Here are a few more pics of me with Tinariwen musicians. I still have trouble believing I actually got to meet these musicians without traveling to the other side of the world to do it.
Tinariwen’s Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni and me
Bashing science has become popular with politicians lately. Yesterday I read Scientific American’s story bemoaning the beating that science has taken from some American politicians, many of whom have staked “anti-science” stances:
Yet despite its history and today’s unprecedented riches from science, the U.S. has begun to slip off of its science foundation. Indeed, in this election cycle, some 236 years after Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, several major party contenders for political office took positions that can only be described as “antiscience”: against evolution, human-induced climate change, vaccines, stem cell research, and more. A former Republican governor even warned that his own political party was in danger of becoming “the antiscience party.”
Americans are not the only ones science-bashing. Yesterday, an Italian court convicted seismic scientists of manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake:
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I decided to delve a bit into the hacking underworld yesterday, wanting to learn more about how Facebook users could be signed up for pages they didn’t like. It turns out that a Google search for “facebook clickjacking” returns a lot of results.
I downloaded one clickjacking kit from a site called zarabyte.com and took a look. It includes this line in a file called like.js:
var thehairs = “< iframe id='theiframe' scrolling='no' frameBorder='0' allowTransparency='true' src='http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=" + encodeURIComponent(fan_page_url) + "&layout=standard&show_faces=true&width=53&action=like&colorscheme=light&height=80' style='position:absolute;width:53px;height:23px;overflow:hidden;border:0;opacity:" + opacity +";filter:alpha(opacity=" + opacity * 100+ ");' >< /iframe >“;
Basically, it sneaks in an iframe on the page and kicks off the like.php script to “like” the desired page. There doesn’t appear to be anything magic about what this does. If the user is logged into Facebook (in another browser window, for instance), this script should register a like. Futhermore, that like should be logged in the Activity Log as any other like would be.
Based on this behavior, I’m pretty confident that these mysterious Romney Facebook likes aren’t being generated through clickjacking.
I just checked out my Apache logs and found this interesting entry:
95.76.161.199 – – [22/Oct/2012:13:21:25 -0400] “GET /?fbconnect_action=myhome&fbuserid=1+and+1=2+union+select+1,2,3,4,5,concat(0x6730306431),7,8,9,10,11,12– HTTP/1.1” 403 5043 “-” “Mozilla/3.0 (windows)”
It appears to be an exploit attempt against the Facebook Connect plugin.
Here’s a webpagethat shows how it works.
There are quite a few websites potentially vulnerable to this exploit. While it doesn’t appear to make Facebook itself vulnerable, it does compromise any WordPress blogs which use this plugin.
This is one of many reasons why I won’t buy an Amazon Kindle.
A couple of days a go, my friend Linn sent me an e-mail, being very frustrated: Amazon just closed her account and wiped her Kindle. Without notice. Without explanation. This is DRM at it’s worst.
Linn travels a lot and therefore has, or should I say had, a lot of books on her Kindle, purchased from Amazon. Suddenly, her Kindle was wiped and her account was closed. Being convinced that something wrong had happened, she sent an e-mail to Amazon, asking for help. This was the answer:
The military strongly supports the President, it seems. So much for that myth that servicemembers and veterans always vote Republican.
Foreign policy, military funding and plans for U.S. troops abroad are providing plenty of chewy campaign fodder for President Barack Obama and his GOP rival, Mitt Romney. But fundraising reports shed light on what the armed forces think about the the candidates.
Former Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul received significant support from the military for his strong stance on bringing troops home, and that briefly continued even after Romney pulled ahead as the clear GOP candidate.
Now, though, the military’s support has shifted toward Obama. Romney has consistently received little financial backing from military donors.
via Update: Armed Forces Show Overwhelming Support for Obama – OpenSecrets Blog | OpenSecrets.
Google tonight led to me to a search result that for some reason hadn’t come up before. It seems five days after I discovered I had been hacked by Mitt Romney, Political Garbage Chute blogger James Schlarrman noticed two of his diehard liberal friends had liked Mitt Romney’s Facebook page. Both friends were shocked to discover this and disavowed ever clicking on Romney’s page:
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Debra Goldman
Goldman gives a bizarre excuse for having so much cash:
Police asked Goldman why she kept so much money at home. According to the notes of Detective Joseph Lengel, who referred questions to Bazemore, Goldman said that she began to keep large amounts of cash at home in case of emergency because “she found it very difficult to get money from her bank in order to pay her bills” after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
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Tinariwen
When they took the stage in their traditional Tuareg garb I really didn’t know what to make of them. The audience was also a bit hesitant. Before long, though, the crowd was clapping along. Soon a dancing group of audience members took over the area in front of the stage.
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Oh my God. With the possible exception of Deborah Prickett, the Republicans on the school board are nutjobs. This is crazy stuff.
Wake County school board member Debra Goldman named fellow board member Chris Malone as a suspect in June 2010 when she reported a burglary from her Cary home of $130,000 worth of jewelry, cash and coins, according to a police report.
Cary police interviewed Malone and dropped him as a suspect after an investigation, but not before recording conflicting statements from both Goldman and Malone about whether they had a romantic relationship.
via Wake school board's Goldman named colleague Malone in theft – Wake County – NewsObserver.com.
