Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

« ? Blogging Brians # »

Book Plug:

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BSD Mall

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12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Saturday, June 8, 2002
20:49 - Weekends of Picnics, Barbecues, and Klez	(top)
Just got back from an afternoon picnic up at Grant Park, under the shoulders of Mt. Hamilton, to which we rode in a motorcycle procession-- myself on my ZX-11, Lance and Dave on the Buell S3, Dusty on his M2, Steve on his Suzuki SV650s, and Tor on his Gold Wing, with Drew and David bringing up the rear in their car. I got blisters on my feet from running after footballs in my motorcycle boots, but I've 'ad worse. Besides, I got to test-ride the SV and the Gold Wing after we got back. The Wing was very trippy-- it makes you feel like you're in a Cadillac instead of on a bike, and the power just gets going and keeps going. But the SV is much closer to what I want in a bike-- very attractive styling, a small and lithe frame, reasonable power, and lots of agility (for maneuvering in parking lots as much as anything else). The seating position is a little bit cramped for me, but at least now I know what it's like to ride something in that class. Like, for instance, the Aprilia SL1000 Falco that I want so very very much. (Which, incidentally, the owner of the SV said that he planned to get as his next bike. Woo-hoo! My motorcycle tastes aren't unique and freaky.) So now that's over, and I get to spend the rest of the weekend listening to the interminable whooping and coughing that accompanies any hockey game, while I get that DV editing out of the way-- as well as cleaning out about 700 Klez e-mails out of my mailbox. (For those who don't know about it, Klez is the most recent MS Outbreak virus/worm; it combs through your address book and your browser cache for e-mail addresses to use as the senders and recipients for copies of itself that it sends out.) I've received several thousand of these over the past three weeks, and while I can filter them, it's getting really old. Especially because there's a secondary effect to this one. See, because Klez gets its sender and recipient e-mail lists from pawing through the Web pages in your browser cache, that means that owners of popular websites are particularly hard hit by it. Not just because everybody has a copy of your website and sends you copies of Klez. That's fine; that can be filtered. No, the really insidious bit is that it spoofs the sender so that other recipients think that it was you who sent it-- and if you have a popular website, that means that "you" are sending out Klez messages thousands and thousands of times a day to random other people. Yes, I have a popular website. (Not this one, lionking.org.) And now I'm getting messages every couple of days from worried people all over the net who either want to alert me that some spammer is using lionking.org to send spam out from, or to scream at me for spamming them myself. If they'd just check the headers, they'd know that it's not me that's doing this-- but who in this world knows how to check headers? We live in a world of computer newbies, and it's only getting more so-- which is a good thing in many ways, as it forces companies to develop good software that's easy to use. But it's also a death-trap for companies that seem to rely on customers being security-conscious and willing and able to download patches for their crappy, buggy, ubiquitous software (e.g. Outlook). I have to wonder, whenever I see one of these virii/worms making the rounds, whether the author had a specific type of target or victim in mind. (Nimda and Code Red, for instance, targeted people with Windows NT Server and not enough neurons to rub together to realize that they were running a web server on it-- let alone a crappy and buggy web server with exploitable security holes). Most of the "Anna Kournikova Naked" type of viruses target people who like to see celebrities naked (that's why I was wondering about that earlier this week). And in this case, Klez seems to be targeting people with popular websites-- because that's who's suffering most. If you're using Outlook: PLEASE CONSIDER USING SOMETHING ELSE. Please... I'm begging you here.