Jerks, or knee-jerks?

You really have to wonder at the mindset of the Left in this country – particularly the media, and now the Right is somehow getting sucked into it as well. What is the deal about a company out of the UAE owning 6 major ports? Oh, sure, they give reasons – but if those same reasons were used at, say, an airport when someone in a turban gets checked in an overzealous way, the Left in particular would be screaming bloody murder about “Islamophobia” and “profiling”. And yet, isn’t this EXACTLY what is being exercised in this case? Somehow, any real logic evades me – the existing owners don’t supply security in these ports, regardless of whether or not they are considered allies of ours. On top of this, UAE has been one of the leading countries to align themselves with our objectives of fighting terrorists. Would we hear the same crying and moaning about a company based in Saudi Arabia, where Osama bin Laden is from, or even Canada – where many terrorist cells exist, and the 9/11 terrorists entered our country the day of the attacks in 2001? If not in all cases, then it is merely knee-jerk to the siren song of CNN – Clinton News Network.

Political Cartoons - or is that Kartoum?

You hear that some things – including cartoons, I imagine – tend to take on a life of their own. In the case of the infamous “Mohammed Cartoons”, this is definitely the case. Actually, more accurately they are taking on a life and DEATH of their own. Not surprisingly, however, when you “do the math” by simply considering the source – as in a MAJOR religion based on the teachings and ramblings of a … well, let’s put it this way, when people nowadays exhibit the same personality traits as Idi Amin, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Mohammed (those who murder, rape, and destroy at will, and exhibit massive paranoia and outrage towards any real or perceived grievance toward their personal vision) at a much smaller scale, are termed sociopaths and serial killers. When they exhibit it on a grand scale, they are merely dictators. How scale somehow decreases their sin, I have no idea, but history – recent history as well – proves this rule. ..let’s just say “nutball”, it becomes somehow almost natural – in a sort of backwards way – that a religion whose vocal many in the Middle East think nothing of disparaging the Jewish race in print and in picture on a daily basis, would seek to kill people nearly worldwide SIX MONTHS after the original printing of 12 fairly tame cartoons. That “six months” that preceded the violence in the Middle East and Europe I feel is VERY important. I say this, because in any crime – such as the most heinous in our society; murder – the way the crime is treated, termed, and sentencing determined, is based on whether the crime is based on a temporary insanity or over-powering fit of anger spawned in a fit of passion, or whether the crime was planned out with “malice aforethought” for hours, days, or (in this case) MONTHS in advance. Another thought along these lines is a take-off on a recently oft used acronym “WWJD”, only in this case WWMD – and, what would Mohammed do, anyway? Probably, if history is correct, pretty much what we are seeing now – except he would have moved quicker, killed more, and claim Allah told him to do it (whereas none of these nutballs claims to personally have had God tell them, they just do it to “defend” their dead prophet). Christians and Jews, however, have had to endure this type of ridicule for centuries – and have usually just “turned the other cheek” basically showing who they believe their God to be, one of compassion and forgiveness, not a raping, murdering, racist, butcher.
All of this is really having a good outcome, though. I believe that their arrogance and stupidity at “showing their hand” so soon, coupled with the equally ridiculous “biting the hand that feeds you” of attacking some of the few countries in Europe that have refused to really respond to help in the war on terror – these things will come back to not only haunt them, but ultimately be their downfall. For a long time, I would hear interpretations of Biblical prophesy, and I have to admit that even though I believe that it will come about, I always found it hard to believe anything as extreme as an Armageddon could come about without there being some way out, or possibility to avoid it. Now I firmly believe that not only will it probably happen, but that it will happen much sooner than I ever figured, and that Islam will basically beg us to push the button – or I should say, threaten us until we have no other choice.

More on Live CDs..

To continue on, or at least build on the basis of the previous post, live CDs really interest me – in many ways. And really, the name is misleading, because even though it really is a complete “living” (in a sense) environment – in all actuality, it is “dead”. Dead, in that it is read only – unalterable, unchangeable (on the disk itself, though “changes” can be made through settings or document saves to other media). This, though, is really its strong suit. Because, not only can’t YOU save to the media, neither can malware. Obviously, you can be attacked, and possibly crashed – possibly from Denial of Service or other means, but after a reboot you are exactly where you were before the inconvenience of rebooting.
These live disks, or even some Linux versions such as Damn Small Linux, can be installed onto pen drives or other USB media to boot a system. In fact, there are – and have been for quite awhile – IDE connections with media that can be booted for use as firewalls or intrusion detection systems. And, as the price goes down – and capacity goes up – there will be greater and greater possibilities in this market. Still though, for the money, I think it would be hard to beat a firewall/IDS/honeypot/whatever device that is run from a live CD, possibly with a hard disk for log files, as a first line of defense.
To be honest, like every “good” thing out there, someone can always come up with a “spin” – so I am wondering if I’m the first to ask if maybe this “impervious” nature of live CDs is all good. Am I naïve, or dreaming this up, or is it impossible to trace – for example forensically – the actual “proof” they need to catch a pedophile, if he surfs the child porn sites via a diskless box booting from a live CD? I realize they could trace someone from sniffing packets to IP addresses and MAC addresses, but all of the cases you see in the news always talk about confiscating the perp’s computer and finding those thousands of files on his hard disk. Personally, it would look like no “hard” evidence with no files saved (obviously if they were saved to a pen drive or whatever, that would be evidence),  am I wrong here?

OSX Tiger - is the live CD next?

Being a major fan of basically being able to run every current (or not so) OS known to man, and on one of my own (x86 based) PCs - I am asking that question. There MUST be a way. I first started with early versions of Red Hat, and spread out from there. Thanks to VMWare, faster hardware - as well as the falling prices in the dram market - I now have quite a collection of bootable environments. These virtual machines vary from the nearly useless DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups, up through Windows Server editions, Solaris 10, and several flavors of Linux and BSD. Over the years I have used VMWare as a test bed mostly, but on many occasions have used it to run older programs that won't cooperate with the New Technology. In fact, my 9 year-old thinks nothing of firing up VMWare to run a program that runs best in 95 or 98. Ah, just like her Dad.
Of course, running in a VM is limiting, with limitations of amounts of allocated RAM, hardware recognition, and the related ability or lack thereof to connect to other networked machines or the Internet. With the advent of "live-CD" versions of Linux (thanks in no small part to the brilliant Klaus Knopper), BSD, and more recently (thanks again equally to major geek Bart Lagerweij) live CD versions of Windows XP and 2003, I have taken to using the live CDs in conjunction with VMWare to allow me to boot "out of" Windows and into the live environments rather than having to reboot the system everytime I want experiment with one. I have "used" the Knoppix-like versions of Linux and BSD quite a lot, but even though I hate to admit it, since I was basically weaned on M$ OSs, I have dabbled a lot more into BartPE and its related UBCD and 911 disks. I really like the idea of "rolling my own" version of the OS - and a portable one at that - that carries with it my bookmarks, favorite software, and usually more importantly - the necessary tools to coax a virus/spyware ridden, or possibly boot sector or registry damaged machine back to life, much more simply from the comfort of your favorite gui.
Which brings me back to my first question. Within the last week, after following a few varying links to that effect, I was able to track down something that has had me pondering for years. I have always - especially way back to the early versions of the Mac OS – pondered the reason "why" Mac OS had to be so intertwined with hardware (first Motorola chips and until quite recently, the PowerPC chips) that they, like UNIX, Linux, Solaris, Windows et al - could not (nay, would not) port to X86. With all the many aspersions cast in Microsoft's direction, they in their "ineptitude" were able to port NT 4.0 to the PPC platform - and the mighty Apple couldn't do the same?
True enough, they seemed since OSX to have kept their options open. They basically have used and supported Open Source for their Mach kernel, through the Darwin port of every release to the X86 architecture as well as PPC. And, with their recent announcement to move to Intel (albeit with hardware added to lock us non-Mac peasants out), it has at least been somewhat encouraging that at some unknown future time the Mac OS would be unconstrained by architecture - much as UNIX/Linux/Solaris/Windows is and has been for years.
Anyway, what I started to mention that I had tracked down, was the "cracked" - or whatever the terminology is correct for it - VMWare VM of OSX Tiger, that will indeed run (I'm "as we speak" seeing it with my own eyes) on X86 architecture via VMWare. And, I am told and do believe, will also run, and better than it does in a VM environment, "natively" on a PC such as the P4 I am now running the VM on. As I've stated, this is something that not only I, but I am sure many more out there have wanted to see for years. I'm sure this first "cracked" version is just the beginning. After Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute mile, everyone did. I imagine - and hope - that others will fine-tune this so there is better (or maybe complete) hardware recognition on the host machine. Maybe someone can even go that next step or two, and pull a major Knopper/Lagerweij - script the install, make it live, work with file compression, and be able to at least put the whole live OS on a DVDR, or better yet a CD. I want one!