksgiving everyone!

Okay, the results are in folks and I am pleased to announce...

Best Response to the Election
That's right, this time the prestigous honor goes to Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jesus Perez:

"We are dancing the tango. When you are dancing the tango and your toe is stepped on, hurting your toe, you complain. If it is stepped on harder, you complain again. There's a whole game, but we are prepared to continue dancing the tango."

Ya know Mr. Perez, I think that just about expresses the sentiment of every thinking person in America. :)

World Media Complicit in US Propoganda?

Are the writers of The Guardian as naive as Bush's 51%, or is it something more sinister?

Guardian Unlimited | The shape of a second term...: "Now there is no electoral need for restraint. The attack will be bloody (...) That these casualties only fuel Iraqi nationalism, anger with the Americans and a desire for revenge, seems not to be understood in Washington."

Yeah - sure. Washington doesn't recognize cause-and-effect. That's right, we're freakin idiots over here and the capital isn't a thinktank consuming our greatest minds in sociology, economics and of course global domination.

Neither do we, the silly American public recognize that our security is pimped-out time and again, our lives expendible fodder for whatever expensive imperialist endeavor currently wets the chops of our warrior elite. Nope, can't see a thing in front of my face.

Stupid brits! Does a man, even an idiot American, repeatedly shoot himself in the face to scratch his nose?

Is it not obvious that The country has been hijacked and THE CITIZENS ARE ENTIRELY STRAPPED-IN, like some mad carnival ride gone out of control, finally flinging us all to our deaths.

We cannot get off. :(

I had to check my spelling of complicit and the definition I got back was:

Dictionary - Yahoo! Reference: complicit
SYLLABICATION: com�plic�it
ADJECTIVE: Associated with or participating in a questionable act or a crime; having complicity: newspapers complicit with the propaganda arm of a dictatorship.

Yes - how very apt.

As everyone knows, digital watches aren't nearly as clever as
everyone thinks.

99 cent stores, beware!

While meditating yesterday, I was suddenly distracted by an ingenius idea that is going to put you ALL out of business.

The 99 cent store as we know it is history.

Say hello to next stage of evolution: The 98 cent store.

Who the heck is gonna pay 99 cents when they can get the same damn thing for 98 cents? Hah! 99 cents is outrageous - and it must not stand I tell you.

The time has come for an intelligent alternative.

My 98 cent empire will sweep the nation, then the world, untouchable. Others will be too greedy or too cowardly to lower their price to 97 cents - for at least a quarter or two.

After that I'd just sell-off to the competition because who the hell wants to run a 96 cent store empire anyways.

I'd rather drive a disco-dancing fire-breathing Japanese robot or film building implosions.

"How long does a human live on Mars?", my wife asked.

Me: "The same, about 70 Earth years."
Her: "How long is that on Mars?"
Me: "How long is that on Earth?"
Her: "Huh?"
Me: "How long is it anywhere?"

It's so easy for us to believe that we know exactly how all of this works - probably because we desperately want to believe. It's pretty obvious, though, that we don't - we can't even move around in our own dimension without our systems quickly becoming nonsensical.

Go ahead, set your alarms, synchronize your watches, datestamp your blog entries...
...but don't get too caught-up in it, okay?
...it's just a model.

It's quite possible that everything is actually happening at once, and that time is just a funny idea we came-up with to help hunt for food. :)

What's money? Money is a Hershey bar. Or a motel room. Or a Ferrari. Or maybe it's nothing at all.

I think back to when I was a kid, we were dirt poor. I remember cutting-out a photo of a Hershey bar from an ad and thinking how badly I wanted it. At times it seemed in all the world I wanted nothing more than for that picture to be a real Hershey bar. Perhaps it drove all my future ambitions, wanting that stupid candy bar.

Now I can buy as many as I want - and I have, sure, I've bought a case of Hershey bars (haven't you?). Ya know what, it didn't do much for me. I got the impression that a truckload wouldn't do any more.

A chocolate bar's about what, $0.65 nowadays? I'm puzzled by the fact that $65 worth of chocolate won't serve the desires that might once have been appeased by 1/100th that. What happened?

Somewhere there's a little boy with a picture of a Hershey bar in his pocket. The loose change under my couch is enough to quench his wants. Or is it?

Somewhere a man is panhandling outside a Wal-Mart for the $65 he needs to put his family in a motel room for the night. 1/10th of my 'liquid' fund is enough to quench his wants. Or is it?

Somewhere under Bill Gates' couch is $65,000 in loose change. Would that quench someone's desires for a (cheap) Ferrari? Would that make someone happy?

Somehow I doubt it...

...but I'm going to wander around town today giving-out Hershey bars
...ya know, just in case. :)

PS: You know what, maybe you could find that guy outside Wal Mart and buy him a sandwich or a case of Hershey bars or baby food. Yeah, that'd be a solid deal.

I was just thinking how funny it is that we tend to think of death as being the ultimate obstacle of our perpetual happiness. Having mastered, say, the mortal planes, it's only death that stands to interrupt eternal bliss, right?

But I wonder if that's not just a lame excuse - we blame death because death is the first obstacle we're likely to encounter that we can't mitigate. Perhaps we only think of death as the ultimate hurdle because it hides from us the many other chasms into which our happines would fall - if given enough time.

If, say, you lived on and beat death - well you'd probably find yourself facing osteoporosis. Or you beat that but now the problem is too much sound.

Or not enough of it.

Or light. Or boredom. Or the morning dew, even a light breeze. Exhaustion.

None of those sound very pretty.

Death is not, I don't think, an obstacle. Consider it a "soft measure" - an easy, graceful, dignified exit from the stage. Before your energy wanes and you begin to waver. Before your spotlight fades.

I was in the drugstore the other day and I heard my name being called.

It was a wire scrubbing brush with a wooden handle, poised hopefully on the end of a bin full of newfangled 'wipes'.

"99 cents - I think I'll take you up on that"

When I got it home I put it under the kitchen sink and went back to trying to get an updated Nessus installed.

A short time later it was calling me again. It wanted to scrub the entire house. We spent the next few hours together, until the whole house and nearly everything in it that was not immediatly scratchable had been scrubbed.

The wire brush was worn and dirty - with it's frazzled ends pointing every which way, drying there on the patio floor, it seemed somehow satisfied, spent - purged.

It informed me through its new textures, that it had lived a fulfilling, purposeful existence and now wished to be retired. I walked with it, my compatriat for at least 90 minutes of solid cleaning, to the trash...

...but I couldn't do it. I couldn't let it go - though its glory had passed, some morbid desire in me wants to keep it near, as if the spark of cleansing magic would reappear if it were ever again "really needed".

No I know that's not the case. I know that once that energy, once that kernel of purpose in a thing is spent, that's it - show's over folks, move along.

There's just one fire inside, isn't there? Can the flame of being, the essence of purpose and cause - can that be rekindled when it's gone out?

Yes, I guess I feel alot like this brush right now - I've done my bit, I did it well. Could I do it again? Well - I guess so, but why? I think so. I know so?

The brush waits on my desk near the ashtray as I ponder these mysteries.

Information Security - If you wanna be good at it, you need two hats. People think just their white hat is good enough - I'm sorry folks, it's just not.

Case in point: I've recently discovered (and discreetly reported) a severe vulnerability in a certain popular embedded system - I mean this one is BAD, run any command as root without even logging-in. Nasty one.

Anyways 2 or 3 levels of the vendor have asked me the same question: "how did you find what DoD and other security audits missed?".

Am I some sort of genius? Well, yes actually I am - BUT that has nothing to do with this particular issue. :)

The answer is simple: Audits are just lists of 'bad things', a list of rules. Now if all a skilled hax0r (read 'cracker') did was go down a list, well, he'd be a script kiddie and not a hax0r anyways. DoD may 'audit' and that's good, real good...

...but hax0rs *don't audit*. Hax0rs don't HAVE rules.

Instead, a hax0r sticks his hand in the virtual ASS of your damned system where it says 'no user serviceable parts' and starts poking and pulling things - he *keeps* poking things until something breaks or he sees something out of place - something that doesn't belong. Once they've found that thing that shouldn't be happening, it's generally a simple matter of figuring-out what STUPID assumption the original system engineer has made - and using that assumption against him.

Now, those people out there who run audit-based security, they already KNOW they are slacking-off: They KNOW the security of their system/site/product deserves the focused, intelligent and improvisational meditation that comes with a black hat. They even know how to do this.

Why don't they? Well it's hard work, folks! It's infinitely easier to just run some sort of audit tool and say 'green' or 'red' (more than likely green).

So, conclusion? Yes - if you are responsible for security, LEARN TO HACK! Quit slacking-off and know your enemy because he sure as heck will do the homework on you.

Today I feel like one of those monkeys that we shot into space in the 60's.

I'm strapped to the damn chair without the slightest idea of why I'm hurtling out of control to a certain doom.

Maybe it's just the state of this country making me feel powerless. The hawks have completely taken-over, we're a sham across the planet - this morning I actually heard a lawyer for one of these soldiers in the Iraqi prisoner photos using the "they'd do it to us" defense. Is this now a legitimate defense here? Have we completely lost our minds?!?

Even Diane Sawyer blinked and paused for a moment...
...but she didn't say anything.

I think we're all strapped-in.

What's the deal with all this photoshopping/chopping, it's gone from tool to travesty: People will look-back on the results of the practice with the same disdain given to those old colorized photos.

Okay sure, some of those old colorized photos are pretty, but we'll never know what that person's skin really looked like and hell, we could colorize a print if we wanted - and keep the original data intact. One imagines the grandchildren of tomorrow will need advanced systems indeed to figure-out what grandma really looked like before her complexion was cloned into oblivion...

...unless we all saved them with layers intact. So the point is save all your layers, right? No, it isn't.

The point is stop chopping-up your photos, if you've got a damned unibrow well then that's what you look like man, love your hairy self and go on record as such. If your picture is boring then you are boring so get unboring and retake the shot.

If you're cloning-out an old tire or an airplane or an ugly person then you took the wrong damned photograph: Go back and take the right damned photograph and next time be a freakin' professional! Anyways if you're cloning-out ugly things then your mind is too small and you should probably stop shooting now and switch to paint by numbers.

Well here I am, flat on my face on Blogger dot com and not even 2 full months into the new year yet . . .

. . . looks like 2004 is gonna' be a winner, folks! Oh sorry I misread that - actually it's gonna' be a weiner.

Don't ferget to check-out my other online infractions:
www.unhacker.com
www.pbase.com/metalshop
www.electronicscene.com/metalshop