4:03 am - Wed 8 Oct 2008 
Archive for the 'Rants' Category
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…
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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Not a good day…weekend…or even near future…
Cosmic Echoes has not been getting its fair share of my attention the last few months, and it is in a great position to help a LOT of people. I should be doing a better job of keeping this blog updated.
So, in that state of mind, I’ve made a commitment to myself, and to you, the reader, to make this blog a USEFUL, interesting, and cutting edge look at all things preparedness…again.
This year, after 3 years of heavy college student involvement, resulting in two college degrees, many awards (All USA Academic Team, New Century Scholar, Video Telly Award, and others), I am taking what we students like to call “a breather”, and do some half time college work and invest the majority of my time this next 18 months doing a specific set of projects. In no specific order these are…
- 6 to 8 credit hours of college classes towards my bachelors degree in Journalism(instead of 12 to 20 credit hours per semester…as I have been doing for my first two degrees)
- major update of SurvivalRing.org..the ENTIRE website…into a database driven, Web 2.0, easily manageable, and entirely up-to-date system. See the first glimpse here
- the addition of a citizen driven, science backed, and thoroughly complete compendium of BIRD FLU prep..including some deep discussion of the effects a very possible pandemic outbreak might bring to our society
- a greatly enhance fallout shelter compendium, with lots of comments, suggestions, and insight….versus just a ton of free downloads. You’ll have the info in your hands to print out with the downloads. Now, I’ll tell you the things you’ll really need to understand..if you’re considering actually building one. The Build A Fallout Shelter Page, in other words, is due to a massive overhaul.
- Podcasts….yes, long promised, yet, not online. I’ve been doing weekly music radio shows for my college radio station for over a year…now it’s time to make the SurvivalRing Survival Podcast a reality. Everything is ready (computer hardware, software, recording equipment, mics, etc)…but that ACTUAL podcast recordings. That will change, very soon.
- A lot of new articles from yours truly, on a wide range of preparedness topics and genres. These articles will also be making the rounds of magazine editors, to hit the real world between the eyes with what can be done with very little work, when it comes to being preparede.
- New CD Rom projects. I’ve published two multimedia CD projects in the past 4 years…I’m doing at least 3 more in the next YEAR. Watch this space for more news.
- New digital publications. I’ve mentioned here many times that I have hundreds of original government produced, unscanned survival and preparedness documents…some of which you never knew existed. I have at least a dozen ready to finsish and upload in the next month, and new scan projects queued and prioritized. You’ll love what is coming…
- Interactivity for you, the site visitor. I’ve had polls up for several years on the main SurvivalRing website, and had forums up for years as well, until spammers wreaked total chaos and havoc. I’ve got the old archives saved and updated, and will be opening the new SurvivalRing forums this spring, in a much more secure and stable software package. Chat has been working fine, but with little traffic. Comments in the new site design may be posted in ANY page or article, much like commenting is available on THIS blog. Take advantage of it!
That’s just the start. A new year, a new sense of adventure, and a lot of work to do…and a lot of work that has ALREADY been done.
Many things are happening in the background that will change the way we all see our future. SurvivalRing, Cosmic Echoes, and I will be here to help you get through what we fear will be tough times ahead. Consider me your friend, mentor, and guide…we will get through this together.
Rich
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
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
First, read this…
I can see a couple of things here that concern me.
First, yes, it’s easy to see if a file has been accessed on a hard drive…IF it’s still in the original computer that was running the Operating System AND things such as resetting the computer’s clock wasn’t done.
I’m full aware of forensics software tools and their uses, as well as many variations of file recovery methods. I also have 24 years of computer experience, two computer science degrees, and A+ hardware certification.
Here’s the thing. Once a laptop hard drive is removed (or any drive for that matter), it’s so very easy to plug the drive into an external drive case (USB 2.0 for example), plug that data cable in, and simply make an IMAGE file (.iso) of the entire drive, which is an EXACT bit for bit copy of the data on the drive, to another same sized or bigger hard drive.
Then, return the stolen drive to the original computer, and no one is the wiser for what MIGHT have been done with, or to, the original stolen data in question.
In short, this story is NOT over, and all that data is STILL a valuable piece of personal information history that could still bite 26.5 million veterans in the proverbial buttocks.
The computer and drive were out in the wild for how many weeks? And how many hands did that system pass through? And there are NO fingerprints on the drive OR computer?
By the way, did the computer have any PHONE HOME software installed so that if it was online during it’s trip into the countryside, it could secretly call home base and give it’s current IP address so it could be tracked down immediately, by all the Alphabet Agencies neccessary?
Update ONE:
The Internet Security Zone has a story out this afternoon about this incident, with details on what the Feds may/might have done in their “checking” of the data. A nice little trip into the world of Computer Forensics
Update TWO:
Here is the OFFICIAL FBI Press Release regarding the fact that “They Found It”. Right….SOMEONE ELSE brought it TO THEM.
This article is disturbing in so many ways. But, what it comes down to is that we, the USA, are forecasting a future attack plan (undoubtedly one of many) to a nation which truly is a threat to world security. This article shares way too much info that *I* think would best be left unpublished in open source publications.
What can you do? Bush seems to have a BIT too much worry about Ahmadinejad and Iran’s leaders plans after they start enriching uranium. It COULD be a problem…but it is NOT right now.
We’ll just have to see how this plays out, I suppose.
Fair Use Applies…
THE IRAN PLANS
Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2006-04-17
Posted 2006-04-10The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.
American and European intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action is the best way to prevent it. Iran insists that its research is for peaceful use only, in keeping with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that it will not be delayed or deterred.
There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush’s ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler, a former senior intelligence official said. “That’s the name they’re using. They say, ‘Will Iran get a strategic weapon and threaten another world war?’ ”
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THE IRAN PLANS
