More clues in the government botnet mystery

The plot thickens in the government botnet mystery I recently wrote about. This morning I got hits from the Navy-Marine Corps-Internet, specifically a host identified as gate3-norfolk.nmci.navy.mil:

Again, it started off innocently with a Google search, with the browser properly identified:

138.162.0.41 – – [15/Oct/2009:08:36:27 -0400] “GET /2008/12/19/beware-the-police-protective-fund/ HTTP/1.1” 200 6377 “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=police+protective+fund&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022)”

A few more hits down, I see the random jumping around I’d seen before:

138.162.0.41 – – [15/Oct/2009:08:36:30 -0400] “GET /2008/12/20/a-mange-in-a-wager/ HTTP/1.1” 200 4191 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”
138.162.0.42 – – [15/Oct/2009:08:36:30 -0400] “GET /2003/07/29/goodbye-bplog-hello-drupal/ HTTP/1.1” 200 14042 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”
138.162.0.44 – – [15/Oct/2009:08:36:30 -0400] “GET /2003/07/27/action-packed_weekend/ HTTP/1.1” 200 4371 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”
138.162.0.43 – – [15/Oct/2009:08:36:30 -0400] “GET /2003/07/24/keys_keys_keys/ HTTP/1.1” 200 5531 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”
138.162.0.45 – – [15/Oct/2009:08:36:31 -0400] “GET /2008/12/18/progress/feed/ HTTP/1.1” 200 1973 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)”

My site is apparently being indexed by computers on a government-run network, but the question is exactly what is indexing it? Is this some sort of proxy technology that government gateways are now using, sampling websites that government users are viewing to ensure that these websites don’t have questionable content? Or, is this a botnet of compromised government computers as I recently suggested? Or (tinfoil hats, please), is this a secret spidering project run by a three-letter agency that uses the gateways of various government departments as cover?

The bottom line is these hits are inconsistent with a human browser. Beyond that I’m not sure what to make of them.

Back on the map, sort of

On a whim I checked my address again in Google Maps. After first having it in Google Maps, then finding it missing, I wasn’t sure whether when my neighborhood would “exist” again as far as Google was concerned. Looks like my submitting it to Google’s map company affiliate finally did the trick. It’s been exactly one year since I alerted them.

But all is not happy in Mapland, oh noooo. Seems that even though typing the address in will correctly highlight my house, the map itself shows my street as Bennett Street. It seems that Tonsler Drive exists enough in Googleland to pinpoint my house but the street name still doesn’t show up on the map view. And Street View is still broken, though it once worked.

I give up!

Post-election stress disorder

It was a long, long day on Tuesday when I volunteered to be a poll greeter for the campaigns of Rodger Koopman and Russ Stephenson. My feet hit the floor at 5 AM and I basically wasn’t off my feet until midnight that night.

After showering that morning, I threw my umbrella, a folding chair, and a bunch of campaign signs into the car and headed out to nearby polling places to make sure signs were out. Then I picked up more from Rodger’s house and headed north.

I arrived at my assigned polling place at 6:35 to find the parking lot full already. My Odom counterpart, Collin, was already there greeting voters. I set up my chair closer to the “no campaigning past this sign” limit, held up my sign and smiled in the drizzle at the disinterested voters who walked past.
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Election Night

My friend Rodger Koopman lost his Raleigh City Council District B race to John Odom. I spent the day outside a polling place meeting voters and asking them to support Rodger. My sense around midday was that Rodger was getting one out of three votes – a prediction that was eerily accurate when my precinct’s numbers came in.

Though it might seem otherwise at first glance, elections are not won or lost on election day: by then it’s too late. If you haven’t done your homework in the weeks leading up to the election there’s little you can do to turn it around at the last hour. I’m still analyzing what went wrong but it’s a shame that a fine candidate like Rodger Koopman won’t get another term.

Michael Jordan’s net worth

For some reason, MT.Net has been deluged with Yahoo searches for “Michael Jordan’s net worth.” This leads folks to my earlier musing about the legends surrounding Jordan.

Yahoo is running this story on their front page about His Airness buying a rather large house in Jupiter, Florida. There is a tiny link under the headline “Michael Jordan’s Costly Mansion” that runs the search. So essentially MT.Net is one step away from being linked to from Yahoo’s home page.

(And for those of you who were wondering, Michael Jordan’s net worth is estimated to be somewhere north of $400 million.)

Juggling breakthrough

This evening when I put my juggling balls back into the air again, I noticed a startling effect. For a moment I felt as if I had all day to catch the falling balls! My mind was completely in tune with the falling objects.

Athletes talk about being “in the zone.” Today I was in the zone with my juggling. It’s a great feeling and a sure sign that my juggling is coming along nicely.

Wrestling MythTV into submission

mythtv

As the All Your Base video meme said, “main screen turn on!”

I got my MythTV frontend working with my HDTV again after a ridiculously tough set of issues to resolve. First, the PC in question is my old Thinkpad laptop and is barely functional to begin with. If you touch it ever so lightly, for instance, the display and keyboard will cease to function. I had to carefully position it through trial and error before I got it to keep its video alive.

Once that was done I was happy to see mplayer doing something on my big screen, only it wasn’t showing any video. GNOME would dutifully draw a border around where my video was supposed to be showing but all there was was an empty box. Instead, the ATI Radeon video driver was showing my video on the laptop screen – the booby-trapped one, remember? No good. No good at all.
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