Cosmic Echoes…by Rich Fleetwood

Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

[ Reading time: 6 - 9 minutes ]

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

[ Reading time: 2 - 3 minutes ]

…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.

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[ Reading time: 4 - 6 minutes ]

Well….THAT sucked…

OK folks…

I’ve had a very long, very bad day….I’m sick, with a stomach virus that is REALLY about to start kicking in (I saw it in action last night in Laramie when we had to pull to the side of the road for one of our tv crew to decorate someone’s yard, and then had to find a newspaper for him to sit on because he blew at BOTH ends)…

…and the video shoot with the vice president went horribly awry with the satellite truck developing hardware problems JUST as the VP’s plane landed, and our regular on-air engineer throwing up in his hotel room and NOT available to fix it, with our backup, less trained engineer arriving only minutes before air time, after a 3 and a half hour drive across the state….well, it become a total cluster (****)….

…and I didn’t even mention the frikking idiots that the state GOP folks hired to do the audio and nicey nice lighting and multimedia INSIDE the 60 or more year old Laramie High School gym…and who could NOT understand how to set the audio feed to us…causing ME to have to FIGHT MY WAY into the gym..AFTER LOCKDOWN by the secret service and the vice president ALREADY in the building, before he came on stage…

…with me getting a full security scan and pat down, and personal traversal by TWO SS agents from the front door all the way through the crowd, to the AUDIO control guys in the BACK of the gym…who had turned our audio feed OFF from the gym to the satellite truck.

Once they pushed the button, and I got back out to the truck, they were blowing the WORST sounding audio I’ve ever heard in my short TV career….at least 20-40 DB…and we were receiving audio feed into our mic set for -50DB…using XLR mics with balanced stereo levels….and I was NOT about to go through that fight again to get back inside to slap the snot out of them.

Holy Mary Mother of God….

Can my day have been ANY worse?

And, I’m just now posting this, because the “director” of WyoPTV chose for us to stay at the Motel 6…which did NOT have wireless access …or net access at all…so I’m a DAY behind now…and this is the FIRST thread I’ve read and caught up on since arriving home, hugging my wife, playing with my grandson Hudsin, and taking a deep breath…

I’ll have a more detailed report later this week, on the entire event.

For now, understand this….

Cheney gave pretty much the same stump speech he has been giving across the entire Western US…almost word for word…

Cubin did the same thing I’ve heard her do several times now while working television coverage of these political races….blowing smoke….standing on a not so hot 12 year career..with NO goals of what she WILL be doing for our state.

The other REPUB candidates (gov, dept of edu, etc, etc) all gave somewhat lukewarm speechs, and the crowd (less then expected I heard), was there for the sparkly lights and big names, but little else.

As we were heading to the satellite truck to power up for the day, we passed a block long procession of protestors marching toward the high school from a couple of blocks away. I got some handy cam video of them as we passed.

A few got in…and one was forcibly carried out…after interrupting Cheney a couple of times with screams of FASCIST!

Sheesh…..

What a frikkin’ day…

That’s the world of political posturing, main stream media, and little people….

…all rolled into one hour long, tripe filled, security laden, vomit smelling, and incredibly intense Saturday morning in Wyoming.

Less you think I am anti-republican, anti-Cheney, or anti-anything, let me say this…

I am an INDEPENDENT.

I vote for the MOST qualified, intelligent, and trained person for the options available. I am a Constitutionalist, and have been for a long time.

But, you just have to see some things for yourself to make that final decision on WHO deserves…ney….EARNS your vote.

AND, for the love of ALL that is great and just in our country…PLEASE vote this Tuesday.

THIS is what our men and women in uniform the world over, have paid for with their blood, and lives, ever since the founding of our nation.

Each of us is welcome to our own choices, decisions, and lives…

Voting is how we help shape our own futures, and the futures of all that come after us.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for those posting on this thread in shows of support…I appreciate it…

Rich

[ Reading time: 2 - 2 minutes ]

Time for another news update from Wyoming .

In the last 6 weeks or so, SurvivalRing has had a major set of attacks from many different sources. Due to some open source file security holes, we had a few “Script Kiddies” break into the site, and cause both some disfigured home pages (twice), major spam attack (twice), and some political hacking from a group of Islamo-Facists, who posted anti-Israeli war pictures of war victims, including mangled children…it was horribly nasty… Mine was NOT the only site. I know of hundreds of other sites which were using the same open source tools, that were hacked in the same way…it was an automated and combined attack…but needless to say, we were a victim.

All scripts have been updated, but our chat room is still down…to be finished this weekend soon. The chat hack seriously affected thousands of sites, and for a few weeks, a huge rush of these same script kiddies kept trying to get in, after I had removed the weak link in the chat code.

I’ve even seen a video made by the hackers, showing EXACTLY how to break into and destroy sites…it was amazingly simply, once the hole was found. Be certain…I AM watching the site admin section VERY closely, and have installed extended tools to track hack attempts and IP addresses.

I’ve also had to fix a few other sites I admin, who received the same automated attacks. So, I’ve been a bit busy. My apologies for a lack of updates here on the blog.

Stay tuned…major updates coming to the SurvivalRing website.

Rich

[ Reading time: 2 - 4 minutes ]

Received this from a friend today…and feel it’s something I need to share…

Rich

You probably missed it in the rush of news last week, but there was actually a report that someone in Pakistan had published in a newspaper an offer of a reward to anyone who killed an American, any American.

So an Australian dentist wrote an editorial the following day to let everyone know what an American is so they would know when they found one. (Good one, mate!!!!)

An American is English, or French, or Italian, Irish, German, Spanish, Polish, Russian or Greek. An American may also be Canadian, Mexican, African, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Australian, Iranian, Asian, Arab, Pakistani or Afghan.

An American may also be a Comanche, Cherokee, Osage, Blackfoot, Navaho, Apache, Seminole or one of the many other tribes known as native Americans.

An American is Christian, or he could be Jewish, or Buddhist, or Muslim. In fact, there are more Muslims in America than in Afghanistan. The only difference is that in America they are free to worship as each of them chooses.

An American is also free to believe in no religion. For that he will answer only to God, not to the government, or to armed thugs claiming to speak for the government and for God.

An American lives in the most prosperous land in the history of the world. The root of that prosperity can be found in the Declaration of Independence , which recognizes the God given right of each person to the pursuit of happiness.

An American is generous. Americans have helped out just about every other nation in the world in their time of need, never asking a thing in return.

When Afghanistan was over-run by the Soviet army 20 years ago, Americans came with arms and supplies to enable the people to win back their country!

As of the morning of September 11, Americans had given more than any other nation to the poor in Afghanistan. Americans welcome the best of everything…the best products, the best books, the best music, the best food, the best services. But they also welcome the least. The national symbol of America, The Statue of Liberty, welcomes your tired and your poor, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores, the homeless, tempest tossed. These in fact are the people who built America.

Some of them were working in the Twin Towers the morning of September 11, 2001 earning a better life for their families. It’s been told that the World Trade Center victims were from at least 30 different countries, cultures, and first languages, including those that aided and abetted the terrorists.

So you can try to kill an American if you must. Hitler did. So did General Tojo, and Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung, and other blood-thirsty tyrants in the world. But, in doing so you would just be killing yourself. Because Americans are not a particular people from a particular place. They are the embodiment of the human spirit of freedom. Everyone who holds to that spirit, everywhere, is an American.

[ Reading time: 2 - 3 minutes ]

Hi folks,

The Madness was mine… at my website host.
The last couple of days, SurvivalRing.org and most of the other domains associated with the website crashed because of issues at our webhost, which happens to be Hostrocket.

A day of tracking down domain settings, many trouble tickets, and several long distance phone calls, resulted with a very tough ticket being sent at high priority to the Hostrocket techs. This last 0ne got their attention. I threatened to find a new host if this wasn’t resolved.

At 3am this morning (thank God for 24 hour tech support), a tech named Joe dug deep into the settings of my website config system, and found the problem.

It seems my entire website was moved to another server without my knowledge, using an automated hosting tool. Problem came about because the script didn’t finish the job, and corrupted many settings…leaving SurvivalRing a smoking hole in the ground.

He found the problem, corrected the major issues, and brought the site back up so that the domain pointers could find my site again on a server shared with 250 other websites.

I still had a problem with missing subdomains (which contain my other websites, such as theblastshelter.com, sundancerdigipros.com, cosmicechoes.org, yaaaonline.com, and many others), and dead programs including my blogs, forums, and other tools. He recovered over 30 subdomains in the next hour, and everything seems to be working now.

I was seriously considering finding a new host that last half of yesterday, and had looked at Hostgator and 1and1, both of which seem to have good references and some really good packages with lots of storage space and bandwidth…my major concerns for immediate upgrade.

After the last response on this issue from Hostrocket, they took responsibility for the site issues, and upgraded my account to 5 gigs of space and unlimited bandwidth, at a savings to me of 30% off what I was going to pay, and which beat the prices at the two hosts above.

For the time being, which means the next year, I’ll hang with Hostrocket, and see what comes out of it. I can always upgrade later, and may still create a mirror backup site of SurvivalRing…for the next time things go awry.

Rich

[ Reading time: 5 - 8 minutes ]

…from the Red Cross. Yes…THAT Red Cross…

Seems that a handful of files I have been offering for download for many years (since 2002) has offended them. The files were received, in good faith, from a team member of the Witchita Falls Emergency Management Agency many moons before 2002, on CD for me to share with the world via my website.

I even put them on my first CD rom publication in 2002, after checking with my local chapter of the Red Cross in Worland, Wyoming, and getting their permission after they viewed the entire CD. After that, my CD master disk had to go through a copyright check before thousands of copies were made at cost, to be GIVEN AWAY by a good friend of mine in the preparedness business. The manufacturer went through every file, and found NO copyright issues.

Now, here some 3 years later, the Red Cross has “caught up” with me (literally…the envelope contained copies of letters sent [and returned] by the USPS in Nov. 2004, and July 2005. They want me to remove 133 files from the CD master. View the actual letter here.

I sent a nice return email to the Office of General Counsel of the Red Cross asking clarification of exactly what they were saying…

What I didn’t include was some rude, crude, and socially unacceptable comments about how the Red Cross seems to steal, lose, or otherwise screw people out of their hard earned money, even to the point of STEALING services and REFUSING TO PAY ANYTHING for use of equipment they used and abused after signing contracts stating they would be responsible for…

For example, a good friend of mine, “Alfie”, is based in the DC area. He has had personal dealings with these folks, who have their “ivory tower”, a huge headquarters in Merrifield (where their letter was postmarked from, incidentally). He shared the following with me…

“Alfie” recommends I pursue this hard…if the Red Cross decides to rain down their own little game of terrorism on a poor, hard working family man who is paying his own way, as well as for his wife and two kids, through full time college at the same time.

“Alfie” suggest that I follow through and consider these options…

“Alfie”, I have to agree with you. I have done NOTHING but HELP get these life saving documents into the hands of tens of thousands of Americans in the past 4 years since the events of September 11th, 2001. I’ve shared over 600 gigabytes of files with 700,000 unique visitors in that same time, and ALL on my own dime.

If I have to redo the CD…no problem. If I have to remove the files from my site, no problem. I’ll just do it.

If I have to go to the mass media…main stream media…underground media…to let the world know that the Red Cross…the agency so many millions of Americans have come to WANT to depend on…DOES NOT want to share life saving information as WIDELY and OPENLY as possible, well…I’ll just have to do that as well.

Want to see the files for youself? Check out the file set here… I also have all the files from the 1998 FEMA CD Rom titled Fema Disaster Preparedness & Mitigation Library • 1998 edition also on the site. They are also all available for free.

The REDCROSS files use less than 27 megabytes of space. The FEMA CD rom file set use just over 33 megabytes. The PDF navigation fails to work for the FEMA file set, but I have a php script that lists every file in the set, on the server and creates a browser link to the file.

Both of these sets have been COMPLETELY free for every visitor to the site.

I state on the CD set that I sell, that I only ask payment for the many dozens of files *I* have created over the years, and NOT for the rest of the government and preparedness digital files that I have added to the set, to compile in one place, a massive collection of over 19,000 pages of survival and preparedness information. From Day One of this online project, it has been about SHARING the info…not making a profit.

Please read the letter as it was received, and see if you can detect any goodwill from the Red Cross. I am concerned for their actions. I will post any reply I receive from them, here.

Support your local Red Cross chapter….somehow….

I’ll be removing the files in question from the RED CROSS folder of SurvivalRing.org, as well as the directory on the Civil Defense Now Ultimate Digital Library CD Number One, and putting the excised files into their own unique directory, and a statement to the effect that the RED CROSS does not, and has never created, supported, or is in any way connected with the files in question.

Joy to the world, my friends….