News You Can Bruise for 1999 October 4

Mon Oct 04 1999 07:16: People dropped out ahead of me, so I am now, enrolled in CS112. Only problem is, the paycheck I deposited Friday isn't showing up in my bank account, so I'm not going to be able to buy my books today. I wonder if they'll take my credit card.

Mon Oct 04 1999 07:22: Yes, they will. So I'll do that.

Mon Oct 04 1999 10:37: Someone is going crazy, and I hope it's not me. Last night I watched the traditional Simpsons->Futurama->X-Files block (X-Files sucked; I think a policy of watching only episodes with aliens or the Lone Gunmen would be more successful than my current policy), and:

There was stuff in The Simpsons that just plain made no sense. I know about and understand the surreal aspect of the jokes on The Simpsons, but these things weren't jokes, although they were portrayed as jokes. I don't mean they were jokes that weren't funny. I mean they weren't jokes at all. The fan belt? The air instead of Valium? {I, parents} just don't understand [how I could just kill a man]. Rather complicated multiple-reading sentence there.
The commercials made me want to huddle up in a ball. Why? Why? Why are today's commercials so fundamentally disturbing? Were they always like this? Are the ad execs of America smoking crack (more than usual, I mean)? Are these commercials really supposed to make me want to buy these things?
It's not Futurama's fault, but my repitoire of college party movies is extremely limited, so I had to extrapolate a lot of the jokes this week. Same as last week, actually, as I've never seen Titanic.

Mon Oct 04 1999 14:45: So. I'm doing the log analyzer for segfault, and I finally get Scott to log the referers for people who hit the site. And when I analyze the logs I find that some of the referring URLs from Slashdot have Slashdot usernames and passwords in them. We're getting 10-15 passwords a day. Turns out Mike Popovic has been seeing the same thing in his server logs.

So I mail the Slashdot crew, and I get an email back from Rob Malda that, basically, it's not a bug, it's a feature. They have a thing where you bookmark http://slashdot.org/index.pl?op=userlogin&upasswd=xxxx&unickname=yyyy and you can use that as your bookmark. So people go to that bookmark and it logs them in automatically, then they click on the segfault Slashbox and get taken to our site and we get their username and password. Malda sez: "When the bookmark is given to people it clearly states 'This is horribly insecure, but some people want it anyway'. It's a dumb method, but people are being warned of the risks."

So I don't know what moral can be derived from that, except that a lot of people prefer convenience to security. And that if you want people's Slashdot passwords, you should start a popular site and get a Slashbox for it.

Mon Oct 04 1999 15:11: Your tax dollars at work, Israel:

Host: barzili.health.gov.il
Page: /~leonardr/articles/virgin/index.shtml
Last: http://www.google.com/search?q=virgin+defloration

Mon Oct 04 1999 18:23: I'm at the LUG meeting. Dan is giving a talk on security.

I think CS111 might be just a scam to line Leonard Kleinrock's pockets with royalties for his queuing theory book. We're talking about a book published in 1975 here, selling for $95.

I couldn't find two of the books I need for my classes. Bleah. At least the trip through the bookstore only took me about 6 minutes. The line was long but they have learned from previous quarters and had a whole lot of people in the checkout alcoves. So I only spent about 3 minutes in line.