aubreyturner.org

It appears that Belkin stepped into a big pile of public relations crap with the latest firmware update to one of their home router/firewall devices.

The marketing geniuses at Belkin, the consumer networking vendor, have dreamed up a new form of spam – ads served to your desktop, by way of its wireless router.

Uh Clem. a former Belkin wireless router user, was perplexed to find machines on his network redirected to an ad for Belkin’s new parental control system, following a software update. (emphasis added)

Belkin has created a new content filtering system to their routers (censorware) that requires a subscription to their service (the list of blocked sites resides in their central servers, which the router uses to get updates).  Someone at Belkin thought it would be just spiffy if the router would automatically route a user’s web request to their ad page which tried to get the user to sign up for the six month “free” trial.  The user would be forced to hit an “opt-out” button to stop this from happening in the future (the router will hijack a web request every eight hours until the user either activates the content filtering trial or opts out). 

Belkin’s initial reaction was to try to control the damage by responding to the Usenet post.  This didn’t go over very well with users, who rightly thought that it was a bunch of marketing spin.  Someone (most likely at Belkin) deleted the response, but it was too late since the response was mirrored all over the place.  Belkin then created a rather curt and defensive announcement on their website (claiming that only people who cancelled a window during installation without opting-out of the redirect would get redirects; i.e. it’s your fault that we keep hitting you in the face because you never asked us not to).  They later changed to a more concilatory one.  The current statement says that a firmware upgrade will be available on November, 17th “to allay customers’ worries”. 

I don’t own any Belkin networking hardware and I’m not likely to do so in the future, given this little fiasco.  A home firewall/router should never redirect a user’s request without the user’s consent, which is what was happening here.  Not only is it dishonest and annoying, it could potentially mess up an online transaction (not to mention cause untold trouble for any non-web HTTP traffic over the router; e.x. SOAP/RPC over HTTP).  But there’s also a great big gaping security hole in their process (at least as I see it).  When the user selects the “opt-out” link on the redirected page, the a flag is set in the router to turn off redirects.  This means that an unauthenticated path exists for a request to be sent to the router to change its internal state from outside the secure side of the network.  Granted, it’s just a flag, but it makes you wonder what other little backdoors the marketdroids at Belkin have inserted into the firmware.

Link via Slashdot. 

Yesterday’s follow-up from Slashdot.

Just as soon as I got settled into my new house my company moved us to a different location.  We’ve left our nice secluded office complex in the country to one on the outskirts of Dallas (in the Farmer’s Branch/Carrollton area).  This means that I now have to negotiate some truly annoying traffic.  It took me an hour and 15 minutes on Friday (it was raining then) and an hour this morning to get to work.  My home office is looking better and better all the time (or front-mounted rocket launchers to deal with the most obnoxious drivers).  I think the thing that bugs me the most is that the two main routes to get out of Keller are overloaded (1709 just plain sucks and 114 is under destruction right now with traffic rerouted to the service road).  If 114 were fully operational it might be better, but that appears to still be several months away.  Anyhow, it means dealing with a lot of stop lights until I can get onto 635 (which is surprisingly good once you get past the 114/121 merge).  The stop lights bring out my ire at people who wait for the other car to get fully moving before starting when the light turns green.  This causes gaps in the flow and also causes a ripple effect down the line, usually causing those of us at the back of the line to get trapped by the light when it turns red again (because their ripple moves too slowly).  It is possible to get more cars through if people would move together (i.e. start moving as the car in front is moving, rather than waiting for the car in front to open up a gap).  Of course this would mean paying attention to traffic and we wouldn’t want to interrupt anyone’s cell phone conversation or interfere with putting on makeup…

I went to the Great Western gun show at Fair Park this weekend.  I was an OK show, although it wasn’t quite what I’d expected.  It seemed smaller than what I had thought it would be.  Perhaps that was just because of the way the hall was laid out.  If someone is interested in old military or old west stuff, then it was probably a good show.  I just don’t have as much interest in those things, so I only spent a couple of hours there.

Some things the show’s promoters should address before the next one:

• Better directions are needed.  The flier simply listed “2nd/Exposition Ave”, but Fair Park is a big place and that’s not really enough information (it’s easy to get lost down there).  It would have been good to have included a detailed map which included parking and pointed out which building the show was in.
• Better signs.  I only saw one sign and it wasn’t very helpful.  I was eventually able to deduce where the show was when I noticed a ticket booth lit up with some people milling around it.
• Perhaps this isn’t really something for the promoters, but clear directions about how to get out of the parking lot would be good.  I ended up having to go the wrong way down a one-way parking area to get back to the entrance, which was the only open entry/exit point.  I suspect that this is a general failing of Fair Park when dealing with small groups, though, since they had big exits (which were marked), but they were closed off.

When I submitted my mortgage application I included a voided blank check along with an authorization for the lender to direct debit my account each month.  At closing time, among the blizzard of papers I was handed was one that authorized direct debit and included a coupon for the first payment.  When I told the attorney that I’d already submitted the authorization, he said that I didn’t have to worry about that form since I’d already submitted it.  What I didn’t realize was that even with my previous authorization I’d still have to make the first payment myself.  This means that I was late with my first mortgage payment—and I only found out when I noticed that the ACH debit had never appeared on my online statement.  Arrrrrrrrgh!

I was able to go onto the lender’s website and arrange a direct payment, but it’ll still be 9 days late.  I’m quite unhappy with the situation, since I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with my mortgage payments.

The Instapundit mentions “NASCAR Dads” and the Democrat party when linking to today’s rant from Kim du Toit.  This is an issue that’s been percolating around in the back of my head for a few days.  I’d been having similar thoughts, although I was focusing on the ‘soccer mom’ification of America.

With me, the one nonnegotiable part of my political philosophy concerns guns, which is what got me thinking about the issue.  As long as Democrats like Kerry run around spouting off about hunting anytime the subject of guns comes up, I will continue to conclude that they are fundamentally out of touch with the real meaning of the Second Amendment.  If they want to win over people like me (who think the NRA is too wussy) they’re going to have to acknowledge that the right to own arms is a basic human right that includes self-defense and that it exists regardless of whether the Second Amendment exists.  Nothing less will do.

Until they come around on this issue I will consider them an enemy.  Yes.  ENEMY.  Anyone who denies the most basic human right to self defense is no friend of a free citizen, but would instead make you a helpless peasant (just ask those poor bastards in England how well that’s working out).  And if the Republicans think they can continue their back-door sneaking sell-out of gun owners, and then turn around and scare me into voting for them by bringing up the spectre of a Democrat victory, they can kiss my ass too.

Some scumsucking piece of shit at levitrad@yahoo.com (82.80.6.80) just tried to spam my comments hawking “Levitra” and other “enhancement” crap.  I deleted the comment and reported them to SpamCop.  Let’s hope their host kicks their spamvertised websites offline.

It would appear that 82.80.6.80 is the address of a DSL user connected to “Bezeq International” in Israel.

This is potentially good news.

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has just decided to fund multiple human clinical studies to test the reovirus. This naturally occuring virus has a remarkable ability to infect and kill cancer cells, without affecting normal, healthy cells.

It appears that almost all of us have a natural immunity to this virus due to it being so pervasive in the environment.  However, a cancerous cell does not have the same immune response as a healthy cell, which means that the virus ends up killing the cancer cells and propagating itself to other cancerous cells.

At 6:22p.m. this evening my television officially pushed me off the deep end.  I was totally unprepared for what I saw.  I was gobsmacked.

What exactly was it that did me in?  A damn Christmas commercial from Petsmart.  It’s only November 4th for Pete’s sake!

My reserve of good cheer and good will towards man is going to be depleted long before December 25th if I have to spend two whole months subjected to fake snow and commercial cheer.  It’s enough to kill any joy that Christmas may have had left.

This is going to be a long season…

Not only are spammers evil, some of them are nuts.

This summer, Dave Hill got a refreshing break from the run-of-the-mill spam that routinely invades his e-mail inbox. Instead of hawking mortgages, penis-enlargement pills or weight-loss products, a message arrived that seemed straight out of a science-fiction novel.

The anonymous e-mail offered $5,000 to any vendor capable of promptly delivering a collection of far-fetched gadgets for conducting time travel. Among the mysterious devices sought by the message’s author were an “Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement” and an “AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor.”

While that was weird, this guy has now gone ‘round the bend completely and is attacking those who have complained about his spam.

Three websites that spotlighted a Massachusetts spammer’s bizarre quest for time-travel technology have been hit with an avalanche of what appear to be retaliatory messages.

In what spam fighters term a “Joe-job” attack, late last month someone forged the sites’ domains as the return addresses on a recent flurry of junk e-mails advertising antispam software. As a result, the innocent sites have been inundated with hundreds of thousands of error messages and complaints about the spam.

Link via Slashdot.

Further proof that spammers are evil.