From jericho at attrition.org Thu Dec 1 21:21:21 2005 From: jericho at attrition.org (security curmudgeon) Date: Thu Dec 1 21:21:40 2005 Subject: [attrition] News Update: Sony DRM Timeline Message-ID: 11.26.05 company: Sony DRM Timeline http://attrition.org/errata/company.html http://attrition.org/errata/company/sony01.html "Below is a timeline of events as they relate to the discovery of the various Sony BMG DRM tools. The initial announcement comes courtesy of Mark Russinovich from Sysinternals who found that the XCP program written by First4Internet utilized rootkit technology to cloak itself from the Windows API." From jericho at attrition.org Sun Dec 11 03:11:37 2005 From: jericho at attrition.org (security curmudgeon) Date: Sun Dec 11 03:11:46 2005 Subject: [attrition] Bush on the Constitution: 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper' (fwd) Message-ID: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Richard Forno If true....words fail me. -rf --- Bush on the Constitution: 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper' By DOUG THOMPSON ?Dec 9, 2005, 07:53 http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_7779.shtml Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act. Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal. GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. ?I don?t give a goddamn,? Bush retorted. ?I?m the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.? ?Mr. President,? one aide in the meeting said. ?There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.? ?Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,? Bush screamed back. ?It?s just a goddamned piece of paper!? I?ve talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution ?a goddamned piece of paper.? And, to the Bush Administration, the Constitution of the United States is little more than toilet paper stained from all the shit that this group of power-mad despots have dumped on the freedoms that ?goddamned piece of paper? used to guarantee. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, while still White House counsel, wrote that the ?Constitution is an outdated document.? Put aside, for a moment, political affiliation or personal beliefs. It doesn?t matter if you are a Democrat, Republican or Independent. It doesn?t matter if you support the invasion or Iraq or not.? Despite our differences, the Constitution has stood for two centuries as the defining document of our government, the final source to determine ? in the end ? if something is legal or right. Every federal official ? including the President ? who takes an oath of office swears to ?uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States." Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says he cringes when someone calls the Constitution a ?living document.? ?"Oh, how I hate the phrase we have?a 'living document,?? Scalia says. ?We now have a Constitution that means whatever we want it to mean. The Constitution is not a living organism, for Pete's sake.? As a judge, Scalia says, ?I don't have to prove that?the Constitution is?perfect; I just have to prove that it's better than anything else.? President Bush has proposed seven amendments to the Constitution over the last five years, including a controversial amendment to define marriage as a ?union between a man and woman.?? Members of Congress have proposed some 11,000 amendments over the last decade, ranging from repeal of the right to bear arms to a Constitutional ban on abortion. Scalia says the danger of tinkering with the Constitution comes from a loss of rights. ?We can take away rights just as we can grant new ones,? Scalia warns. ?Don't think that it's a one-way street.? And don?t buy the White House hype that the USA Patriot Act is a necessary tool to fight terrorism. It is a dangerous law that infringes on the rights of every American citizen and, as one brave aide told President Bush, something that undermines the Constitution of the United States. But why should Bush care? After all, the Constitution is just ?a goddamned piece of paper.? ? Copyright 2005 Capitol Hill Blue From jericho at attrition.org Mon Dec 26 07:39:40 2005 From: jericho at attrition.org (security curmudgeon) Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2005 07:39:40 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [attrition] State of the Attrition Address Message-ID: http://attrition.org/news/content/05-12-25.001.html State of the Attrition Address Sun Dec 25 13:49:45 EST 2005 Attrition Staff As you may have noticed, Attrition has had a bit of downtime lately. The problems began when the box started powering off with no warning. This lead to no logs, nothing on the console screen and no indication of what the problem may be. Due to the sudden loss of power, file systems were not properly unmounted and it played havoc with fsck and booting. The only way to get the machine to boot was to have our NOC run fsck by hand several times on each drive (a 25 minute process). This would last between one and three hours on average, causing a significant amount of downtime. Since the box supports several projects and is the base of email for many people, this had to be fixed sooner than later. Lyger researched and coordinated for a new machine to be sent to Jericho who would handle the base installation and configuration. Since Jericho has had several stable SuSE 8.1 machines, he figured another would work just fine. The first shot at getting the OS installed worked fine. The default SuSE 8.1 kernel worked for the most part (including eth0), but didn't have all the options needed. The latest 2.4.x kernel compiled fine, but wouldn't boot. The ever present "Kernel panic: VFS: Unable to mount root fs" was not very helpful in figuring out exactly why it wouldn't play nice. In an attempt to maximize time, kernel reconfiguring was put on the back burner, the known good default kernel back in place, and he could keep working on the rest of the software such as rot13, nethack and figlet. In theory. [..] From jericho at attrition.org Sat Dec 31 06:26:53 2005 From: jericho at attrition.org (security curmudgeon) Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2005 06:26:53 -0500 (EST) Subject: [attrition] The myspace.com plague Message-ID: http://attrition.org/news/content/05-12-31.001.html The myspace.com plague Sat Dec 31 02:26:52 EST 2005 Jericho A while back, we used to run an image gallery with over 5,000 pictures of all types. During this time, more and more web sites would inline link to the images. Inline linking means the image would display on their page, as if it was their own or hosted on their own server. This caused the image to display fine, but be served up by our server and use our bandwidth. Early on, gallery traffic was responsible for a couple gigs of traffic, but quickly grew. After a couple months, this got to be quite a burden to this server and our hosting situation. On a normal day, we would push out over 10 gigs of traffic from the gallery alone, often enough to saturate the link during peak hours. [..] In the past 48 hours (29th/30th), there have been just under 20,000 link attempts from 928 profiles! If you would like to cause yourself physical discomfort, feel free to wade through a list of the profiles that have partaken in the abuse. I warn you, many of these are physically nauseating and make grown men cry due to the "terrible grammar, horrible page formatting, and annoying graphics" as Rick Forno once said. When you hear people talk of online communities such as myspace.com, remember that they are not some fabulous social network advancing our culture. They are the scum of the internet, dragging it further down the sewers day by day. They are full of the most shallow, vapid and weak minded people our society has to offer. They are the next generation, and that scares me.