biting kneecaps

"The best firewalls won't save you from a weak password."

So said someone who was compromised a few weeks ago by this attack....

What is it?  It's a botnet of several hundred compromised machines, centrally controlled to perform dictionary attacks against other machines.

So much to post, but, well, I'm busy and it's not all that interesting....

But I ran across this while parsing some police logs for a project:

Wow, didn't notice that Sony signed a deal with Emusic in June... I just noticed a ton of Dylan music show up on my recommended list there...

(Too bad I already had them...)

This is huge, though, bringing tons of major artists to Emusic, the original home of flat-rate drm-free downloads.

Very nice, and nice to see that DRM is slowly dying in favor of affordable downloads.

Remember how Obama promised a more transparent government, where the people would actually be able to see government documents?

I finally got around to adding WFMUs blog to Liferea, just so I can find interesting things like the Rolling Stones from an alternate universe.

Worth a listen even if you don't like the Stones... or maybe especially so.

CNN has an article about "10 Sites to help you navigate the new world of music" and although they are smart enough to include eMusic in the list, they list The Pirate Bay... and not Last.fm.

So my addition:

Last.fm: Analyzes your music listening habits and recommends artists based on the listening habits of others.  After a few weeks of listening, it gets reasonably good at recommending music.

Well I finally got annoyed by Tikiwiki's image gallery enough to move back to Gallery... and since I am lazy, I wanted it to integrate with whatever CMS I use...

And since I have a bunch of Drupal sites already, may as well add another.

So ugly theme. no content, but I have a gallery again.

It's been a long week, with Tiger needing to go to the Kitty Emergency Room, where he was transferred to Kitty Quarantine: Feline Distemper is highly contagious and often fatal. The good news is, after two nights at the Kitty Hospital, he is doing well: he eats and purrs and cuddles and except for still being in his own isolation room and lonely, he is very happpy and seems healthy now.

So we went to Sizzler for dinner last night, and it was a special treat.

Okay, this has to be the best Christmas gift ever. MeriAnne bought me an Acer Aspire One which I spent last night installing Linux on (I left XP on with a 20G partition... maybe I will need it some day) and it totally rocks. A tiny little Linux box (okay, it's bigger than my Nokia 700 and my SqueezeBox Controller... but it has a much better screen than either of those, and a keyboard as well.. and 160G drive, running Debian and Gnome.)