Sleeping Outside the Box

I just listened to the latest Off the Wall, in which Emanuel Goldstein read my letter. The poem he read is in my last entry. Kick ass. Viva la Revolucion!

Sound clip of my letter here:
off_the_wall__20060124_atomantic.mp3

Complete Show Here:
http://www.2600.com/offthewall/mp3files/2006/off_the_wall__20060124.mp3

I keep reading the news and I’m reminded of the Pastor Martin Niemöller. Here is a modern adaptation of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s poem First They Came…:

When they sued the file sharing mothers,
I remained silent;
I switched to another network.

When they tapped our phone lines,
I did not speak out;
I no longer used my phone.

When they came for the guitar tabs,
I remained silent;
I no longer played the guitar.

When they opened and read personal letters,
I did not speak out;
I no longer used the mail service.

When they told us not to think,
we already no longer used our minds.

—–

Original
Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten,
habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten,
habe ich nicht protestiert;
ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

Als sie die Juden holten,
habe ich nicht protestiert;
ich war ja kein Jude.

Als sie mich holten,
gab es keinen mehr, der protestierte.

Translation
When they came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

It’s a big scaler thing that floats in the C,
Beware of the Databass my Sun…
Run to the mighty Apache…
Away from MicroSuck

MySQL: My Subconscious is Quickly Learning
PHP: Pretty Hungover Programmers

For those of you who haven’t heard, there is a very bad “zero-day” (8^]) exploit for Windows exploding in the malware world.
I’ve written a detailed explanation below, which comes from various sources, but primarily the latest Security Now podcast
Microsoft has no working fix for it yet but there is a third party fix:

Creators Site:
http://www.hexblog.com/index.html
Mirror:
http://www.grc.com/miscfiles/wmffix_hexblog14.exe

I suggest installing this as soon as possible. All versions of Windows from 95-XP (including NT and 2K) are affected by this exploit.
When Microsoft finally fixes this problem, you can uninstall this patch.

Exploit details:

Windows *.wmf files are a scripted image format similar to scalable vector graphics (*.svg). Unfortunately, these files do not need to be named with the .wmf extension for windows to execute them so any file on any web page or attachment or floating around in a worm may contain executable .wmf code.
The simple exploit takes advantage of a built in error function execution in .wmf files. If the .wmf file has an error (can’t be rendered for some reason–such as intentional poor coding), Windows will automatically execute whatever error function is built into that file. This function can contain any malicious code that the creator wishes and allows transparent installation of malware such as Trojans, spyware, key loggers, etc…

Patch Details:

The patch (http://www.hexblog.com/index.html) simply installs a .dll, which prevents the error function execution by removing it from the Windows metafile handler. It will not affect the system in any visible or functional way besides preventing this unnecessary feature.