ThisMyShiznat

In Greenpoint Brooklyn, a local resident living on top of one of the USA’s most polluted areas of land, decided to capitalize on the estimated 17 million gallons of oil contaminating the groundwater.  The unnamed man, an otherwise reasonable citizen, purchased specialized drilling equipment and in his spare time, he started drilling for oil in the backyard of his Brooklyn home.

While you are sitting there trying to remember the words to the Beverly Hillbillies theme, I will make one notable point about the average size of an NYC back yard, ranging anywhere from 5 square feet up to roughly 20 square feet.  For instance, my house has a front yard which extends roughly 5 feet by 7 feet.  That’s what us NY folk call a “lawn”.  You could cut the grass with a pair of scissors if you wanted to.

According to various websites devoted to the epic pollution in Newtown creek, the massive oil spill does in fact exist under the mans house.  The pool of oil starts at a depth of roughly 40 feet below ground and extends down another 40 feet.  In his spare time, the Brooklyn man was able to get the 6 inch diameter hole to a depth of 23 feet before a neighbor noticed the foul smell from the chemicals being released through the ground.  A smell of gasoline filled the neighborhood for over a week before anyone discovered the source.

Due to the underground pressure of the gases escaping from this hole, the residents were unable to fill it in due to fear of an explosion.  It’s like they say, when you break the seal, you cant unbreak it.  Instead of filling in the hole, they had to get in touch with the Department of Environmental Conservation, who erected a ventilation device over the hole.  The device was essentially a piece of PVC pipe sticking into the hole.  The other end of the pipe was 40 feet above street level, allowing the gases to vent over the next several years.

Oddly enough there are exceptionally high rates of cancer, asthma and other untold illnesses in the neighborhood.  Who’d think, eh?

For the original article, click here

To get more information about the Newtown creek and the cleanup efforts click here.

In recent news AT&T was under fire from the web site operators at 4chan. Over the weekend, AT&T began blocking traffic to www.4chan.org, do to what it called a DDoS attack being launched from 4chan servers.  Today, 4chan argued that the AT&T was intentionally blocking the sites content from its subscribers.

I’m sure you have heard of AT&T, but if your not familiar with 4chan, then I don’t recommend visiting their site at www.4chan.org.  Even if you just did go there, you won’t think it’s very interesting at first glance.  From visiting the site, I would assume that they are based out of Japan.  Traceroute tells me the server is being hosted in California by a company called xeex Communications.

During todays report, a false report of Randall Stephenson’s death showed up on a website affiliated with CNN.  The website, at IReport.com is “a user-generated site” and that stories are not “edited, fact-checked or screened”.  Basically, the site appears to serve as a bulletin board for real news.  In this case, the report never made it into the national news, but in the past these pranksters have managed to get these stories through.

A few months back I posted an article about an 11 year old girl in Wisconsin who died of diabetes when her parents opted to ignore the possibility that medical treatment could help their daughter.  Instead, they prayed for the daughter. Over the course of several days, the 11 year old girl died.

The mother was recently found guilty of second degree reckless homicide and the father, Dale Neumann, is about to begin trial for the same charges.  Neumann’s lawyer argues that there is not “a shred of evidence” Neumann knew his prayers would fail to help his daughter or cause her death.  With an argument like that, Neumann and his lawyer should should BOTH plead insanity.

Just last week, an Oregon man was found guilty on the same charges, resulting from the death of his 15 month old daughter.  He didn’t plead insanity either.

A pair of gay penguins have broken up in a steamy saga of death, betrayal and heartache.   Where else would this happen but at the San Francisco zoo?  I mean seriously, only in San Francisco would this happen.

The gay penguin couple, Harry and pepper were in a common law marriage for 6 years, with a baby chick that they received government approval to adopt.  Pepper became suspicious about Harry’s late night visits to Linda’s den, and although Pepper was suspicious, he never expected the betrayal that comes next.

Back in March of 2008, Linda the female penguin next door, took out a significant life insurance policy on her husband Figg.  Later that year, Figg died under questionable circumstances and the death was ruled to be “of natural causes”.   Harry and Linda started spending more time together.  Then one day, Harry told Pepper that he was going to the store, borrowing $20 for cigarettes and milk.  Harry never came back from the store.

Today, Harry and Linda are happily married and have a baby together.  Pepper still lives in the cave next door, bitter and alone.  On occasion, Pepper visits the new couples home, but he is not met with a warm welcome.  Harry and Linda are happy together, and want nothing to do with Pepper.  Currently there is a custody battle over guardianship of the gay couples child.

Several calls to the penguin department caretakers have gone unanswered.  So far, the only information we have gotten has been “no response”.

Pepper only had one thing to say to our reporters. He wants his $20 back.

A quick search for “Unemployment Rate” brought me to a nice little gem from those evil geniuses at Google.  They put together a line chart, updated regularly, to display the Federal Unemployment Rate. The utility is actually pretty handy.  By default, it shows you the overall U.S. unemployment rate, as reported by the US Bureau of Labor.

Just in case you didn’t get the memo back in early March, it seems that the published federal unemployment rate does not include a certain group of the job force, who are technically unemployed.  See, the federal unemployment rate has 6 levels of measurement, ranging from “not that bad” to “holy shit”.

Since we are on the topic of unemployment, please click on my advertisers.

It seems that the published unemployment rate is what’s called U-3, and does not include workers who have stopped looking for work, workers who are so downtrodden that they will take what they can get, or workers who have taken jobs outside of their regular field, such as a lawyer working in fast food.  Also, the statistics don’t take into account the patriotic Americans who don’t want to be part of the problem, and thus haven’t applied for their free money.  Bless their unemployed souls, really.

As you can see from the BLS governemt site, the actual recorded unemployment rate is closer to 16.5%.

A recent whitepaper has been release, and the techniques will be demonstrated at the 2009 Blackhat convention, laying out details for two techniques for keystroke logging, using very unconventional methods.

Typically, keystroke logging is done by means of software installed on the victims PC, or through a small piece of hardware attacked to the keyboards cable.  In this case, access to the computer is not required at all.  The first attack involves sniffing slight voltage changes from an AC electrical outlet up to 30 feet away from the victims computer.  When a key is pressed on the keyboard, a string of binary code is sent to the computer through the USB or PS2 cable, for instance 1000101 or 110100100.  Since there is no shielding on the ground cable attached to the keyboard, running into the computer and back to the ground wire in the buildings electrical wiring, the variations, or noise, generated can be picked up quite easily from a nearby outlet.

Scary huh?  Well, not really, not to me at least.  An easy way around this is to get yourself a nice wireless keyboard.  Since the wireless keyboard uses infrared light, or bluetooth, there is no ground cable on the keyboard, and the signal cant be snooped on in the electrical cabling.  Great success.  Right?

Unfortunately, as an example, the bottom line with car security systems still holds true to this day.   If an auto thief want your car, they are going to get it.  You didn’t hear this from me, but did you know that a LoJack  system can be rendered useless with a handful of fairly inexpensive neodymium magnets?  Also, a few pieces of aluminum tubing will also do the trick.  It’s called science and it works.  Distortion and interference can cause the LoJack signal to be rendered useless.  I’m not telling how to, or that you should do this, because inexperienced auto thief’s will do it wrong and you will probably be caught.  Experienced auto thief’s already know this trick.  As for me, I’m just familiar with the concept.  That’s all.

Back to keystroke logging though.  Lets say you have the wireless keyboard, or a laptop running on a battery.  No connection to the ground wire in the AC system.  In this case, the attacker can use a fairly inexpensive laser to measure vibrations on the laptop, keyboard, or even the table top where the keyboard is sitting.  Now these vibrations aren’t going to be nearly as easy to decipher as the 1’s and 0’s being sent out through the electrical wire, so it will be good for preventing the casual hacker from logging your stokes.

It’s like they say.  A lock on a door will only keep an honest person out of your room.

In the wonderful* city of Camden New Jersey, a 22 year old factory worker died earlier this week after falling into a large vat of boiling chocolate.

That’s all I really have for you on this one.  But to make up for my lack of content, I will leave you with the following image from the movie “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”.  The recent remake.  Not the original.

That movie was very strange, wasn’t it?

Delicious.

In the computer and network industry there are a handful giants that everyone has heard of, but there is one little known giant that many people may not have heard of.  A little known company based out of Mountain View, California called Google.  Just in case you are not familiar with Google, let me fill you in.  You’re an idiot and I don’t know how you possibly found my site.  Please put your computer into it’s original packaging and ship it back to the manufacturer.

In a recent news story, Google has announced their plans to increase their ever expanding reach by releasing a full fledged Operating System for home computers.  I suppose that their marketing data on everyone in the civilized world, including their age, race, sex, interests, where they live, where they travel to, where they go on vacation, an index of their email, who they communicate with, what tv shows they watch, music interests, office documents, news interests and preference to boxers or briefs… well.. I guess that isn’t good enough for them.  Now they want to seal the deal by dominating your life by gaining control over your home PC entirely.

Is anyone else a *little* bit concerned?  I’m sure that Micro$oft is wetting their pants a little bit.  Luckily, Google has the ability to make a piece offering by sending the Micro$oft executives new underwear that fit’s their particular preference.

The definition of a monopoly is when a single entity has significant control over a particular market, giving the entity a great latitude of control over the  pricing and terms of the services and products offered in the given market.  Now, technically this definition doesn’t really apply to Google.  Instead, what Google is doing is trying to gain a significant level of control over the lives and habits of it’s individual users and customers.

I am not sure if there is a term for this level of domination, but this is another case in point for my “Google is evil” theory.  Just in case you havn’t been following my blog regularly, let me restate the theory for you.  “Google is evil”.  That’s the theory.

People.  We can’t let any one entity have this level of domination.  Before technology, I don’t really see how this could have been possible but if there were a single company back in the 60’s with this level of big brotherhood, (aside from government) don’t you think there would have been public outcry?  Today, especially with the power of technology and the ease of sharing information, where’s the public outcry?

Where is the fear for our privacy?  Who is protecting you? oh… yeah, I forgot.  Googles got your back.  ok…

Sleep safe I guess.  For today.