Well, yesiree-bob, I got intruded upon this weekend. Not in a physical way mind-you, but in a digital way. I awoke Saturday morning (around 10:30 AM or so), having the night before hosted a rompin’ good night of Winter Feasting and Pokering, to Geoff calling to tell me A) that he was sorry to have missed the Winter Feast and B) that the server was down, and that both of these things made him sad.

Needless to say, I was pretty bummed out. Since I started leasing that server back in August 2003, there hadn’t been a single minute of down-time for the server! I logged onto my hosting company’s website (EV1Servers.net) to see what was up. I soon noticed that a trouble-ticket had been opened up due to “Acceptible Use Policy Violations”. Further, it gave me the indication that my box had been cracked (not hacked). AKA intruded, transgressed, violated. This happened at 4:20 in the AM, and at 4:38, EV1Servers had — quite literally — pulled the plug on the server. I needed to contact them to get them to start investigating what was up. Unfortunately, the Abuse Department can only be contacted via email, and when I pressed the Customer Support lady about me phoning them (“You are telling me they have no phones at all?”) she replied “Yes, the have no phones.”. A pretty blantant lie, I’m thinking, but nonetheless they had started their quick investigation about 12:30 or so, and had brought my server back up to me around the same time. They amended the trouble ticket to say that they had found some suspicious files consistent with an exploit of a webserver/scripting bug and that I should start the cleanup immediately.

Turns out it was a cracker with an IP address from somewhere in Brazil, and the target of the denial-of-service attack they mounted was also in Brazil. I’ll save you the gory details, but there were a couple of bugs (aka “vulnerabilities”) that were exploited to allow very limited but annoying access to the webserver. I host a server with a number of websites on it, and I can’t keep tabs on every piece of software (like webmail, galleries, bulletin boards) at all times. The best I can do is keep server-wide security as tight as possible. A big “oops” on my part, but I thought I was safe. After ensuring that the crackers hadn’t destroyed any data or left behind any “backdoors”, I brought the webserver and databases and everything save for the email system back up around 2:00 PM or so.

While I managed to plug the hole in the webserver that the crackers had made, I found there was another hell-of-annoying thing that had happened — the crackers had flooded my box with all sorts of SPAM email. I had to meticulously weed out those SPAM from legitimate emails and clean up the mail queue. I think that very few SPAM emails escaped my box. This was the biggest pain in the ass, and much to both mine and Kelly’s chagrin, it took me until damn near 5 o’clock to bring the mail subsystem back on-line.

Last night (Sunday) I spent most of it on the couch fortifying my server with firewalls, intrusion-detection software, and a number of other little tricks to help me fend off those pain in the ass crackers.

I realize most of this won’t make a lick of sense to most of you, but I thought it might be interesting to hear about the saucy underside of this thing we know as the intarweb. If you are really interested in knowing more specifically about what happened, feel free to contact me.

If you’ve happened by The Drudge Report in the last couple of days, you’ll notice that there has been a flap over Dick Cheney getting a flu shot. To counter, the Bush camp says “but Clinton got one, too!” As per usual, both sides are acting like children because both Cheney and Clinton fit the government’s guidelines of “at-risk” people. Cheney and Clinton both have had heart problems, Clinton’s being most recently, but Cheney really holds the crown here with not one, but four heart attacks since 1978.

Geez folks, bring me something real here in the final weeks of the campaign!

In map form!

LA Times’ 2004 Electoral Vote Tracker¹

Rasmussen Reports Electoral College projections²

Electoral-Vote.com’s Electoral Vote Predictor³

ElectoralProjection.com’s Election 2004 Projections⁴

And finally, an animation of the 2004 Presidential Race in map form. See how states have flip-flopped or remained resolute throughout this race.

And one final thought: if two back-to-back very close elections don’t bring about at least some discussion on the topic of reforming the Electoral College system, I don’t know what will…

1: Based on data from PollingReport.com

2: Bill Rasmussen, the Administrative contact on the WHOIS record for rasmussenreports.com is indeed the founder of ESPN and a financeer in Naples, Florida. I have found no indication of his political leanings or any reported bias of the reports. Empirical evidence shows both right and left-leaning sites mentioning their reports.

3: Read their Frequently Asked Questions

4: Their formula is detailed here. On data: “I use the Polling Report and RealClearPolitics for national polls and DC Political Report and RealClearPolitics for state polls.” On objectivity: ” In developing the formula, I made every effort to be objective, rather than biased toward Bush. Yes, I am a huge supporter of the President, but this formula does not, in any way, falsely inflate Bush’s standing.”

And let it be known that regardless of who wins, Jon Edwards is filled with goddamned optimism.

GAIM is an Instant Messaging client which can use AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, and many other protocols. Originally, it was solely for Linux, but last year they put out a Windows port, and just now they have finally release version 1.0 for both platforms. It’s been a long, long time coming, and I’ve been using it on both platforms for a long, long time so it is great to see the project reach this milestone. I suggest highly that if you are using AOL’s client, you dump it immediately and go and download a copy right now!

Update: This is from an email I sent to the developers to congratulate them, and Sean Egan replied:

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 10:38:59 -0400, Ben Wilson wrote:

Thought I’d drop a line and congratulate you on Gaim v1.0. Being a developer, I know that version numbers don’t really mean that much technologically, but they are a huge psychological barrier. I’m sure it’s a big relief.

Actually, you’re wrong. 1.0.0 is entirely insignificant. The only reason for it is that we decided to change to a major-minor-micro versioning scheme, and 1.0.0 was the most logical place to start.


-s.

So, nevermind! Actually, not really. I’m giving Gaim their props anyway.

Further update from Rob Flynn, maintainer of GAIM:

Thanks :) It’s always good to hear these kinds of things. :)

Further further update:

(13:41:10) HunterDixon: ooh, just installed gaim
(13:41:11) HunterDixon: i like
(13:41:30) HunterDixon: oh wow, tabs
(14:00:08) HunterDixon logged out.

From a collection of Japanese cigarette PSA graphics, with
more here. I love you, Japan. I do.

Hey, that’s me!

Geoff has been helpind Odd Todd out with various and sundry flash games over the last couple of years, and they’ve finally released Mep Ball, a Kick-ups style game, and I was credited for beta-testing with ol’ Geoffy. Mostly, I played Mep Ball and tried to cheat a lot. It turned out very well — very fun indeed!

There is a website, it’s called SomethingAwful, and each Friday they publish a new themed “Photoshop” contest where they do amazing things with digital imagery. This has somehow caught on like wildfire, and even become VERY funny! And I’m not EVEN joking! Just take a look at this this entry for this weeks contest, which is based around reworking strips from a popular (ne’ classic) comic graphic novel, “The Watchmen”.

I loved The Watchmen, and having the crew at Something Awful take strips out of this classic graphic novel and re-work them in a way that only Something Awful can do is just dandy.

via TheMaxx, via Charlie

I’ve been playing the heck out of SimTower as of late, but I just found the sequel — Yoot Tower — at The Underdogs. You can download it for free, it’s 52 megs.

Dear readers, I have changes up the styles a little bit. The new “default” theme is what used to be the “blue” theme. And the old “default” is now the “simple” theme.

What? You didn’t even know you could change the theme for the site? Why sure you can, doodarino! Look for the THEME dropdown list and choose one. Dependent on the theme you have chosen, this should be on the left or the bottom of the page.