A little good news

"I stood transfixed as I saw the bird land on a tree about 50 feet away," she related on her Web site. "I had an unobstructed view. The sight was overwhelming. The bird was huge, and was hanging from the trunk of the tree, not more than 15 feet off the ground, with its wings folded on its back.

"There were two large white triangles on the wings," she wrote. "A shaft of sunlight was shimmering through the red crest. The bird had a long neck and prominent shoulders. My mind was clicking off the field marks, but there could be no doubt as to what I was seeing."

— from Scientists report possible sightings of bird feared extinct on CNN.com, previewing a report in Science

See also Mary Scott's site, whence comes the quote above.

The upshot: the authors of a paper in Science are pretty sure from some video they've got that the Ivory-Billed woodpecker, thought to be extinct for as much as 60 years now, is, after all, still going.

Damn. A twenty inch wingspan. Bigger than a Pileated. That, in case you're wondering, would make it the largest extant species of woodpecker. Nice to have a little good news, now and then.

Wannabe does self in via loopback—urban legend?

A colleague sent me a link this morning to an alleged IRC log of a conversation with a wannabe cracker who, supposedly, did himself in via the loopback (no, I'm not posting it. Assuming you want to see one of these, feel free to Google it, but it sounds like the poor buggers are having bandwidth issues with everyone jumping on it this morning)... You might have heard this one before (hell, you mighta even seen the strip on User Friendly). Important part of the conversation goes something like:

Wannabe: That's it! You're going down! What's your IP?
Bemused intended target: 127.0.0.1.
Wannabe: Watch this, sucker!...

After which, of course, the trash-talkin' yutz disappears from IRC, as his allegedly deadly hacking tool apparently turns his own machine into a smouldering ruin, and it gets a mite too busy to keep up with talking to the IRC servers...

For anyone who doesn't get the joke (and I suppose such folk do exist), 127.0.0.1 is the loopback address. You send anything into your IP stack destined for that address, it's gonna come right back atcha. So, theoretically at least, whatever the wannabe was using, he just used it on himself.

Now, I'm amused by this story. It has such a perfect cartoon quality about it. It's pretty much the same thing as in the old Warner Brothers bits—Bugs saying to Elmer Fudd, 'oh, no no no... you've got it backwards, bub! Let me help you, there,' and turns around the shotgun. Fudd says, sincerely and gratefully, 'G'g'g'gee, thanks! S'say s'say your pwayers, wabbit!'... and blows his own head off...

But I also find it pretty hard to believe.

It's not, actually, the notion that the wannabe might not know the loopback address when he sees it. Yes, there is a whole class of characters playing with these tools whose knowledge of networking is pretty rudimentary—a whole class of characters who mostly get by on downloading those tools from folk who know the bits a lot better. So yes, theoretically, you might get one stupid enough actually to take that bait... And no, it's not the notion that that's essentially what would happen if they did. Probably, it would work, provided the tool really was effective against the system in question. Particularly if it were some obvious denial of service thing, it would probably be better than twice as effective as usual, since the machine would be doing both the work of attacking and defending, simultaneously, and the malicious packets might be going through a lot less medicine on the defending end, depending on the OS and setup.

My problem is more with the overall narrative. I mean, let's get this straight: the wannabe asks the intended target what IP to attack (seems unlikely they'd expect to get an answer)... after which the intended target just cheerily gives them the address, and the wannabe isn't a bit suspicious?

Hard to buy, I gotta say.

Still, pretty funny.

Bashin' bits and takin' names

Well, I'm happily up to my elbows today in the silicon and software wonderland that puts food on the table, and haven't anything particularly deep to say, so I'm going to slack off and dump out a now very out-of-vogue random ten (or twenty or so) and a coupla random links from the history file laid down by one of my Opera browsers 'fore getting back to work.

The software picked the .oggs in the following order today:

1. Sarah McLachlan—Building a Mystery (live)
2. Sarah McLachlan—I Will Remember You
3. Barenaked Ladies—What a Good Boy
4. The Beastie Boys—the Negotiation Limerick File
5. The Beastie Boys—So What'cha Want?
6. U2—Sunday Bloody Sunday
7. Tori Amos—Silent All These Years
8. U2—Surrender
9. Daniel Lanois—For the Beauty of Wynona
10. Siouxsie and the Banshees—The Passenger
11. Tom Waits—Goin' Out West
12. Tori Amos—Precious Things
13. Sarah McLachlan—Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (live)
14. Midnight Oil—Star of Hope
15. The Beastie Boys—Alive
16. The Red Hot Chili Peppers—The Power of Equality
17. Midnight Oil—Short Memory
18. Alanis Morissette—Thank You
19. The Tragically Hip—Looking for a Place to Happen
20. The Holly Cole Trio—Downtown

Yeah, yeah, I'm a fossil from the eighties. Dunno what gives with it repeating on artists; still mostly a CD guy, so my .ogg list isn't endless, but I do have a lot more variety in there than the list implies...

Well, okay, I do have lots of McLachlan in there right now—side-effect of the fact that it's one of the things that works best for calming the savage beast that is my ten-week-old son—so that's no wild coincidence. Those other guys just got lucky, I guess. Go fig.

And from the recent links file:

Oh, it gets worse! Church and state were never supposed to be separate! In the original Constitution, the president wasn't elected by the people. He was directly appointed by God during the sacrifice and ritual disembowelment of the Speaker of the House, according the grand traditions of parliamentary godmocracy!

— from Fafblog interviews: THE CONSTITUTION! on Fafblog

... and ...

BASIL EXPOSITION: (on picture phone) Hello, Austin. This is Basil Exposition, Chief of British Intelligence. You're Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery, and you're with Agent Mrs. Kensington. The year is 1967, and you're talking on a picture phone.

AUSTIN: We know all that, Exposition.

— from an early script for Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery

... that script, by the way, is a neat thing. All sorts of odd little bits that got dropped from the final cut. Kinda like a text version director's cut... And of one of the masterpieces of our age, no less.

Stellar nurseries

It's not so much news as an excuse to post some pretty images. But NASA's doing a little retrospective on the occasion of Hubble's 15th year in service, so I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon too.

Picked the M16 image to the left out of the bunch thinking less of its beauty (in that department, I'd call the Centaurus A collision the winner) than of what it means: stars being born.

Think about that, for a moment or two. Whatever happens to our species over the next few centuries and (if we're lucky) millennia over here in this corner of the Orion arm, 7,000 light years farther in toward the centre of our galaxy, in the border of the Sagittarius-Carina arm, we're watching stars being born... Something which might lead just about anywhere—even, potentially, given a few billion years more, to another sentient species, looking up and around, pointing telescopes out this way...

Depending, of course, on how long it takes them, they might by then just find themselves looking at a cooling white dwarf where our sun once shone. But either way, somehow, I find the thought somewhat cheering.

Follow-up

Sounds like that bit about the Oxyrhynchus fragments a week or so back was a bit over-hyped. From the New York Sun today:

These reports in the press drew the interest of scholars, but questions were unanswered. After all, this technology was hardly new - it's been available for a decade. And researchers had been applying it to manuscripts from Oxyrhynchus for the past few years. It should not have been surprising that the Oxyrhynchus researchers had discovered new classical works: That is what they do, having uncovered almost 70 volumes worth of fragments in the past century.

— from A 'Second Renaissance'? Well, Maybe a Little One in the New York Sun

More at that link. Still, it's rather cool to think this is going on, even if the 'discoveries' trumpeted in the Independent are kinda routine from the persepective of folk who know the field.

A vision of hell

I submit as evidence that I love my daughter that I tolerated almost a half an hour in a Toys 'R Us the other day.

Toys 'R Us and big box stores like it are, for me, a vision of hell. Big, noisy spaces lit with headache-inducing fluorescent lights. PAs crackling constantly overhead, noisily enough that it's effectively impossible actually to talk to anyone—particularly for us folk whose voices, being both low and soft, don't particularly cut through a din. And, most annoyingly of all, big, slow-moving folk everywhere, clogging the aisles (not unlike the cholesterol presumably clogging their arteries), making actually getting through the place with any dispatch effectively impossible. I'm a tall guy, normally walk pretty quickly—but in a place like that, if I were to try to move with anything like my normal speed, it would be one long collision—me pushing an ever-growing raft of the stunned and dazed into a massive logjam—a tangled mass of arms, legs and coathangers piling up somewhere in infant clothing...

Seriously, after ten minutes in the place, I'm experiencing violent impulses. The palaeolithic part of my brain is coming up with various brute force solutions to the problem. A club. Mebbe a big chunk of bone from a mastodon or something. And if the two three-foot-wide guys standing there in the middle of the aisle discussing the relative merits of the KFC fifteen piece versus the twenty piece meal don't understand 'excuse me', well, it ain't like they couldn't see I was packing...

For just these reasons, I don't darken the doors of places like these too frequently. But there's no way 'round it, on this occasion. You can't get the bicycle the little one wants in most (usually relatively quiet, nicely lit) bike shops. The nice people who sold Daddy his 6V lighting system and other such hardware don't carry the 'My Little Pony' 16" model. So here we are.

The (relatively) happy ending: we get out of the place without Daddy acquiring a criminal record or anyone being hospitalized. The little one loves her new bicycle, proudly and happily rides it to school the next day. Coulda been worse, I guess.

But, just in case any wannabe big box retail folk are reading, just an opinion: if you actually want me ever to enter your establishment other than at the point of a gun (or under the threat of a crying four-year old), here are a few things to try:

Halogen lighting. No PA (I dunno how you talk to the staff—wireless, phones, maybe? Must be something that works; Chapters manages). And keep the aisles a bit bigger, so I can get past the guys who only browse under the influence of Valium without actually sending them spinning sideways into your lovingly assembled displays of Star Wars spin-off merchandise.

Just a few suggestions, with my compliments.