This needs to be propagated.

Waltzing Matilda and William McBride, from aldon by way of technoshaman, secanth, and riverheart (not necessarily in that order).

New attack, possibly against IIS?

I was just reviewing my log files and found a bunch of these .....

• error log contains:  [Thu Apr 22 17:07:12 2004] [error] [client 61.152.210.36] request failed: URI too long
• request log contains:  d60-65-155-212.col.wideopenwest.com - - [21/Apr/2004:01:26:44 -0400] "SEARCH /\x90 [about 8k of repeated \x02\xb1] [about 24k of \x90]" 414 383 "-" " -"

My best guess is this is a probe looking for vulnerable systems which, when identified, will then be targeted with a serious attack.  And just taking a wild-ass guess, my guess is it's trying for a buffer overflow in -- going out on a limb here (NOT!) -- IIS.

Go away, kid, ya bother me.

A mixed bag

dafydd found this piece from Scientific American discussing the Bush administration's disdain for science.  Your scientific advisory council is telling you things you don't want to hear?  Dismiss them and get different scientists who'll bend the knee and meekly say, "Yes, m'lord.  It is even as thou sayest."

Today's word is "defenestration," class:  a teacher at a Newton County, Georgia school has resigned after ordering two students to throw a 14-year-old girl out of a classroom window.  The teacher hasn't been charged with anything yet, but investigations are ongoing.  The girl was taken to hospital with cuts and neck pain.  There is absolutely no truth to the vicious rumor that President Bush will put her in charge of the White House scientific advisory council.

Mark Jennings of Synergroup Systems is offering the services of US programmers at rates competitive with Indian and Philliline offshoring firms.  US corporations aren't interested.  The implication: It's not just about the money.

JPL has designed an optical quantum memory device that can store photonic qubits, and could also be used as a quantum transponder or repeater.

Eric Allman on SMTP and spam:  "Redesign SMTP to incorporate cryptography -- forget about DNS-based authentication."  I'm with him.  Gates, meanwhile, continues to babble unworkably stupid nonsense on the subject, while Brewster Kahle says, "Book'em, Danno.  Email fraud one."

dafydd comes up with a fun meme

This could get interesting....

Invent a memory of me and post it in the comments.  It can be anything you want, so long as it's something that's never happened and reasonably reflects how you think of me.  Then, if you wish, post this to your journal and see what people would like to remember of you, only the universe failed to cooperate in making it happen so they had to make it up instead.

Excessive force (and then some) in Portland OR

Thank ilcylic for these two accounts of Portland, OR police beating up and pepper-spraying a blind, half-deaf, 71-year-old woman and her 94-year-old mother for the heinous crime of trying to make sure a city employee wasn't mistakenly hauling off a 90-year-old antique wagon along with her yard waste.  Portland PD continue to insist they did nothing wrong, and were in fear for their lives from these two handicapped geriatrics.