The first order of business for Mr. Romney should be to let Latinos know that the GOP wants all people to succeed to the very best of their abilities, unencumbered by the heavy and draconian foot of Fedzillacrats who believe they know what is best for people …
Mr. Romney should continue to press for education reform, and remind Latino voters that education is vital to success. He should illustrate the importance that Americans of Asia-Pacific descent place on education and how fast their children move into the middle class. It doesn’t have to be an Asian thing …
Mr. Romney should continue to remind Latinos that the GOP is not anti-immigration or racist …
Unintentionally hilarious, the Republican Party has stopped beating the wife, sez Ted. Straighten up and fly right like the “Asia-Pacifics”.
Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure does a takedown of the Flame virus here.
It’s not really a takedown although the introduction is, as a teaser. The post is a good brief summary and discussion list of escalating technical points — follow the links — leading to the conclusion that, hmm, Flame was really not so lame, the opposite of the post title. (This is called burying the lede.)
When the Flame malware was found two weeks ago, it was characterized as ‘Highly advanced’, ‘Supermalware’ and ‘The biggest malware in history’.
These comments were immediately met with ridicule from experts who were quick to point out that there was nothing particularly new or interesting in Flame.
In fact, the only unique thing in Flame seemed to be its large size. Even that was not too exciting …
Recommended. You have to read all of it. Helps if you have some familiarity with the subject, too. (Of course, this is likely all wasted on a standard audience which, largely, has very little idea about what’s under the hood in malware.)
Discussions on the technical merits of viruses, or the lack of them, have been around as long as the anti-virus industry. Beauty varies depending on the vantage point and the eye of the beholder.
New viruses have always been described as super when first discovered, particularly if they become a handle to great publicity.
As the news piles higher, so does their alleged superior technical quality.
Indeed, this is what the news media loves to hear. It makes the story all the more urgent and exciting. The hearts of editors and journalists swell for they are the ones getting the message out on the newest thing to turn the world upside down.
The Cryptic Morgue underground bulletin board system had a copy of the Mutation Engine which Newsweek reporters had mentioned in hysterical tones on March 6, the day of the Michelangelo virus’s activation in 1992, That virus had turned out to be something of a bust but, “beware the next round of computer viruses!” wrote the reporters,
I thought this was rather amusing. High school kids running a bulletin board system from their bedroom in Texas had access to “the scariest new virus … the Mutation Engine,” but Newsweek’s information gatherers didn’t. They’d just heard about it.
And the Mutation Engine wasn’t a virus. The Mutation Engine, or MtE for short, was a segment of code which provided any computer virus that used it with variable encryption, but only theoretically.
In practice the MtE was too difficult to use although the idea for its type of viral masking proliferated around the world.
The leading anti-virus vendor McAfee Associates showed the Mutation Engine to Steve Gibson — an excitable writer for the computer magazine Infoworld. He panicked publicly in a May column: “It is clear that the game is forever changed,” he wrote. The sophistication of the Mutation Engine is amazing and staggering.”
Gibson’s words made great quotes, perfect for anti-virus software releases. Central Point Software used the specter of the Mutation Engine in its direct advertising. Indeed, so did McAfee. Why should they not?
Vince McKiernan, a McAfee Associates vice president claimed, “We expect that the Mutation Engine will increase [the virus] problem exponentially for those with unprotected systems.”
Of course, if you a copy of SCAN by McAfee it was a different matter.
“Actually, we cracked this some engine some months ago and have been shipping product capable of detecting the Mutation Engine since March.”
As trade for access to virus bulletin board systems I wrote two variant viruses using the Mutation Engine. One was called CryptLab — which eventually was mentioned very briefly in a book called Approaching Zero, and one called Insufficient Memory which was included in one of the early issues of the e-zine, Crypt Newsletter.
They were used as barter for access to virus libraries. As actual spreading examples, Mutation Engine viruses weren’t successful. Jacking the code into new viruses was just too clumsy a task.
Because anti-virus companies used it as publicity, the had effective cures for it relatively quickly. That made use of it in new viruses pointless.
However, the technology it exploited was not pointless. In varying ways, it became widespread in computer virus programming.
How would one rate that? Superior? Sophisticated? Ahead of its time? Or just another thing to be summarily dealt with. It all depended on your outlook.
Jeff Moss, a prominent hacking expert who sits on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council, said that it was difficult to persuade talented people with technical skills to enter the field because it can be a thankless task.
“If you really look at security, it’s like trying to prove a negative. If you do security well, nobody comes and says ‘good job.’ You only get called when things go wrong” …
Moss, who goes by the hacker name Dark Tangent, said that he sees no end to the labor shortage …
U.S. defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp on Monday launched the first undergraduate honors program in cybersecurity with the University of Maryland to help train more workers for the burgeoning field.
Sean Sullivan, from F-Secure, said: “[Flame is] interesting and complex, but not sleek and stealthy. It could be the work of a military contractor — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and other contractors are developing programs like these for different intelligence services. To call it a cyberweapon says more about Kaspersky’s cold war mentality than anything else. It has to be taken with a grain of salt.???
Not enough science and math majors, it reads. Boo-fucking hoo.
There are plenty of educated scientists in the US, just not precisely the ones these types of stories always pine for. Plus, there’s the private sector unwillingness to train on its own dime.
And so you haven’t sent it around because of the name and no one wants to really know about the nastier issues in writing viruses, anyway, because it’s so boring. It’s against Iran, too, and they deserve it. Better than bombing them.
North Carolina GOP heevahavas haved passed law essentially declaring global warming isn’t happening because they say so. What else could we get them to pass because science needs debunking?
How ’bout bringing back the flatness of the world? Did you know it’s a scientific conspiracy to deny the Earth is the center of solar system too? We should also reinvigorate alchemy so people can be free to believe, if they just find the right stone, they will be able to transmute lead into gold. That will fix the economy.
Next, they could rule that dinosaurs lived with people thus clearing the way to make The Flintstones instruction material for high school biology. That will chase off the Darwinian vermin.
From the wire:
With hardly any debate, the state Senate on Tuesday nixed global warming restrictions on the state’s coast.
Lawmakers passed a bill that restricts local planning agencies’ abilities to use climate change science to predict sea-level rise in 20 coastal counties. The bill’s supporters said that relying on climate change forecasts would stifle economic development and depress property values in eastern North Carolina.
The bill has sparked outrage in some circles … Despite the controversy, it has repeatedly cleared every hurdle in the GOP-led legislature. In the Senate on Tuesday, the only comments were a few brief remarks in favor of the measure as a victory of common sense over alarmist research.
Two Southern states have made it clear they want nothing to do with the idea of global warming.
A day after the North Carolina state senate passed a bill requiring science on rising sea levels to be ignored, Virginia lawmakers allowed a study on its coastline to begin on the state’s dime only after all references to climate change or global warming were removed from its funding proposal.
Looking to address flooding and encroaching sea water on the coast, Virginia lawmakers recommended a scientific study on the problem. When state Sen. Ralph Northam pushed the study through the legislature in February, he met resistance from Republicans who didn’t want any reference to “sea level rise” or “climate change” in its language.
“(State Rep. Chris Stolle) said ‘This isn’t going to work with “sea level rise” in there, it’s not going to go anywhere if we don’t change it’,” says Northam.
Stolle told The Virginian-Pilot those were “left wing-terms” …
And why is the Democratic Party having its convention in North Carolina? What platoon of fools think this state is going for the president in November?
Foreign readers and Americans who are not nuts will note, once again, that your country can’t say it’s a leader in anything except the quality of obstinate homegrown stupidity when half its political leadership is an enemy to science.
It also looks like there’s a disconnection of the scientific community. It knows the Republican Party is insane from top to bottom, that the insanity is contagious and that there is nothing to be done.
So they have gone silent. Which seems sensible. After all, what is actually to be done when newspapers report this as matter of fact, and all one can expect is language like “the bill has sparked outrage in some circles … “?
Go to Hell leftist commie scientists.
For those about to rock against the global warming hoaxing, we salute you!
It had to happen. Hamburger and steak are moving toward being only for swells. And why not?
If the cattleman can lift prices, capitalize on shortage, and sell to countries like China where the government will help pay a higher price for it, it’s the free hand of the market, right?
The U.S. cattle herd has shrunk to the smallest since three years before Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald’s Corp. (MCD) hamburger stand, reducing supply and raising prices even as domestic demand sinks to a two-decade low.
Beef output in the U.S., the biggest producer, will drop for a third year in 2013 after drought destroyed pastures, forcing farmers to cull herds to the smallest since 1952, government data show …
Record beef prices predicted for this year by the Livestock Marketing Information Center, a 57-year-old research group based in Denver, may mean higher costs for retailers and restaurants …
Smaller breeding herds mean that calf production in the U.S. has declined for 16 straight years to the lowest since 1950, the University of Missouri’s Plain said. That could mean the highest prices ever, said Plain, who has studied the industry for three decades …
U.S. beef consumption is forecast by the USDA at 11.359 million tons, the lowest since 1993, partly as people eat more pork …
The logic of stomping on the poor and the one-paycheck-away-from-being-broke class until they have even less money is inescapable.
You get to sell less and less stuff to people who can’t afford it, shrink your resources, hire less help, push up your prices for the 1 percent, sell less and less stuff to people who can’t afford it, shrink your resources, hire less help, push up your prices for a smaller number …
I hear there’s real market potential in ketchup and molasses over shredded recycled cellulose.
The president is a radically racial polarizing person. As I recall, he was supposed to be the great uniter when instead he has been the worst racial divider ever in the White House.
I don’t believe in government redistribution of citizen’s earnings. Like Mao, the president does, as he told Joe the Plumber. I believe in wealth creation through individual hard work and sacrifice, and that government should simply stay out of the way of job-creating, entrepreneurial free-market addicts. The president believes just the opposite. His class warfare tactics are anti-free market, anti-success and anti-American … Welfare advocates Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven taught you well, Mr. President.
Ted Nugent watches Glenn Beck. Like the rest of the Tea Party, it’s only reason he knows the name of an old lady, Frances Fox Piven, who Beck regularly demonized on Fox News for an article she wrote with her husband, now dead, when Nugent was about 18 and playing “Journey to the Center of the Mind” in the Amboy Dukes.
Beck regularly cast her as a person with a plan to collapse the economy of the United States and the perversity of that is well-described here at an article in the New York Times.
From the Times:
Her name has become a kind of shorthand for “enemy??? on Mr. Beck’s Fox News Channel program, which is watched by more than 2 million people, and on one of his Web sites, The Blaze. This week, Mr. Beck suggested on television that she was an enemy of the Constitution.
Never mind that Ms. Piven’s radical plan to help poor people was published 45 years ago, when Mr. Beck was a toddler …
Two years ago, from a Nugent column, on how he’s been menaced by the alleged plots of an old lady:
[I] previously have been the target of [the Democratic Party’s] vicious personal lying attacks and smear campaigns straight out of the playbook of Richard Andrew Cloward, Frances Fox Piven and Saul Alinsky.
So, once again, for those who think I’m too mean and unfair …
