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.

When you sleep with a woman outside of marriage, people think you’re a bad person. When she gets pregnant without a ring on her finger, people think you’re both bad people.

Mary’s folks already didn’t like me. I wasn’t exactly wealthy and I hadn’t proposed to Mary in the four months we’d been seeing each other.

“It was an Angel!” I blurted out when her father saw her glowing, obviously pregnant with a bulge the size of Gibraltar. I looked down sheepishly. If I was going to pull this off, I had to be careful not to lay it on too thick. “An immaculate conception, while I was on a business trip to Bethlehem–I didn’t touch her, I swear. It was God!”

Her father looked at me like a jackal to a snake. I thought for a second that he might chase me around the room, jaws snapping in an effort to bite me. Instead, he looked at his wife, Mary’s mother, gullible as ever.

“Oh Mary,” she said with tears of joy and worry. “What will you name it?”

Mary’s father cared for his daughter. No matter how much he despised me, I had to give him credit for being a good guy. “Right.” He said sternly and he glared at me again, this time followed by a sigh of defeat. “You,” he pointed at me, “keep your mouth shut. I’ll tell people what happened.”

My sleep was full of fantastic CGI. Rain, water, puddles, and more all resting on a handheld device. We all had these portable devices in the shape of a perfect golden rectangle. They showed video wrapped all around the 1-inch thick screen (sides, top and bottom, front and back). It didn’t seem to have controls but nobody tried to change them. Everyone watched the same channel.

There was this young girl dancer. She suddenly became much better after disappearing for a short while. It was amazing, as if she had studied for a lifetime. Soon, she revealed that she had a way to swap her mind with that of her dying self. I eagerly prodded to find the method. It was a pen shaped chocolate with one word enscribed upon it–in gaelic it said something like “mysticism” but it also translated as “placebo”. Nevertheless, it was a necessary catalyst for the process. Somehow, I found the shop that sold these pens and soon I departed to find my dying self–because it was best to switch with a version of myself in the future, having lived a full life and now on my death bed.
I boarded a Russian boat and sailed for months. It took us through strong winds and seas filled with amazing things. Eventually, I found myself in a midieval hut where I my elderly self was dying. Now came the dissapointing part. I performed some ritual to the likes of which I cannot recall. Out from a rafter fell a copy of myself at my same age. He had the mind of my elderly self but was spry and youthful as I was. Apparently this was how it worked. I was now obsolete. There was a better me to take my place. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it was a better outcome than nothing. I was still somewhat pleased and allowed the better me to take my life while I wandered the world.

I saw an old friend on the street. He was cranked out on something vicious and didn’t seem to recognize me at first. When I stepped up to him, he produced a dull knife and hammered it into my chest. It didn’t pierce the leather jacket I was wearing so I grabbed his head and twisted him around. He still managed to prod me with the blade again and this time it cut through slightly. I let him go and started to walk away but he stabbed me in the back, just under my left arm. My jacket protected me for the most part but I could feel a little blood warming my side. He just stood there and I tried to rip the knife from his hands. The blade broke in two pieces and he started to laugh. Somehow, I was left holding the two halfs while he ran away.
It was late and dark and I was in the part of town you don’t want to be in with somebody else’s broken knife. Throwing the pieces in two seperate places, I climbed up onto a roof to hide. A patrolman was coming with a flashlight and I didn’t want to be seen. On the roof was a little shack, which I crawled into and took a nap on a makeshift bed someone had left there. I awoke to dropletts of rain, falling from the shoddy roof of the shack and to the sound of the door starting to open. I jumped up, intending to lock the door but it was too late. The kind face of a slightly elderly man poked in from the other side. He didn’t seem to hold any ill will toward my intrusion on his shack. I let him in and apologized. He sat at a desk, which I hadn’t noticed before. He began to type on an old Remington and it produced a pleasing tack and clang. The old man explained that he was a writer. He had been a writer his whole life but only recently had he truly written. This rooftop shack was now his home, his escape from his previous life, a small salvation for a dying artist.
When he realized that I was invited to a prestigious dinner party, which took place later that night, he begged me to bring him along. He desired to interview someone at the event for an environmentalist paper he was to publish. I didn’t know the person he wanted to talk to but I said he could come along anyway.
It was an extremely expensive party, with all kinds of dancing, food, deceit and decadence. I lost track of the man from the shack and soon felt it was time to go home.

Last night my dreams were in Javascript, endless for() loops, recursively scanning deeper and deeper into the dream. I woke up because of some memory error. I think I lost track and the loops crashed.

I was walking around and it was so dark I could barely see the block ahead. There wasn’t fog, just black night. Someone was following me with sinister intent so I took evasive action. After turning a corner, I ran up the next block and backtracked around. My destination was close. Around the next bend, I banged on the glass door of an office, which had all of it’s blinds drawn shut. It was late and the office was closed but I knew the owner was inside. I had something important to tell him and he needed my help. When he answered the door, I bolted inside and explained that I had someone on my tail.
“You scared me half to death,” he wandered back to another room where he had been playing Soul Reaver, a playstation game. He had a very large monitor, which made the game look life-like. To add to the effect, all of his lights were out and he had some creepy movie playing in the living room.
I looked at him and around the place, waving my arms in exhaustion. “It looks like you scared yourself.”
He took me into a back room and showed me a huge statue. “You’re tail is after this. We have to move it but moving it would destroy it.”
Somehow, we got off topic and I started talking about new things going on in the world. “Technology is really moving forward quickly. The other day, I saw a no wheel skateboard in the window of that shop. Some sort of hover tech.”
“Really? Show me.”
I took the scientist down to the skate shop and we looked around. “It was here the other day. Let me ask someone…”
I found a store clerk but he was the opposite of helpful. He said, “It’s like I’m a little kid who likes cartoons. I haven’t seen every cartoon. Got any candy? If I were you, I’d go downstairs and join the parade. Skate battle starts at 9am sharp. You’ve got a few minutes.”
We went downstairs, which was actually a huge skate ramp. The “skate battle” looked more like a winter ball. Couples were waltzing in fancy clothes and we skated around them (having somehow aquired boards along the way).
When we exited the shop, we were suddenly high up on a balcony of some extremely tall building. The walkway wrapped around and we found that we were looking over a world class soccer game. Across the field, about as high as we were, sat a group of obvious undercover police men. We acted casual, passing a clipboard back and forth, while my cohort fiddled with a pocket PC. The clipboard didn’t have anything important on it, but the pocket PC was a remote control for a weapon of some kind.
Zooming in on the police, I could hear one of them saying, “You know, while we pass these binoculars back and forth and they pass that clipboard back and forth, it’s likely that that clipboard is just a distraction. They are probably just throwing us off the tracks of the real issue.” Then my partner bit the tip of his pocket PC, stretching out a large antennae. Giant balloons started to grow from it’s tip and they floated upward, full of hydrogen. “This is it. This marks the creation of zero point energy. We’ve done it.” It was too late. The cops couldn’t do anything about it. We had created free energy out of hydrogen balloons and misdirection.

I had to half-way wake up last night to keep from self-imploding. Someone was telling me about a plane that went down some time ago. As it fell, it spun, faster and faster. Before hitting the ground, half the crew had died from self-implosion. Just watching it, my own insides started to shrink. For a minute, the plane was falling and spinning so fast, it vanished. Someone said it was some well known physics law that I had never heard of.
Later on that night, a taxi almost ran me over. It slammed on the breaks over a block away from me, but it was going so fast downhill that it slid and twisted it’s way right next to me. I had my cell phone ready to dial 9-11 in case someone inside was hurt from the sudden stop. The driver and his guest were fine, though the passenger was quite shaken up and both of them had stomach aches.