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So I was at the SANS security training at Disney in Orlando, and the hotel’s conference room lights (which are IP-controlled) started randomly blinking and surging at odd intervals.

The thinking is that some jackass has hacked the system and was trying to disrupt the training.

It backfired.

Everybody tuned out the flashing lights in about five minutes. But the need for this training, and for the implementation of better security everywhere, couldn’t have been illustrated better.

The next day, the script kiddies turned on the emergency warning in the room. Backfire again! We were in a long session due to an upcoming extended, vendor sponsored lunch, and the five-minute break gave us a much-needed chance to stretch our legs and refocus.

What this second event also gave us was some actual, real-world evidence to take back to our management to show them that the threat is real, we’ve seen it, and we need to step up our efforts to protect against it.

In the waning minutes of January 8, the Florida Gators wrote some college athletics history, becoming the only college in NCAA history to win national titles in both basketball and football in the same year. Only a handful of schools had won both titles in the same decade.

With ACs and fans turned off, windows open to the cool night air, the cacophony of helicopters, car horns, sirens, and fireworks made sleep an unlikely prospect for the first ninety minutes of January 9.

I laid awake and thought.

I realized that I was proudest of our representation— of those we’d earned the right to represent by defeating them in single combat.

The University, of course, but the state of Florida, too.

All schools, and education in general, in the Southeast.

The long-underrated SEC, now a powerhouse of college football, ever since a young fella named Spurrier raised the bar.

And yes, college athletics in general.

I saw OSU players helping Gators up after plays, and Gators gratefully accepting the lift.

I saw sportsmanship on both sides; not the frantic desire to pen a higher number at any cost, but the will to try and be tried on a level field of play.

That last, to me, is more spectacularly thrilling than any set of human acrobatics imaginable.

This game was played the way the game was meant to be played.

For that, thank you, Gators. For that, thank you, OSU.

I’ve been getting a lot of feelers for trackback spam lately, so I’ve installed Kitten’s Spaminator plug-in.

So far it’s working a treat.

Long-term, though, I think we need to respond to spammers at their source: their customers.

I can think of lots of ways to do this, such as respond-bots that pollute their databases with random (but sane) values.

“You bet I want to learn more about CAS1NO VIAAAAGRA CIAILS ROLLEX”, the ‘bot would say when it got a spam, “gonna go to your site to buy me some of that hot stock before it ‘explodes tomorrow’– just as soon as I pick a random value from the known-invalid credit card list!”

Wouldn’t that be great, if the identity thieves paid good money to the spammers for a list of marks, only to find that most of the identities were completely bogus bot-spawn?

Or even better: specially-crafted values being back-tracked by the authorities?

One aspect of trying to grasp the Eternal Verities is tricky enough to knock the old “chicken-and-egg” problem into a cocked hat.

For obvious reasons, it would be helpful, if not critical, to have a professional understanding of the mind, the tool we use to perceive (or navigate, or create) what we call Reality.

But how can one gain that understanding within the framework of what you’re trying to understand– discerning whether the process is intruding on the results? It’s Heisenberg writ large.

One possibility that I’m exploring is a sort of “perceptive gestalt“– a continual imagining of the impact my thoughts and actions have on the people and environment near me, the creation of a handful of gestalts of my own gestalt from “outside the bubble”.

This has proven to have a tendency for feedback overload, but each time I restart the process, I seem to be able to maintain the perception stream a bit longer, and to extend the perceptive distance “outside the bubble” a bit further.

I’m hopeful that I will be able to continue to develop this skill, to the point that it provides some valuable insight.

[pause]

“I don’t know what you’re going to do with this information, but you have it now.” — Shelley Berman

Spammers suck.

Wouldn’t it be great if some clever litigator got spam classified as “electronic terrorism” and enabled us to send a few “presents” back to the lowlifes who spew this crap? Say a couple of 1200-v power surges, or maybe a few squads of heavily-armed Marines?

Now Donald Trump is suing the city that tried to cite him for displaying an oversized flag.

Apparently this attempted citationage somehow caused him ten million dollars (plus lawyer’s fees, don’t forget the lawyer’s fees) worth of damage.

How? Who knows. Pain and suffering perhaps.

I take back what I said about him being a patriot. To paraphrase Heinlein, a patriot is one who puts the welfare of the body politic before his own.