jdac

Well at least two of my friends have fallen prey to this. I've gotten instant messages from both of them in the form of:

<timestamp> <alias>: hey you check out my new pics login here <link>

Now, it looked suspicious at the start; it uses the same tactic as Tagged.com's social networking virus (I use the term loosely in that case). With "Bebo" the object appears to be to steal your AIM profile by getting you to tell them your credentials. It's called "social engineering" in general; I guess this would qualify for the more specific term of "phishing." Attackers know that a profitable percentage of people will simply give you their sensitive information, if you only bother to ask.

I feared they might be doing something sophisticated, like a CSRF or XSS attack, but I'm not well-trained enough to see that in the raw source of the page. I used the good old unix browser lynx with the '-source' option and piped it to the text file reader 'less' so I could look at the page source without executing it.

It's got some ads and such in it, I see. I imagine it looks like warez sites or other places on the net that mostly try to curry ad revenue. I think I also saw a 1x1 .GIF image/pixel bug/web bug in there. That's a technique is used by parties — either nefarious or simply corporate, which is arguably worse — to keep track of who is downloading their content and from where. In this case I think our phisherscum are using it to keep track of the hits on their attack page.

Friends, don't enter any account credentials of anything into a third party site like this. Or really any site. Reputable services that you can make an account with won't ask for your login name and password through a third party site or by email. Banks and universities regularly warn their clients about this sort of thing, and for good reason.

I'm going to try and figure out which parties I should report this to tomorrow. Maybe Robert Hansen and Jeremiah Grossman would be interested (not that it's really up their alley). A droid can dream, though.

A droid can dream...

~jdac

The new "SyFy" show Warehouse 13 is a bit charming.  It's secret-government sci-fi, along the lines of Threshold and, more closely, Special Unit 2, with a bit of everything-you've-heard-is-sorta-true flavor as in Buffy/Angel (where Santa is real, but he eats children rather than leaving gifts for them).

Along with Primeval, this is my most compelling argument for watching a network with a thoroughly stupid name.

So I just caught the last of Michael Shermer's appearance on the Michael Medved show, opposte Benjamin Wiker, a Discovery Institute senior fellow who was plugging his book The Darwin Myth: The Life and Lies of Charles Darwin.  I'd be tweeting it right now, but as luck would have it twitter went down for maintainence as soon as the segment ended.

Shermer had the right of it, but the deck was stacked against him, with Medved plainly and openly favoring his opponent in the sham "debate." You see, Medved is a believer in Intelligent Design, and subscribes basically to the same "teach the controversy" strategy that Benjamin Wiker and the Discovery Institute favor. Whereas Shermer favors testable theories and evidence.

I only caught the last fifteen minutes, so maybe Shermer was just getting fatigued from battling the willful ignorance of two IDiots. Still, I was sad to hear him getting caught up in a muddle of misleading arguments and ridiculous equivocation. Wiker argued at one point that Darwin didn't consider the implications of his theory, citing Rutherford B. Hayes (if memory serves), speaking at a time that predated Darwin's theory, claiming that it was the nature of blacks to be slaves.  This, for the record, is the fallacy of the Argument From Final Causes, saying that if Darwin's theory led to someone claiming blacks were inferior (though barring time-travel it couldn't) then it means that Darwin was wrong.  If Shermer's tweets are to be believed, he also equates Darwin's theory with Social Darwinism, as well.

Shermer got caught up moralizing about civilization as a means by which humans can "rise above their natures" (I paraphrase).  This led to a useless digression about whether apes are good or evil because chimp troops kill each other and bonobos like to fuck.  Wiker's assertion that Darwinism means that superior species go around slaughtering inferior ones was rightly challenged,

Medved had the home-court advantage, which he happily conferred to Wiker.  This favoritism extended right down to only mentioning Wiker's book in his closing monologue, then pointing interested listeners to his website if they wished more information about both authors, including Shermer's newest book, The Mind of the Market, about evolutionary economics.

Wiker had apparently practiced plenty of misleading arguments as well, and had his favorite cherry picked quotes and "evidence," an arena in which Michael sadly engaged him before finally pointing out that justification for anything can be found if you ignore inconvenient data. Wiker's book seems chiefly a vehicle for libel against Charles Darwin, which is entirely aside from whether or not his ideas have merit.  If my supposition is correct, hopefully Shermer pointed this out sometime before I started listening.

Well, twitter should be back up by now.  I'm off to scope out the reaction.
~jdac

Well, it seems that user enitilar  is no more.  See the purty strikethrough?  Another sockpuppet bites the dust.

If you missed it, enitilar was a sockpuppet account for the Google Money Tree scam that I talked about (it was featured on the local news around these parts too).

I'd crack open a beer, but I don't have any.

I was blind-friended recently by a user named enitilar. I thought this person might have come to my profile because they were searching for people with skepticism or roleplaying games or some other interest that we might share.

Upon visiting entilar's journal I found three posts. At the top was an image of a check, and both the check and post title contained the word "GOOGLE," so I thought maybe this person was a programmer who had recently scored a kooshy job at Google (their employee retention techniques are purported to be extensive and formidibly seductive).

Scanning down, I found that all three (friends only) posts on this journal pertained to something called Google Money Tree. The alarm bells started ringing as soon as I started seeing sentences like "I quit my job and earn $XX,XXX per month!"  The exclamation points are a dead giveaway.

I've seen this shit before.

Closer reading indicates that Google Money Tree is some kind of Multi-Level Marketing scam, much like Amway (which is to MLM what Scientology is to vindictive, manipulative and destructive cults). A quick search of (you probably guessed it) Google confirms this. Google Money Tree is not in any way affiliated with Google, Inc., even though that name appears on the check image, and who knows if anyone within its pyramid framework actually sees significant gains.

MLM schemes work by offering financial freedom to their victims, thus enticing them to take on a company-salesperson relationship that is actually the exact opposite of how it works in the real world; you see, in a MLM scheme the salespersons pay their employer for products to resell, in effect paying the company for their job, instead of getting paid to sell the company's products.

MLM's can be tricky to fight, since it seems to actually be possible to make money while working for one. These cases, those touted sales training seminars (whose admission tickets net the MLM organization more money, if this particular MLM uses them), on infomercials, or in sockpuppet blogs like enitilar's or this one. The first post of enitilar's journal goes thusly:


My non-sockpuppet friends, I dearly want you all to develop a good bullshit detector so you don't get taken by scams like this.  I know (directly and indirectly) people who have.  Exercise critical thinking and skepticism.  Question advertising claims, watch for fuzzy language. 

I haven't decided what I'm going to do about enitilar.  A ban seems apropos.  I may also start messaging the other users listed as friends on the profile.  And reporting the profile...

~jdac

Okay, so if you haven't heard, SciFi Channel is planning to change it's name to, "SyFy," apparently in an effort to score higher on the, "dumbest thing we've ever done," scale than Mansquito.

However, in a stroke of brilliance, SciFi decided to follow the formula that made them awesome in days of yore, and led to things like Dr. Who on their channel; borrow good stuff from across the pond.

The show I'm talking about is Primeval, which, if you're a Capcom fan I'd describe as being Dino Crisis: The Series.  More generally, the show follows a scientist whose wife mysteriously disappeared while hunting for a monster, which is seen briefly as it attacks her in the "cold open" to the series.  Events lead him to discover that some force is creating portals between periods in the Earth's history, the first of which causes a sudden influx of dinosaurs in a British forest.  Her Majesty's government gets involved, and we're off and running with an above-average, special-effects savvy, and in some ways pleasantly skeptically-bent TV series.

( click for FANTASTIC DEALS! )

This show is the main argument I'm making to myself, besides Eureka, about why I should give the imminent SyFy brand a fair shake.  If they cut it though, Eureka might not be enough.

The seductive belief that humans are special is a great vulnerability in our thinking.

Our homo-chauvanism is readily apparent.  The history of scientific endeavor is littered with self-aggrandizing theories about our place and significance in the universe.  Our religions exalt us as God's favored creations.  The Strong Anthropic Principle cast us as the universe's means of introspection.  In social situations also, the desire to be special works against us; subtle flattery and ego-boosting tactics are a staple of that special variety of confidence scam, the cult.  Conspiracy theorists and occultists delight in feeling that they are clued in to the real goings-on in the world (I know; I used to be one).

For centuries astronomy foundered under the burden of the Ptolemaic, Earth-centered model of the universe.  I imagine people accepted it, in part, because it affirmed comforting notions about ourselves.  It took the dissent of Copernicus, Gallileo and Aristarchus of Samos, Tycho Brahe's painstaking observations, and finally Kepler and Newton to provide the empirical laws and physical framework to accurately model the motions of celestial objects.  Aristarchus in particuar, as I learned watching Cosmos, argued for a heliocentric universe, cast Earth and a planet and submitted that the stars were incredibly far away.  We know of this only by reference, sadly; apparently his works were destroyed with the Library of Alexandria.

Biology has demonstrated that we share a vast number of genes with other organisms on Earth, and the evidences of evolution prove that we are all cut from the same cloth, as it were.  We are the sole surviving branch of the hominid evolutionary tree, a tree which for decades was thought to contain only our direct line of descent from the ancestor we share with modern apes.

Archeology shows that our turbulent rise to prominence on this planet is a very recent event.  Paleontology gives us many examples of animals more successful than we hominids, both alive today (sharks for instance) and long extinct (dinosaurs).

Astronomy lately is discovering more and more planets, and the basic materials from which life on this planet is made are in fact very common.  There may indeed be life on other planets in our own solar system; what hubris, then, to assume that life has developed only here locally.

Perhaps it should be a corollary to the Law of Parsimony/Ockham's Razor that, "thou shalt not aggrandize humanity beyond necessity."  The sciences have consistently shown, I think, that when two theories are equal but for the status they award to humanity, we should bet against ourselves.

I just recently finished watching the first episode of Cosmos, on Hulu.  I'm struck again with appreciation for what Carl Sagan has done and, through his legacy, continues to do.

For a great long while after my departure from Christianity, I was a confirmed "woo-woo."  By the time I recognized the freedom and awe science offered, Sagan was gone.  Though I never came to appreciate his genius during his life, I hope to take the measure of it before the end of mine.

In just the first episode of Cosmos, Carl Sagan deftly evoked the scope and wonder of the cosmos, the vast and expansive truths and revelations that science offers to us if we care to partake of them, and an enthusiastic wonder at what we could discover next.  Along with The Demon Haunted World, Sagan provides the theses of science and skepticism nigh-singlehandedly.

I'm agnostic, myself.  I cannot refute assertions about supernatural realities, such as the supposed afterlife, though I doubt in the extreme assertions of supernatural forces at work in our natural world.  I hold with no god I have ever heard of.  Those with deeply religious convictions wonder how people like me make it through the night, and pity us for the lack of spirituality in our lives.

In Carl Sagan I find the perfect antithesis to this attitude.  Cosmos is a shining example of how supernaturalistic beliefs are not prerequisites to the experience of spirituality.

Go watch it, Earthling.  Sure, Sagan talks a little funny and his hair goofy, but bear with him.  His message is worth hearing.

One of the tools I use daily (besides firefox) is EMACS.  Specifically GNU EMACS.  In GNOME, which I don't often use (WIMP environment, see Issue 1), my launcher comment is "What CAN'T you do with it?"

Emacs is extraordinarily powerful because of two things.

1. It has at its core a fully developed programming language, not a kludged-on toy language or specialized scripting language (EMACS LISP or elisp)
2. It can call and interface with outside programs through said language

Here are a list of the things that I do or have done with EMACS

• Write Documents (using LaTeX, which has a major mode in EMACS)
• Chat on IRC (rcirc)
• Minimalist web browsing (calling Lynx through EMACS)
• Play audio and video files (Bongo, which interfaces with mplayer, VLC and others)
• Edit code
• Play elisp games

There are also things that I don't do yet but am figuring out, like using Gnus to read my email and browse usenet.  Really, you can do anything with EMACS, just as you can do anything with a POSIX compliant operating system.

EMACS is technically a WYSIWYG program (ESR seems to think it was one of the first).  It may seem strange that I'm devoting an issue to praising it when I spent Issue 1 criticizing WYSIWYG programs and GUI interfaces.

What sets EMACS apart is that it is not a WYSIAYG (What You See Is All You Get) program.  EMACS does far too many things for pull-down menus to accomodate.  I basically never have used the menus, because I learned the minibuffer commands while figuring out the editor on a terminal only interface over SSH, so I never needed them.

I see it as a problem that so many GUI applications lack the versatility and extensibility that EMACS has.  Perhaps confronting application design as you would language design forces you to completely cover the application domain.  Maybe EMACS benefits from an application domain where functionality can be easily accreted in the form of new commands based on existing code.  Either way, it's always up and running on my "ed" workspace on fluxbox, and it's practically never "just" and editor.

Well, today I ran across the secret superhero origins of ShamWow Vince.

Y'see, we wouldn't love Vince's nuts if it wasn't for the Church of Scientology.

Oh, and now he's made fighting them his life's work.  I think I need to buy this man's movie.  And maybe some nut choppers.