Flametoad

The below joke came to me through e-mail. I have no idea where it originated, but I liked it enough to share.
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A wealthy old Gentleman decides to go on a hunting safari in Africa, taking his faithful, elderly 
Jack Russell named Killer, along for the company.                                                  

One day the old Jack Russell starts chasing rabbits and before long, discovers that he’s lost. Wandering about, he notices a leopard heading rapidly in his direction with the intention of having lunch.

The old Jack Russell thinks, ‘Oh, oh! I’m in deep doo-doo now!’ Noticing some bones on the ground close by, he immediately settles down to chew on the bones with his back to the approaching cat.

Just as the leopard is about to leap, the old Jack Russell exclaims loudly, ‘Boy, that was one delicious leopard! I wonder, if there are any more around here?’

Hearing this, the young leopard halts his attack in mid-strike, a look of terror comes over him and he slinks away into the trees.

‘Whew!’, says the leopard, ‘That was close! That old Jack Russell nearly had me!’

Meanwhile, a monkey who had been watching the whole scene from a nearby tree, figures he can put this knowledge to good use and trade it for protection from the leopard. So, off he goes, but the old Jack Russell sees him heading after the leopard with great speed, and figures that something must be up.

The monkey soon catches up with the leopard, spills the beans and strikes a deal for himself with the leopard.

The young leopard is furious at being made a fool of and says, ‘Here, monkey, hop on my back and see what’s going to happen to that conniving canine!

Now, the old Jack Russell sees the leopard coming with the monkey on his back and thinks, ‘What am I going to do now?’, but instead of running, the dog sits down with his back to his attackers, pretending he hasn’t seen them yet, and just when they get close enough to hear, the old Jack Russell says…

‘Where’s that damn monkey? I sent him off an hour ago to bring me another leopard!’

The moral of this story: Don’t mess with the old dogs. Age and skill can overcome youth and treachery! BS and brilliance only come with age and experience.

James over at Hell in a Handbasket wrote a great post about what happens after guns have been outlawed. In Great Britain, it is increasingly difficult to legally own a firearm. However, criminals still do what criminals do. He documents an event more than a year ago in which two police detectives who were attacked by five criminals were rescued by a citizen carrying a samuri sword. Sadly, the rescuer had to make a hasty escape to avoid being arrested just like the criminals he was protecting them from. I’ve poorly summarized in one paragraph what James covered in a dozen. Go read his version.

I wouldn’t want to live somewhere where I’d be harrassed or even prosecuted for defending myself or another victim. When those rights are taken away from me in Texas, I’ll pack up and move to a small Central American country where I can buy a little hacienda and my own rules.

Usually I consider myself somewhat well informed, but somehow several recent waves of massive, automated attacks on web servers flew under my radar. This attack, which affected hundreds of thousands of web pages and thousands of servers, adds malicious code to web pages. The code is “injected” into a “SQL” server database, thus the title of my post.

The code that is injected then tries to attack every user who visits one of the infected pages. You can read a layman’s summary of what it tries to do on the McAffee website, or if you’re more technically inclined you can try a more detailed analysis. If you want the explanation that falls somewhere in between, I’ve got you covered too.

I try very hard to stay on top of XP’s patches, however, back in March I and Mrs. Flametoad both noticed a significant slowdown on the old PC. That is partially what motivated us to go ahead and get the new PC. I wonder if we hit one of thoses infected pages and were given a malicious payload. Once I can find a misplaced Quicken insall CD, I’ll have everything needed from the old computer and can safely wipe the hard drive.

Has anyone else experience a computer slowdown within the last two months? Did you resolve it?

Never let it be said that the digitari don’t have their own sacred cows. In teh interweb, some topics are simply common knowledge. No need to roll for it; everyone knows it’s true. For instance: Mac versus PC, or Firefox versus IE.

Late last year a security strategy director for Microsoft named Jeff Jones published a report that counted the number of reported vulnerabilities in IE versus Firefox and came up with a surprising result. I hope he was wearing gloves. If you read a few of the comments, you can feel the moral outrage ooze from the page. Firefox folks fired back.

I find it funny that more than six months earlier he spent an entire post talking about how his employment with Microsoft would affect people’s perception of his bias.

If you are relatively fireproof, read some of the comments (the best ones are from “anonymous”, of course) below each post. Try to set aside your own browser prejudices for a few minutes and just observe how strongly the commentors react. Maybe the study is flawed, maybe it isn’t. Before you jump on to comment about how flawed the “research” is, I require that you download the full report and read his methodology. I’m not interested in uninformed opinions. I have enough of my own. Actually, I don’t even care for your informed opinions. This post isn’t about which browser is better. It’s about how we acquire conventional wisdom and what we do when it’s threatened.

Microsoft really is in a no-win situation. When it comes to security, the conventional wisdom is that IE and the Microsoft OS are less secure than [insert any browser/OS here]. When someone tries their hand at tipping those sacred cows, the push-back is almost staggering. The very suggestion that the bovines in question might be flawed is treated as heresy. Manners go out the window and the “discussion” devolves one step above name-calling. Have you ever experienced or witnessed something similar with another piece of “common knowledge”? What happened?

Cool… in a slightly freaky, French sort of way.

The Animator