digip : sailing the high seas of the internet

The people who do the street level surveying for Google drive around in a car with a special camera that lets you record 360 degrees while moving in one direction. The benefit is that you can immerse yourself in the video using either google maps or google earth to see street level footage to get better directions or whatever.

Lately there have been a lot of “bloopers”,(although, they aren’t really bloopers in the traditional sense) on Google Maps and Google Earth. The “bloopers” I am referring to though are images that the google surveyors caught on film, but didn’t bother to filter out for content.

Here are three examples of such “bloopers” as I like to call them:

Man walking with a gun through the parking lot

The google team runs over and kills a dear and films the entire scene(Last time I checked, google was filtering out this street level scene due to high traffic. Maye they will remove it all together)

Two men in a Sword Battle

Via Gizmodo

Taken from a Forum post on Hak5: http://hak5.org/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=4883&view=findpost&p=56475

Here’s a prime example of “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus”
offered by an English professor from the University of Colorado for an
actual class assignment:

The professor told his class one day: “Today we will experiment with a
new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person
will pair off with the person sitting next to them.

As homework tonight, one of you will write the first paragraph of a
short story. You will e-mail your partner that paragraph and send
another copy to me. The partner will read the first paragraph and then
add another paragraph to the story and send it back, also sending
another copy to me.

The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on
back-and-forth.

Remember to re-read what has been written each time in order to keep the
story coherent. There is to be absolutely NO talking outside of the
e-mails and anything you wish to say must be written in the e-mail. The

story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached.”

The following was actually turned in by two of his English students:

Rebecca and Gary.

THE STORY: (first paragraph by Rebecca)

At first, Laurie couldn’t decide which kind of tea she wanted. The
chamomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now
reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he
liked chamomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind
off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about
him too much her asthma started acting up again. So chamomile was out of
the question.

(second paragraph by Gary)

Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron
now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about
than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with
whom he had

spent one sweaty night over a year ago. ” A.S. Harris to Geostation 17,”
he said into his transgalactic communicator. ” Polar orbit established.
No sign of resistance so far…” But before he could sign off a bluish
particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his
ship’s cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of
his seat and across the cockpit.

(Rebecca)

He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt
one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who
had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its
pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4.
“Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel”,
Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously
excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her
youth, when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no
newspaper to read, no television to distract her from her sense of
innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. “Why must one
lose one’s innocence to become a woman?” she pondered wistfully.

(Gary)

Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands
of miles above the city, the Anudrian mothership launched the first of
its lithium fusion missiles. The dimwitted wimpy peaceniks who pushed
the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through the congress had
left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were
determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage
of the treaty the Anudrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying
enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop
them, they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion
missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his
top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the
coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion, which vaporized
poor, stupid Laurie.

(Rebecca)

This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My
writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic semi-literate adolescent.

(Gary)

Yeah? Well, my writing partner is a self-centered tedious neurotic whose
attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium. ” Oh, shall I
have chamomile tea? Or shall I have some other sort of F–KING TEA???

Oh no, what am I to do? I’m such an air headed bimbo who reads too many
Danielle Steele novels!”

(Rebecca)

As*h@le.

(Gary)

B*tch!

(Rebecca)

F**K YOU – YOU NEANDERTHAL!!

(Gary)

In your dreams, Ho. Go drink some tea.

(TEACHER)

A+ – I really liked it.

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

“Its the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.” – President of the United States of America, Barack Obama

no more racism
no more violence
no more hate

Every once in a while when working on a computer, you will find that something happens and the keyboard stops working. Now, under normal circumstances they usually do not stop working unless one of two things happens. 1, you unplug it without realizing it, and 2, you break the damn thing.(Stop eating and drinking at your desk!). But every once in a while something does happen and your SOL. On windows, you can bring up a utility with the “Windows Key + U” and start an on screen keyboard. Well, that does nothing to help you if your keyboard is already borked or you want to save/name a file you were currently working on.

A quick fix is to set up a “Keyboard Rescue Bat Script” ahead of time. Open notepad and type in utilman.exe and then save the file to your desktop as keyboard.bat. Now, next time your pc’s keyboard stops working, minimize the windows and double click your bat script. You can then start the on screen keyboard utility and finish your work, save, name the open file, etc. Not the prettiest of solutions, but it gets the job done quickly and gives you the chance to shut down the machine without losing any open files. You can then replace the keyboard. (Sometimes windows won’t recognize a newly plugged in keyboard unless its a USB keyboard – For older PS2 and KVM Switch users, this can save you in a quick fix)

Some artwork I created. parody of two films, Edward Scissor Hands and Twilight’s Edward Cullen and Bella Swan.

“Sears Calls Several Days After Purchase To Upsell Unnecessary Protection Plan With Lies” – consumerist.com

Source : If you buy a Plasma from Sears and some nitwitt calls you to buy an extra 3 year warranty, telling you that the TV will need to be “recahrged” in 5 years because it is a Plasma TV, tell them you will see them in court and have a nice day!

According to Consumer Reports: “There is no such thing as recharging a plasma TV with new gas. It is sealed at the factory.”

One sunny day in late January 2009 an old man approached the White House from Across Pennsylvania Avenue, where he’d been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to the U.S. Marine standing guard and said, “I would like to go in and meet President Bush.”The Marine looked at the man and said, “Sir, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.”The old man said, “Okay”, and walked away.The following day, the same man approached the White House and said to the same Marine, “I would like to go in and meet President Bush.”The Marine again told the man, “Sir, as I said yesterday, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.”The man thanked him and, again, just walked away.The third day, the same man approached the White House and spoke to the very same U.S. Marine, saying “I would like to go in and meet President Bush.”The Marine, understandably agitated at this point, looked at the man and said, “Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mr. Bush. I’ve told you already that Mr. Bush is no longer the president and no longer resides here. Don’t you understand? “The old man looked at the Marine and said, “Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it.”The Marine snapped to attention, saluted, and said, “See you tomorrow,Sir.”

Conficker \con-fick-er\, Verb: To “fuck” your configuration.
Translation: The name is a German hacker pun, meaning “program that manipulates the configuration”, consisting of the abbreviation con for configuration and the nominalized form of the German verb ficken which is a very obscene German verb for sexual intercourse.

Conficker is a worm that attacks Windows Operating Systems. Some of you may have been hit with this little guy over the past few weeks and not even know it until its too late. There are a few things you can do to mitigate the problem on the home network though(For corporate networks, I hope you would have an IT staff that handles this for you and should be transparent to the end user what steps they have put in place to block this worm – In other words, you should never get infected, nor should you be able to see or know what was done to protect you, as its not your responsibility to worry about it).

For starters, patch your system. Now this works great if you were never infected and the patch is available for your system, but does nothing to help you if you get hit before the patch is released or there is no patch to begin with. Zero day flaws are a bitch to try and block when there is little to no info on what a process is doing.

In this case, its best to take another approach. Because the worm attacks certain flaws in specific windows services, its easy to disable these by default. Unless you need a service for a specific task, there is no reason for it to be running on your system! So, lets go and disable some of these right now.

From your keyboard, hold the “windows key + r” or go to start, then the run prompt. Type in services.msc. This will bring up the Windows Services Snap-in MMC. Click on the third column that says “Status” until all the started tasks are shown at the top. Now, lets go down the list of running services. Because conficker uses the “Server” service to spread itself and infect computers, we can set that to disabled. Double click the Server service. Change its startup type to disabled and if it is running, click Stop to bring down the service. Because the Server service uses a few other services to do what it needs, you can stop those as well. They are “Computer Browser”, “TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper” “Windows Firewall/Internet Connection Sharing(ICS)” and “Workstation”.

Now, if you have no other Firewall software on your pc, then you will want to at least leave the windows firewall running, but you will want to block certain ports and services under the firewall control panel(Find this in the windows control panel, icon “Windows Firewall”. The ports to block are 135-139 and 445. These are Netbios and ICS ports for windows server services, and do not need to be running unless you are sharing resources with other computers on your home network, ex: printers, folder sharing(like pictures and video, etc).

Now that these services are stopped, you will want to configure your network card. Go into the control panel and then click on “Network Connections”. Under this folder you should see something like Lan or High Speed Internet(If you are using dial up, which by then you probably won’t be networked to any other machines in your home, so you can stop right now). Find the icon for your network card, wether it be an ethernet adapter or Wifi adapter. Double click it. Click properties and bring up the General and Advanced tabs. On the General tab you will see some thing like “Client for Microsoft Networks”, “File and Printer Sharing”, etc. Uncheck “File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks”. Then scroll down to “Internet Protocol(TCP/IP)” and double click it. Click the advanced button. Go to the WINS tab and check off “Disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP” and uncheck Enable LMHOSTS lookup.

(Unless you are part of a domain or active directory service and require local DNS server settings to do lan domain name lookups, you do not need this checked – This is only for local DNS, and if the worm gets in and sees these computers in the list it will know what machines to try and attack – This is only a problem if there are actually any addresses coded in the LMHOSTS file to begin with, so it really doesn’t matter if this is checked or not, but either way, you won’t need it unless you are doing your own DNS Lookups on the lan).

Last thing you can do is get the list of domains known to be hosting the worm and spreading it. This is a list compiled by the F-Secure team. Download the list here: http://f-secure.com/weblog/archives/downadup_domain_blocklist_13_16.txt

You will want to add these to your windows HOSTS file, located in c:\windows\HOSTS for windows 95,98, and Millenium, and c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS for XP and later. Open this file in something like notepad or word, whatever you have. You will also need to open something like excel or an OpenOffice spread sheet(OpenOffice is free!).

To manually create this HOSTS file list one line at a time in notepad would take you all day. There are over a thousand domains or so in the list, so we can use excel or OpenOffice to speed up the process. In excel, paste the list into the second column(B column) and past special so the all go down in the list into each cell one below the next. In the first column, type 127.0.0.1 and then copy and paste it down. Select all in he second column from top to the last entry in column “b” and paste special to fill in all the cells one below the next. Now save copy all the cells to the clipboard. Then paste them into the HOSTS file and save the file. If you don’t have excel or OpenOffice, then you will have to manually enter each line, starting with 127.0.0.1 and then hit tab, and then the address to block. EX:

127.0.0.1 aauhyeyu.info

If you decide to use this HOSTS list, then you will also want to turn off another service in windows to speed up your network speed. The reason we do this is because windows has a DNS service of its own that stores domain names and ip addresses in a cache, and to be sure its reading them from the HOSTS file and not from the cache, you will want to turn off this service. Don’t worry, windows will still be able to resolve domain names to ip addresses based on your ISP’s DNS servers or whatever service you are using(I prefer OpenDNS), but this helps force it to read the HOSTS file first instead of going to the cache for DNS. Some people say this slows down your Internet connection, but its only milliseconds of time it takes to read this list and doesn’t really slow down your connection enough that you will notice any difference. I have probably 5,000 or so addresses in my HOSTS file(Used mainly for blocking advertisements and malware sites) and have not seen any speed performance issues at all. In fact, in some cases, it speeds up my connection, because I block certain sites that have ads using javascript and other things to serve me scripts and images that will now never load. Greatest ad blocker is my HOSTS file.

You can now reboot to make sure these changes take place.

Try Harder! That is the word for the day. This is one of my failed attempts at a logo while brainstorming for a client. I did eventually find something that worked for what they wanted, but I’m not going to post that until they release the product. Once they do, you will probably see it on a bumper sized sticker at one of the upcoming Hacker Con’s(I think). One thing I have realised lately though, is that when working on creative ideas, force yourself to throw out the first several drafts you do. Once you finish something, no matter how good you think it is, you can probably do better. I only know this because I never even showed this version or several others to the client. You sort of get a sense of what they need and then start to think like the client. I admit though, even I was stumped, and when that happened, that is when I sent in my version of the bumper sticker for their approval. Happy to say, they loved it. So even though they needed a logo that said “Try Harder” it applies to every thing you do, and know this. You can do better, you just have to “TRY HARDER”.

I have a friend who works as a linesman, putting in new telephone poles and hooking up electricity. He works for Idaho Power, and has told me of stories about how people have died on the job from electricution and how they use Helicopters to repair high tension lines. Until now, I always wondered what it would be like to do that for a living. Check out the video and you will see what I mean.

High Voltage Cable Inspection
by monnotman