by Chris Barrus
No pictures from the bust unfortunately.
SAN DIEGO — Federal authorities arrested six Mexican men and seized 6,000 pounds of marijuana smuggled into the United States in a shipment of squid. The arrests, announced Thursday, were made Monday after inspectors at the Otay Mesa border crossing, found bundles of marijuana hidden in a squid shipment inside a tractor-trailer.
Because eventually, everything DOES turn up on the net.
I remember seeing the British animated version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm way back when I was in high school. Little did I know that the production was funded by the CIA.
The Denver Post reports on the renumbering of U.S. Highway 666. It might be only a number, but it apparently scares off tourists, drivers, and economic development. More to the point:
It’s a pretty involved process, and such requests are pretty rare,” says Richard Reynolds, director for Region 5 of the Colorado Department of Transportation. “The reason I’d like to change it that people steal the highway signs out there like crazy.”
Using the photograph from the article for now. Somewhere buried in a box is a picture of me and the old Pontiac on a stretch of US-666 in Arizona.
Mind-croggling collection of City/World/House Of The Future/Tomorrow web sites. The Retrofuture begins here.
Cook high-geek-quotient technology + open source freaks = Holy Cow! Freevo is a free open-source TiVo clone. As Anil Dash points out – “you can tell it’s open source because the menus are skinnable and they’re going to add an RSS reader to it.”
The blogging is heavy on the lead story in the latest Crypto-Gram, but it’s a pretty spectacular story.
In December 2002, the notorious “spam king” Alan Ralsky gave an interview. Aside from his usual comments that antagonized spam-hating e-mail users, he mentioned his new home in West Bloomfield, Michigan. The interview was posted on Slashdot, and some enterprising reader found his address in some database. Egging each other on, the Slashdot readership subscribed him to thousands of catalogs, mailing lists, information requests, etc. The results were devastating: within weeks he was getting hundreds of pounds of junk mail per day and was unable to find his real mail amongst the deluge.
Ironic, definitely. But more interesting is the related paper by security researchers Simon Byers, Avi Rubin and Dave Kormann, who have demonstrated how to automate this attack.
If you type the following search string into Google — “request catalog name address city state zip” — you’ll get links to over 250,000 (the exact number varies) Web forms where you can type in your information and receive a catalog in the mail. Or, if you follow where this is going, you can type in the information of anyone you want. If you’re a little bit clever with Perl (or any other scripting language), you can write a script that will automatically harvest the pages and fill in someone’s information on all 250,000 forms. You’ll have to do some parsing of the forms, but it’s not too difficult. (There are actually a few more problems to solve. For example, the search engines normally don’t return more than 1,000 actual hits per query.) When you’re done, voila! It’s Slashdot’s attack, fully automated and dutifully executed by the U.S. Postal Service.
Nice to see that the CIA’s psyops division is still as ultra-moronic as ever.
A radio station thought to be backed by the CIA has been broadcasting a gangsta rap-style parody of Saddam Hussein to Iraq. The radio has a Saddam impersonator in its comic slot rapping out a message in English and Arabic to the tune of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”.
“If you don’t like me, I kill you. I am Saddam,” he sings in an English segment. “My days are finished and I will die – all I need is chilli fries ”
The Antic Muse points out the best potential punk band names to come out of Operation Iraqi Freedom:
The Chemical Pants, The Bunker Busters, The Iraqi Irregulars, Surrender Monkeys, The Weapons of Mass Destruction, Decapitation Exercise, Targets of Opportunity, Coalition of the Willing, The Embedded Correspondents, M.O.A.B.: Mother of All Bombs
Even with the omnipresence of the Internet, odd things still happen. Over the weekend I got email from one of the guys in Friends Of Ghosts – an impossibly obscure band from San Diego that released one album back in 1986. Cool album – kinda had an early 4AD Records feel to it and a wild range of sound from sparse piano-led songs, to distort-o-sludge, barking dogs, and a groovy swirly-guitar pop closer.
Anyway, it was only released on vinyl and never reissued. Original copies sell for $$ in the used record circuits, assuming that someone even has a copy to begin with. Late last year I finally got around to mp3’ing my scratchy copy and dumped it on my iPod.
Anyway, over the weekend I got an email from one of the guys in the band who got a big kick out of seeing that folks were still listening to it. Better yet, there’s a CD reissue of it available now (check out the site for ordering info and sound files)
Small internet indeed…