Sometimes it DOES pay to get out of bed VERY early…1am
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I’ve been having a bit of trouble sleeping the last couple weeks, and tonight, I dozed off before midnite, while rocking my nearly 2 year old grandson to sleep.

My daughter Laurie is working two full time jobs right now, days at the main book store here in town on main street, and half the weekend and evenings at one of the Community Entry Services homes as an assistant.

She is socking away funds for a move from Wyoming to Nashville in May, and just bought her first new car 2 months ago.

We live on campus here at our college, and our bedroom window view is of the main parking lot. I normally park my 92 Towncar in the curb slots right outside our window, about 30 feet away. My big conversion van is in the middle row about 30 feet or so past the Towncar, and is directly in our view out of our window.

Well, tonight we had an “incident”…another in a series of “happenings” that has affected us personally in the five years we’ve been here (earning 7 degrees between us).

First incident was a dwi driver backing out of a curb side space two years ago in a Toyota 4×4 pickup, and totalling dear daughter’s Grand Am, which was parked straight and legally in a parking space, occuring just after midnight one nite.

Second incident was a police chase that ended in the parking lot outside our window, with the alledged perp diving out of a full size Suburban to run into the campus dorms to hide and being tackled in the grass by a fleet footed cop, and the still-in-gear Suburban t-boning the car parked in the EXACT spot where my Towncar was TONIGHT!

This third incident tonight, was the first DIRECTLY focused at me.

A slim, tall, black hoodie wearing fellow was seen BY MY DAUGHTER (who was looking out the bedroom window right at this moment, having just come home from her second job around midnite)…trying to open her car door (which she dutifully locks EVERY day). Her car was parked literally in the next curb side space next to mine.

The Hoodie-”Hood” then turned to my car, on the passenger side, and tugged on the passenger door handle, which wasn’t locked. The door opened, and he then stooped down so as not to be seen.

Dear daughter is looking DIRECTLY AT HIM, while she is 8 feet from our bedroom window, in the door to our room, and she says “they’re breaking into our cars”…at this point, I’m wide awake from the first restful sleep I’ve had in days.

I open my eyes quickly, and see her bolt for the front door, which opens into the courtyard of our dorm building. I jump out of bed, grab my jeans and mocasins, and dance to the front of the apartment on one leg trying to put my shoes on. I check my car before hopping in, and see that my cheap little Ipod charger has been yanked out of my dash…which is the only thing of value in the car. Perp saw the pretty blue LED light glowing and HAD to have it.

By the time I get 40 feet down the sidewalk to the breezeway walkway to the parking lot, and then the 50 feet to the parking lot curb, she’s already out into the street that comes up the side road from Main Street, which is fronting the entire college campus. I jump in my car, just as shes coming back to the sidewalk out of breath, and she says the perp has run across the field, to the College Hill apartments, which are a quarter mile west of us. These apartments are fairly new, but are mostly Section 8 housing (*low subsidized rent).

I start the Towncar and literally tear across the parking lot, out into the street, and make a quick right, then a left, which brings me to the first row building, where a gentleman is standing outside smoking.

I screech to a halt, roll the window down, and ask him “did you see somebody just run over here”? He says “Yep”.

I park the car at the curb, and run over to him and see if what he saw was what my daughter described. “Yep”. He and his wife live in the west end of this building. He’s seen the perp going into an apartment stoop 4 doors down, after hearing my daughter yelling at the idiot moron across the field as she was chasing him in stocking feet…no shoes.

As I’ve dressed and run out the door, dear wife has called 9/11. Not 45 seconds after I first say something to the smoker, the first local cop pulls up right behind my car, spotlight on me.

Smoker Guy and I point to the door where the perp has gone. As cop #1 has started walking over to that door, Cop #2 comes around the corner down the street, and #1 radios him to go BEHIND the building, to keep an eye out for runners.

2 minutes later, a Sheriff’s deputy drives up behind #1’s squad car and gets out.

#1 and Deputy knock on the door for a good twenty minutes before someone opens up. They go in, and have a couple of people come out and SIT on the stoop while they check the apartment.

Another five minutes…#1 comes back to me (daugher has JUST walked over from our building) and he says “I’m gonna ask you the hardest question you’ll have tonight….PLEASE tell me you had something stolen from your car….”

I said “yep…my Ipod charger”… and he asks “Missing a cell phone?” and shows a shiny new cell phone…which ain’t mine.

Daughter tells him the description of what she saw in my car and who she was chasing after.

He goes back in that apartment, and comes back out about 10 minutes later…holding my Ipod charger.

He says there were 10 people in that apartment (that no one was wanting to answer the door of), and that FIVE of the people inside matched the description of what daughter saw.

He also says they’ve found a STASH of LOTS of stolen car stereos, phones, and other items inside…who knows what else.

Long story short…I’ll get my charger back tomorrow at the police station, after it’s photographed for evidence.

Chances are, there will probably be drugs involved, and probably some ICE stuff, too.

From now on, even though that car is parked right outside my window, I’ll be locking the doors EVERY time, and will be looking for a good paging alarm system.

And, I’m proud of my daughter for not just standing there, and taking off after an evil-doer (she is in one of those moods lately of “Don’t f*** with me” because her senior level college classes are stressing her…and this dude is REAL lucky that SHE didn’t get her hands around his neck…

And, kudo’s to the cops…showed up like lightning…caught the perps…and retrieved my stolen goods back for me, and will be returning a lot more merchandise to folks who were hit previous to tonight…

Well, the clock on the wall says 3am…two hours after this all went down…and I’m gonna crash.

Moral of the story…lock your doors, even in pleasant extremely rural locales…know your neighbors, and don’t be afraid to meet them and make new friends…and most of all…if you can do something….DO IT.

Don’t let criminals get away with shite…track’em down, catch’em in the act….and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.

I don’t let little things go unnoticed very often, but the principal is the thing…I earned the money to buy that cheap little charger. I could replace it next payday. But, perps like the one caught tonite HAVE TO KNOW that there are some of us who WILL “make their day” one to remember…

Rich

…not to be a worry wart…the problems are mine. I have been dealing with hackers a LOT the past couple of months. Most of the problems have been due to a server level hack on my hosting company’s servers, affecting not just my site, but THOUSANDS of web sites on the companies dozens of servers.

I’ve seen spam appended to hundreds of files, using css code to hide the spam links (the worst hack adding 2508 spam links to nearly every index, login, home, default, auth, and admin file in hundreds of my directories), and I had to edit them by hand.

I’ve just found tonight, in a script I’ve been using for over a year, an URL shortener found here…

http://developers.jccorp.net/

that a subfolder of this short URL script had been hacked (I had NO CHMOD 777 folders ANYWHERE on my site), and that the same spam I had been removing from my pages, that were pointing to OTHER hacked sites on mostly .edu college and university websites, was now SOURCING and FORWARDING from my site.

I can not tell you how bloody angry I became at finding this.

The appended spam code was and is looking like this…

< u style=display:none >< a href="http://survivalring.org/url/ 1/2/30/840505780197.html">cheap cialis < a href="http://survivalring.org/url/ 1/2/30/8411792520159.html">order cialis < a href="http://survivalring.org/url/ 1/2/30/8421918768617.html">hydrocodone withdrawal < a href="http://survivalring.org/url/ 1/2/30/potentiate-hydrocodone/">potentiate hydrocodone < a href="http://survivalring.org/url/ 1/2/30/8502024412430.html">cialis compare levitra viagra < a href="http://survivalring.org/url/ 1/2/30/8441589492944.html">levitra vs cialis < a href="http://survivalring.org/url/ 1/2/30/phentermine-without-prescription/">phentermine without prescription < a href="http://survivalring.org/url/ 1/2/30/8471141010198.html">phentermine side effects … and on and on…

It took a good 20 minutes for my FTP program to delete thousands of spam files from that subfolder above at /url/1/2/.

The latest hack that affected me BEFORE this hack was one that hit, again, the index/admin/default/etc php and him files, and REPLACED all of my code with the following code.

Continue Reading »
Not a good day…weekend…or even near future…

Hi friends,

Here is an update to the hack attack on SurvivalRing yesterday, as mentioned in the email below.

This hack attack seems to have darker overtones than I originally suspected.

While I believe the hack was as I stated yesterday ( a web bot spamming program, which gained access to the site via php script vulnerabilities), I’ve done a bit more research on the destination website that all the spam links were pointing to.

Every one of the nearly fifty hidden links point to a hacked website hosted in the middle east…

hxxp://qasweb.org/library/universe/online/?page=49 (link disabled on purpose)

A quick search found an arabic language based website is the home of

http://qasweb.org/

This is the Qatif Astronomical Society forum website…in Arabic.

You can view a mostly translated into english version here (google cache file)

Following the path of the hacked files, we see this…

Continue Reading »
SurvivalRing hacked by Islamists?

Update to this story…

Not for me…but about the “inadequecies” of our wonderful Red Cross USA…

Source…

Dispute Impeded Red Cross Katrina Response

By HOPE YEN
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The American Red Cross was warned years before Katrina hit to resolve its internal disputes or risk a repeat of snafus that plagued the Sept. 11, 2001 relief effort, according to internal documents made public by a Senate panel Monday.

Thousands of pages of Red Cross e-mail, corporate documents and whistleblower complaints paint a picture of an organization whose mammoth structure contributed to the charity’s uneven response to Hurricane Katrina.

In an Oct. 29, 2001 e-mail, board member Bill George warned Red Cross chairman David McLaughlin to resolve the group’s disputes. At the time, the nation’s largest charity was reeling from CEO Bernadine Healy’s resignation amid charges it had mismanaged Sept. 11 donations.

“The worst thing we could do is to gloss over the split on the board, make some superficial changes in governance, and see the whole scenario repeated three or four years from now,” the Medtronic Inc. executive wrote.

“I do not think the board can continue kidding itself that it wants a strong leader and then not giving that person the authority to lead,” he said. Four years later, the group’s next CEO, Marsha Evans, would resign in the aftermath of Katrina, citing board friction.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, calling for immediate changes, warned the Red Cross board Monday that “‘business-as-usual’ cannot continue.” He said the documents raise questions about the Red Cross’ ability to keep close watch on billions of dollars in donations.

“This type of culture, a culture that discourages people from coming forward, management that does not want to hear the bad news, and is more concerned about good press than good results, is a theme that I am hearing too often,” said Grassley, who as Finance Committee chairman oversees charitable organizations.

His committee released the documents Monday.

In a statement, the Red Cross said it would fully cooperate with the committee’s review. The charity has said it responded to Katrina the best it could in circumstances almost unimaginable, while acknowledging that it stumbled in “technology, logistics and coordination.”

“The American Red Cross is committed to learning from our prior challenges and making the necessary changes,” the charity said Monday, noting it had recently launched an independent audit to review operations.

A House report earlier this month on the Katrina response found the Red Cross was overwhelmed by water, food and supply shortages as well as a disorganized shelter process. Some lawmakers have called for a change to the national response plan that gives the Red Cross the primary role and the dollars that flow with it.

Replying to a Senate inquiry, the Red Cross said this month it was working to improve coordination with FEMA and local charity groups.

It said it had no “fixed deadline” for hiring a new CEO to replace Evans, who took over in August 2002 as the organization was shaking off criticism over how it handled Sept. 11 donations, some of which were quietly set aside for future terror incidents.

In dozens of letters to Grassley’s office, former Red Cross employees and volunteers detail a culture of inefficiency in which poor communications, layers of bureaucracy and resistance to change contributed to waste and chaos after Katrina struck.

Typical of the complaints: Red Cross trucks rolling in with goods or sitting idle in parking lots, but not always accounted for; volunteers staying in hotels rather than shelters, holding them for use in case it was needed for someone “with more privilege in the organization;” orders placed for food well in excess of need; extensive travel paid for at retail rather than pre-negotiated volume cost.

“We ask for the Red Cross to be more accountable for donor funds,” wrote Christee Lesch, a hurricane volunteer from Adel, Iowa. “They tell the public how much money has been spent on disaster relief, but not how well it is spent.”

Documents also show Red Cross leaders eager to repair the group’s image following its fundraising flap, but at times uncertain how to navigate among the local chapters, which represent 30 of the charity’s 50-member board. Ultimately, Evans was counted on - unsuccessfully - to smooth out problems.

In a June 18, 2002, letter, Bill Van Eman, chairman of the Brazos Valley, Texas, chapter complained that the charity’s national leaders were unfairly asking the chapter, following media criticism, to lower its administrative costs below 10 percent of funds raised.

“Allowing us to have a small portion of the funds raised was a wise idea,” Eman wrote. “It could have been phrased as a ’special administrative cost’ and not a soul would have said anything. … If all we get as local chapters is bad publicity and additional paperwork, I do not feel this is a wise use of funds.”

McLaughlin responded: “Withholding some funds to cover chapter expenses makes infinitely good sense. With our new president on board, I suspect that we will be undertaking a thoughtful analysis of how we fund disaster response.”

On the Net:

Senate Finance Committee: http://finance.senate.gov/

And, furthermore, here are the Senate Documents regarding this current situation…

February 2006
2-27-06 Grassley Urges Red Cross to Improve Governance, Respond to Volunteers’ Concerns

American Red Cross’ Response to Sen. Grassley’s Specific Questions in his Dec. 29, 2005, Letter

Documents from the American Red Cross Supporting its Response to Grassley’s Dec. 29, 2005, Letter

Response 1, Response 2, Response 3, Response 4, Response 5, Response 6, Response 7, Response 8