It’s definetly worth mentioning that all the singing is done by the actors, with the exception of a couple of backup vocals.

I want to say a word about Felicia Day. She has created a web series called The Guild made up of short episodes and released only on the internet. It is incredibly well written, very funny and intelligent. She writes and produces it with donations of time and funds by professionals, friends, and fans. The series is about a group of online gamers that take part in a long running massively epic role playing game. None of them has an actual social life or sense of the real world, and their only interaction with each other is through speakers, keyboards, microphones and headsets; when they finally meet, they don’t know quite how to take the reality of their mundane existences. The characters are incredibly well written and developed, and this is another web release that should not be missed.

On with Dr. Horrible.

Dr. Horrible can be seen normal size screen on their web site

or:

on Hulu in either normal size or full screen.

Dr. Horrible tells the tale of a super-villain apprentice, working on his “PhD in horribleness”. He’s not very good at it, and gets his horrible inventions built, well, not quite right. For example, his transmatter device that was supposed to transport a gold bar to him from a bank vault, produced a baggie of chocolate milk-like fluid instead of gold. Bummer.

He has submitted an application to the local evil union, called, what else? “The evil league of evil”, run by an evil horse. He thinks he wants to be a villain more than anything else, and is sure that being accepted into the league will finally help him be happy. What he doesn’t realize is that he is basically nothing more than an insecure person trying to get a handle on who and what he really is. He knows on some level that he isn’t really evil, refusing a conflict with another wannabe in a park because kids might get hurt, and resisting a demand from the evil league that he kill someone.

He’s lonely, and meets Penny, an innocent young woman in the local laundry mat. He develops a terrible crush on her, but just doesn’t quite have the social skills to talk to her. During an evil deed that the Dr. perpetrates to get into the league, Penny’s life is inadvertently put in peril.

Enter the super hero. He’s just plain cheesy, and that’s his best quality. He is really the evil dude, because he is shallow, self serving, abusive, and an all around not-nice-guy that tries to pass himself off as a really heroic one of a kind super-person. Unlike Dr. Horrible, he is quite confident in his superiority over every other person on earth, and in his view, he has to try very hard at barely hiding it. He’s also oblivious to the fact that he is totally inappropriate and mean spirited.

Dr. Horrible barely saves Penny’s life at the last second, and quite by accident, Captain Hammer gets the credit. She is enamored of the captain, and the Dr. feels the sting of wrongful rejection.

Penny works in a homeless shelter and she is collecting signatures on a petition to get the city to give to the shelter a building that is soon to be demolished to make room for a parking lot. Captain Hammer arranges this for her, and humiliates her in the dedication ceremony. Dr. Horrible shows up, uses his freeze ray on the Captain, but poor Penny…..

Oh wait, I better not tell you any more. You’ll just have to go see it

Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along blog was produced, directed, personally funded, and co written by Joss Whedon. His two brothers, and soon-to-be sister in law co wrote the script, and scored the music. It was written during the writers strike without the interference of union restrictions, and without the involvement of a studio. Since it was an internet production and was only released on a website, the unions had no jurisdiction or power over the production. This is the future of entertainment, to be specific, movie, television, and music. Dr. Horrible is a first-in-class, way ahead of it’s time. I really hope it spells the end of the strangle hold that the entertainment unions have enjoyed for much to long.

This is a must see folks. Do not miss this gem!

Denigris

Blogs make the perfect target for spammers/vandals/thread hijackers because they are interactive by nature. They are dynamic by design and it keeps the content fresh. thats the whole Idea. I’ve touched on this subject before, but only briefly.

Blog abuse is a common phenominon and it always takes place in replies to an original article or post. There are several methods that are used to accomplish this. The most common are pingbacks and trackbacks which allow comments to be made remotely from another source, sort of a “long distance ” reply to an article or post on the blog in question. There are varying goals that drive these bogus comments and a pandora’s box of methods. One of the most prolific kinds of posting garbage are responses to original posts that are entered into the blog automatically by a program called a “Web Crawler”, “Spider”, or ” ‘Bot “.

The crawler looks for blogs, carrying a postable remark to deliver to them that has various purposes, from porn links, to redirects from a link into a malicious attack web site. They usually have legitimate looking names and identifications in the multiple links and may even appear to be a legitimate remark to a post. Some are just plain obvious and make open referances to various fetishes and positions. Whatever.

The folks that have been blogging for a while take some simple steps like prohibiting posts without reviewing them first, and using Akismet to catch them, which is 99.9% effective.

One thing an experienced blogger will tell you, is that most of this garbage comes from Amsterdam, and/or Russian states. Yup. Big suprise, eh?

That’s also home sweet home for alot of internet porn production and distribution. One thing I have noticed lately is a large amount of this traffic coming from one particular source. Let’s WHOIS it:

OrgName: RIPE Network Coordination Centre
OrgID: RIPE
Address: P.O. Box 10096
City: Amsterdam
StateProv:
PostalCode: 1001EB
Country: NL

ReferralServer: whois://whois.ripe.net:43

NetRange: 62.0.0.0 - 62.255.255.255
CIDR: 62.0.0.0/8
NetName: RIPE-C3
NetHandle: NET-62-0-0-0-1
Parent:
NetType: Allocated to RIPE NCC
NameServer: NS-PRI.RIPE.NET
NameServer: SEC1.APNIC.NET
NameServer: SEC3.APNIC.NET
NameServer: NS3.NIC.FR
NameServer: SUNIC.SUNET.SE
NameServer: NS-EXT.ISC.ORG
NameServer: TINNIE.ARIN.NET
Comment: These addresses have been further assigned to users in
Comment: the RIPE NCC region. Contact information can be found in
Comment: the RIPE database at http://www.ripe.net/whois
RegDate: 1997-04-25
Updated: 2005-08-03

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2008-08-28 19:10

So Ripe, tell me, who are your closest competitors? Inquiring minds want to know.

Denigris

It happened when I logged into the administrators account for TeamTuxedo to do a little work. Akismet, the excellent free spam blocker for WordPress has been catching more and more really yukky garbage lately, and I take a look at it every now and again to see if any legitimate comments get caught in the net by accident.

There was the usual porn Pingbacks and Spambot/malicious web crawler garbage. It was all sitting in the Akismet cache waiting to die a horrible cyberdeath. But one piece of junk caught my eye and I gave it a second look.

It was a link to something or other that I can’t remember now, but I do remember thinking that I would take a look at it just for giggles, and see what the Bozo’s were trying to post. I clicked on the IP (bad idea, don’t fall for this kind of social engineering) and it took me to a web page that redirected Firefox to Antivirusfreescan2009.com . Don’t go there. Very bad Mojo. And for goodness sakes, replace IE with Firefox.

Anyway, my buddy Nort punched it in the nose, and the bad code went scampering away. Good Norton. Bad, Bad, Vista. Go sit in the corner and take a time out.

To quote myself in a previous article:

This is the reality; People become targets when they are unaware of their environment, and don’t take precautions to avoid being a victim. Never underestimate the potential of being senselessly harmed by a stranger.

If you don’t understand this, you are at best, naive. If you choose to ignore it, you do so at your own peril. This isn’t paranoia, it’s the world we live in. It’s why we have policemen.

Nice going Denigris. Physician heal thyself. But I believe it does serve to demonstrate the point I was making in that post.

Here is an excerpt from my router’s activity log after the attack:

(GMT-08:00)02:53:46 Mon Aug 25 2008 stunnel[14804]: remote connect #2 (IP ###.###.##.##:443): Connection timed out (145)
(GMT-08:00)02:53:46 Mon Aug 25 2008 stunnel[14804]: Failed to initialize remote connection

(blocked)

(GMT-08:00)02:54:16 Mon Aug 25 2008 stunnel[14831]: remote connect #2 (IP ###.###.##.##:443): Connection timed out (145)
(GMT-08:00)02:54:16 Mon Aug 25 2008 stunnel[14831]: Failed to initialize remote connection
(GMT-08:00)02:54:46 Mon Aug 25 2008 stunnel[14838]: remote connect #2 (IP ###.###.##.##:443): Connection timed out (145)

And so on.

An intrusion attack is an attempt by malicious code to access protected parts of your computer. The ideal for an attacker is to insert code that will take over a persons computer without them knowing it. They can then steal data, log your keystrokes, even use your computer to launch attacks on other computers.

A good example of the latter is Distributed Denial Of Service (DDoS) attacks. Successful intrusions are used to set up a personal computer connected to the internet as a “zombie”. This so called Zombie computer works as normal and the user is often unaware of the presence of the remote control program waiting to be activated. When an attacker has enough machines infected with the zombie Trojan code, he/she activates them all simultaneously with instructions to make a massive web page service request that slows the server to a grinding halt, preventing it from providing information to legitimate users.

Windows is the platform of choice for these kinds of Trojan attacks because Windows files have a poor sense of user account ownership. In essence, it lets code modify files with relative ease. File ownership in Unix like operating systems like Linux, BSD, and OSX have file permissions on each file including directories and system files that link them directly to a specific user, service, or OS function. This protection is built from the ground up and is coded in the structure of the kernel. In simple terms, Unix based systems are designed to function like this, and Windows systems are adding these features in a sort of “bolt on” fashion. to give credit where it is due, Microsoft has finally decided to lock down the kernel and put some security barriers in place.

I am pretty sure that this trojan wouldn’t have made it past the IP tables firewall in Linux. But if it had, I don’t see it doing any damage since it can’t store itself anywhere. Everything’s a file in Linux, the hard drive, the graphics card, it’s all accessed as a file. The files all have permissions. Malicious software has a tough time finding a place to connect to. The kernel denies it a chair.

The moral of the story is that you will be the victim (you probably already have been at some point) of malicious software and web attacks and the thing to do is simple. Keep a good firewall and spyware/virus cleaner on your windows machine running all the time. Get good ones.

[1] I confess oh great Tux, that I sin frequently, using Windows Vista on my laptop. I ask only for your understanding. My laptop came preinstalled with it, and my business needs it. I accept responsibility for my transgressions.

Denigris

He wasn’t, and he’s a technically savy guy, although I wouldn’t call him a geek (well I might, just to mess with him). That’s why I thought he was pulling my leg when he said it. He’s like that. He has an interesting sense of humor.

He went on to say, “I leave my [wireless] internet connection open [unencrypted]. My neighbors can use it, I don’t care. It’s unlimited access, and I’m just not an interesting target to a hacker. Leo LaPorte (of Tech TV) leaves his access point open, I do too.”

This is the reality; People become targets when they are unaware of their environment, and don’t take precautions to avoid being a victim. Never underestimate the potential of being senselessly harmed by a stranger.

If you don’t understand this, you are at best, naive. If you choose to ignore it, you do so at your own peril. This isn’t paranoia, it’s the world we live in. It’s why we have policemen.

Listen to this podcast with Leo and Steve Gibson to hear what they say on the subject in Security Now! Episode 10 “Open Wireless Access Points”.

Wireless routers or “gateways” provide an internet connection to a computer with a wireless network card, such as a laptop. This is convenient because you aren’t tethered to one location and can use your computer from any part of the house you want without running Ethernet cable. In addition, wireless networking can be used to set up a LAN with multiple computers in any areas of the home or office, and the wireless internet connection can provide the network with internet service.

It’s a great idea, but probably the single greatest security risk you can have. That’s because even aunt Martha knows what a computer virus is, and probably has at least heard of spyware. And she probably has software that came with her computer that’s already set up and there to help her. The number of consumers that have this level of basic understanding of wireless is much smaller. It’s just more technical than most folks are interested in, but it’s not that hard to understand. It’s not rocket science. There are a few important things to be aware of.

Lets start with why security matters.

We have doors on our house to keep people from entering at will without so much as a knock. We have locks on our doors to keep them from breaking in and using our home for their own purposes, which may include harming us. People understand this, and it’s not questioned. There are communities where doors can still be left unlocked, but even there, we know that people from outside that trusted community can show up on our doorstep. We understand that there are evil people in this world who will attack us for a reason or no reason at all.

As for our wireless connection to the internet; It’s not just about people you don’t know connecting to your all-you-can eat high speed internet connection, it’s a risk that has the potential to significantly impact your entire life. That’s because we live in a computerized world, and people can do great damage to us if they find a vulnerability in the way our lives are connected to that world.

It has nothing to do with whether or not we are a juicy target for an online attacker. Attackers will electronically “mug” weak targets that have little or no protection in place. Some people do it for fun, others for profit. Identity theft has become a buzz phrase, so I will break it down to the serious components. If someone can collect information, even a small amount of information, such as an email address, they have the beginnings of a weapon to use against you. Email addresses, for example, are used for financial transactions over the internet. I kid you not. Check out Paypal sometime. In fact one of the most common attack methods is to pretend to be a financial organization that needs to verify your online account information. They give you a link to click on that takes you to a fraudulent web site. You “log in” and enter you private information such as credit card numbers or passwords. These web sites can be quite convincing because they look like the real McCoy.

This is a cautionary tale about why you should always consider yourself a potential target of attack from unknown individuals, especially when you are online….. or using a wireless connection.

When you want to make a connection to another computer with your computer wirelessly, you simply look for a computer that’s broadcasting an SSID. This is simply the name of the network connection and it can be anything. For instance, I used to have a wireless internet connection with an SSID of “worldvms” and that’s what showed up when someone went into their wireless connection screen looking for their own gateway. That, and theirs, and everyone elses within a radius of a couple of houses. You have to be able to see all of them to know which one to connect to. If one of my neighbors dosen’t encrypt their connection, I could accidentally ….. or purposefully, connect to their gate way, and use their internet connection.

Why is this a bad thing? After all, I have good neighbors, and I’m not worried about it. Why not keep my gateway open for them to use my internet connection if they want to. It’s just paranoid to think it’s risky.

No it’s not.

Why? For a variety of reasons. How well do you know your neighbors? Most criminals have neighbors. But lets assume that you do have fine upstanding citizens, and really nice folks for neighbors. Why not share your internet connection?

This one is so simple, many people haven’t ever thought about it before. Sometimes the obvious is hidden right in front of you.

Legal responsibility.

If you don’t take responsibility for securing your wireless internet connection, and it’s hijacked and used for illegal activity, you could find yourself in court facing charges. That’s because if a stranger connects to the internet wirelessly through your gateway and say, illegally downloads pirated material such as movies and music, the source of the illegal activity is going to be your computer, not the guy who wirelessly connected to your internet connection. A trace back won’t reveal his computer. He will sit back in comfort while the RIAA and FBI show up on your door step.

That’s just one of many really unhappy things that can happen. But the good news is that there is a way to protect yourself. Encrypt your wireless connection.

The eight commandments of wireless security:

1. ALWAYS encrypt your wireless connection(s).
2. Never, ever, ever, ever, ever - don’t leave your network open for anonymous connections. Just don’t. ALWAYS ENCRYPT YOUR CONNECTIONS! (did I say that already?)
3. Use the strongest encryption method supported by your hardware.
4. Repeat after me: “Any encryption is better than none at all.”
5. Use a completely random password made up of letters,symbols and numbers or if required Hexadecimal numbers. Make it as long as possible. Each character increases the number of combinations exponentially. That’s a good thing.
6. Never use a password that includes real words, even if they have non word symbols and numbers in them. You might as well publish them in the want ads if you do. The bad guys always start with a dictionary attack, because most people use real words in one form or another.
7. Don’t worry about not being able to remember the passwords. If you can’t remember them, and they don’t appear in a dictionary, they will be really hard to crack. Use a flash drive and store all your passwords in a file on it. Then lock it up in your safe or other secure area. If you have a blackberry or similar device, put them in the password safe.
8. Two common methods of encryption are WEP and WPA-PSK . WEP has well known, easily exploited weaknesses. Use WPA-PSK if you can (info on setting up) , and use a long random password. WPA-PSK can use a password from 8 to 63 characters long. Generate a random one here.

Unencrypted wireless networks expose you to intrusion, hijacking of your internet connection, viruses, spyware, stolen personal data, and other bad, bad, stuff.

The bad guys are going to look for the easiest targets and move past the ones with even the bare minimum security. Any encryption is better than none. At the very least, use WEP.

The bad guys can pull up in front of your house with a laptop from Circuit City, and connect to your unencrypted connection. don’t make it as easy as shifting into park.

Compute safely,

Denigris

United Press International - Aug. 7, 2008 at 10:00 PM

Guantanamo detainee gets 5 1/2 years

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Aug. 7 (UPI) — Convicted terror supporter Salim Ahmed Hamdan Thursday received a 5 1/2 year sentence, far short of the 30 years-to-life sentence prosecutors wanted. Hamdan’s sentence includes the five years and one month he has already served, making him eligible for release in five months, The Miami Herald reported.

Hamdan was captured in Afghanistan in 2001 with two surface-to-air missiles in his car. He has been held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 2002. Prosecutor John Murphy characterized Hamdan, a Yemenite, as an al-Qaida operative and key player in the international terror infrastructure.

Hamdan’s conviction Wednesday followed a two-week trial during which prosecutors tried to paint him as an integral part of al-Qaida but the defense insisted he was merely a civilian employee and was being made a scapegoat.

You have to admit, the potential for adolescent hilarity is virtually limitless. The sheer quantity of lingerie related punchlines is staggering.

“Dozens of German policewomen have already tested the new bras and, after a two-month long trial, the underwear is being issued to officers as part of their uniform.”

It makes me wonder when bullet proof bunhuggers will be available for that (ahem) special part of the male anatomy.

Gotta love it: “Germany Hails Bullet-Proof Bra”

Federal Court fails to protect our children

Update - August 10, 2008: I have received so many disgusting comment spams through links to this article from p-rn sites, that I have disabled commenting for this article. This is unfortunate, but necessary. These sick comments haven’t appeared on TeamTuxedo in spite of their best efforts. If you wish to leave a comment, use the contact page and I’ll add it manually.

On the heels of a troubling ruling it issued this week overturning a $550,000 fine levied against CBS for Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing Super Bowl performance, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia struck down the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a law enacted by Congress in response to parents’ legitimate concern that their children are highly vulnerable to easily accessible obscene materials on the Internet.

In a shocking opinion lacking common sense, the unanimous court ruled that the government’s interest in the welfare of children did not justify the reasonable regulations COPA placed on commercial po-nogr-phers that required proof of age before a user could view highly offensive s-xually-explicit material.

The United States Department of Justice said it is considering an appeal to the United States Supreme Court. But it needs your encouragement!

The primary role of our government is to protect its citizens, and the most vulnerable among us are our children. Congress passed a reasonable law designed to protect children but the court said it infringed the rights of po-nogr-phers and their customers. As usual, the court put the interests of big money ahead of innocent and vulnerable children.

Take Action - Send your letter now!

Encourage U.S. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey to appeal this dangerous ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

For more information contact:
American Family Association
PO Drawer 2440 — Tupelo, MS 38803
1-662-844-5036

Words have been mangled to hamper the bad guys.

The good news is that there’s something you can do about it. The manufacture date is clearly stamped on every tire if you know where to look and how to decipher it’s meaning. To learn more, watch the ABC News video:

Aged Tires: A Driving Hazard?

Friday, July 25, 2008
SYSTEM ALERT: Video Views in My Account are temporarily down
We’ve temporarily removed the sum of all your video’s views while we sort out a technical issue with the code that generates it. In the meantime, the top-level Insight page allows you to track the sum of your videos’ views on a day-by-day basis so you can identify big changes without checking every single one of your videos. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

This isn’t about embedding custom play list players in webpages like I’ve done here at TeamTuxedo. It appears to be an issue with displaying the view count to a member who uploads the video. Suspiciously, the video playlists started acting up two days before this announcement. I suspect that whatever glitches YouTube is working out are also effecting other functions on their site, to one degree or another. In the mean time, I have taken a few of the best videos and embedded them individually on their respective pages to make them viewable until things are back to normal with the mother ship.

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 21, 2008; Page A03

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — Nearly seven years after President Bush declared an “extraordinary emergency” that empowered him to bring terrorists before military judges, Osama bin Laden’s former driver is scheduled to go on trial Monday in the first test of whether that system can dispense fair and impartial justice.

“I find it ironic that there is this tremendous rush to unfairly discount a very well-thought-out military system,” said D. Hamilton Peterson, of Bethesda, whose father and stepmother were killed on the hijacked airplane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11. “Mr. Hamdan and these other suspects are getting more due process than any of the people who were beheaded by the terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan.”