Tag: villainy

sometimes, apple…

my powerbook’s keyboard is trashed. i am getting a macbook from work, but dunno exactly when. i can barely get anything done. so I make an appt at the apple store, but i dunno how much it will cost or whether my laptop will disappear to texas for a week, making it all useless

there is no way to find out how much it costs to replace this keyboard, whether they have the part, or whether they even do that inhouse without making an appt and speaking to a “genius” in person. fuck you apple. i can call your store and they are not allowed to tell me whether it’s worth while to drive across town.

Samy

I’ve known Samy a long time, maybe eight years. He’s a computer genius. At age 15 he was running the L.A. Perl Users Group. I got a conference room for him at my job and he ran the whole thing, even though his mom had to drop him off there. He finished high school early and got emancipated. At 16 or 17 he was living in his own apartment, making good money at a technology job. I didn’t see him often, but it was always a pleasure. Unlike a few other computer geniuses I’ve known, he was personable and sociable, even charming. And Samy is an idea factory. He would pop up, say hi, and show me something he’d done. It was almost always a “holy shit” moment of surprise and admiration for me. More than once he’d figured something out that was potentially Very Big, but he never sold his hacks and to my knowledge he never did any harm.

In October, 2005 someone gave me a link to Samy’s website. On that page, a surprised and a bit frightened Samy recounted his adventures with Myspace. With his usual flair for amusing and instructive hacks, Samy had created a software worm that caused anyone who visited his myspace to have “Samy is my hero” put in their profile. And anyone who viewed their site got the same thing. Exponential growth occurred. Five hours later a million profiles were infected. Six hours later Myspace.com was down.

At the time I was working for Myspace’s parent company. We joked about the hero hack, and we figured they’d probably either fix the hole and hire him, or pretend it didn’t happen.

They did neither of those things. They filed a civil suit, and pressed criminal charges. This week it was announced that Samy had pled out and been sentenced to three years probation, an undisclosed sum of “restitution” to myspace, and restrictions on his use of computers and the internet (employment purposes only) for an undisclosed period.

I think Samy got a raw deal. I’m sure that Myspace and the prosecutor turned the downtime into a cash figure from lost ad revenue, because in my experience the D.A.’s are not interested in computer “crimes” unless they involved large sums of money or national security. It’s my opinion that Myspace needed a security success to offset their more lurid and frightening image as a haunt of murderers and sexual predators. Samy is neither. He’s just a smart kid who made the classic Robert Tappan Morris worm mistake.

I hope they don’t find a way to nail him during his probation.

WOTD: “Princesstute”

The reliably informative Exploding Aardvark has a roundup of 581% inappropriate toys for girls. If I had a 9 year old she would not get any of this shit.

Major points for the phrase “girl power index” and the sentence “Next year, Disney Fairies will be rolled out in earnest.”

Yet another example of the Women Now Empowered By Everything Women Does phenomenon. I support giving 9 year old girls zip guns and dropping them off at Disney headquarters.

Deus Ex Miller Faucher and Cafferty L.L.P.

Just as I was running out of money (temporarily) because the government thingy was being slow and bureaucratic and dumb, something happens that never, ever happens. I was part of the class in a class action suit against SmithKline Beecham about Paxil. They lied about withdrawal symptoms, essentially.

Based on the (large) amount of money I spent on Paxil over the years, I just got a check for $477.08.

Suck it, Smith and Kline and Beecham. That withdrawal was worth more than $477.08 in pain to me, but I’m glad to have it right now.

But he’s a millionaire!

According to the Register, a Mr. Joseph Garcia is currently in jail here on a million dollars bail for rape and sexual assault of at least three women. Mr. Garcia’s M.O. was to go on a date, take her home, and jump her. This is apparently not recommended in that he could get up to 45 years if convicted. And where did he get his dates? One just at the post office, and the others at MillionaireMatch.com!

Don’t worry, gals. Not all of the local real estate millionaires are rapists.

Edit: From the millionaire dating service site itself: “If the site is slow at this moment, come back early morning or late night. It may be due to the recent publicity about a major Hollywood celebrity having found a match here.” Yes, or…

Register story is here:

http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1328764.php

Scout’s Honor

L.A. Boy Scouts new merit badge: ‘Respect Copyrights’

patchLOS ANGELES (AP) — A Boy Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, etc., etc. He is also respectful of copyrights.

Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a merit patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music.

The patch shows a film reel, a music CD and the international copyright symbol, a “C” enclosed in a circle.

The movie industry has developed the curriculum.

“Working with the Boy Scouts of Los Angeles, we have a real opportunity to educate a new generation about how movies are made, why they are valuable, and hopefully change attitudes about intellectual property theft,” Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, said Friday.

Scouts will be instructed in the basics of copyright law and learn how to identify five types of copyrighted works and three ways copyrighted materials may be stolen.

Scouts also must choose one activity from a list that includes visiting a movie studio to see how many people can be harmed by film piracy. They also can create public service announcements urging others not to steal movies or music.

The world of drug ads again

Another visit to the doctor means more scanned-in drug ads! Hurray! First off we have the “Healthy Lifestyles” brochure from the Lilly company. It’s actually not for one of their drugs but for a “stop eating so damn much” plan that is no doubt intended to go with a diet pill or something. They were attempting to show the bountiful beauteous cornucopia of joy that is a HEALTHTY LIFESTYLE! but the cultural resonance of the picture they chose is unfortunate. I cropped it to the “good part.”

eden who

Next we have

The Lilly people are also advertising their antidepressant Cymbalta. Men have ADD and women have depression, so their model for this ad is the typical middle-aged middle-class woman considering her symptoms. I cropped off the top which asks which of these are symptoms of depression? and the bottom that tells you to talk to your doctor about all of your symptoms, no doubt because the list they have adds up to a prescription for Cymbalta. I like it with just the middle bit:

symptoms of buying our stuff

More great stuff from the new age magazine

  1. The Enlightenment Card is here! It’s a Visa credit card that gives you points as you buy towards… enlightening things. I want to tell the Dalai Lama about it so I can get one of those long cheerful Tibetan laughs out of him.
  2. Holistic dentistry as a general concept is probably a great idea, because dentists so often are the ones who see medical problems first. However, I’d avoid the madman with the extensive psychoceramic chart (270k jpg) showing how your teeth control your lungs, liver, and everything else.
  3. Do you need an exorcist? Why no, I don’t. I especially don’t need one who uses Comic Sans. Considering their client base, though, they’re wise to demand the $300 up front. Customer service must be a bitch there.
  4. There is an ad for a psychic clairvoyant medium named Zack Havoc. I don’t want anyone who identifies with “Havoc” messing with the spirit world. That’s a name for a late 1990s extreme sports/fake punk DJ guy, not a medium. His Corporate Reading services include “Product Placement.” Does that mean he will put your product in his readings? Also “Employee Moral” and “Theft of Services.” His political services include “demographic populace” and “legislative zeitgeist.” Okay I’m done now.
  5. Energy Healing for Pets. Yes, the url is psychicvet.com. There is a kind of Pet Tarot for sale there, too. Are we really this rich? I guess we are.

The rest of the ads are mostly for unlicensed psychotherapy via loopholes like “life coaching” and “psychic counseling. There are also ads for fraudulent medicine of various kinds, including a claim for total herbal cure of diabetes; that’s lethal. There are also quite a few pyramid schemes, including ones that produce more of the fake psychotherapists by using counseling to recruit more counselors. The smell of brimstone is evident.

I found one really cool thing in the entire magazine. There is an Organic macrobiotic Japanese food lunch truck roaming Los Angeles. Okay, that’s just awesome, having a lunch truck pull up outside your job and getting edamame, soba noodle salad, some gyoza, and a hot cup of genmai-cha. Salut! Or whatever you say in Japanese.