I'm Not Allowed In Canada

As a kid, I always wanted to travel for business. The lure of distant cities and strange adventures has always had a mysterious glowing appeal to me. A month or so ago I was promoted, and with the promotion came the opportunity to do just that. Now I would get to travel, and I'd be getting paid to do it.

My first trip was to a relatively small island North West of Seattle. Not bad for getting my feet wet. Throw a ferry in there, a cool rent a car, a nice little hotel, and it was a pretty nice trip overall.

The thing is though, when I think of travel, be it business or leisure, I'm looking for some action. I don't mean that like A-Team style action either, just a little good old fashioned excitement. Upon making my way up to a small city of Regina, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan I got a little more than I bargained for.

I walked out of my front door at the brisk hour of 5AM. I began the 10 minute walk to the airport bus in style, nodding my head un-rhythmically to Tool's epic 46 and 2.

I wanna feel the change consume me,
Feel the outside turning in.
I wanna feel the metamorphosis and
Cleansing I've endured within

My timing was bad, as I approached the intersection upon where I would catch the elusive AB bus to DIA. As I began to cross the street, going a list of items in my head. At that moment, it struck my sharply and painfully. My passport was still sitting on my desk at home. This seemed to set the tone of the day. If I only knew what I was in for.

I angrily walked home grabbed my passport and caught the next bus. This put me at the air port about 60 minutes before departure. Not ideal for an international flight, but it would do. As I snaked though the rapidly moving and dreadfully long lines of security I recalled an unfortunate even that had landed me in a Denver court a little over a year before. How I had forgot to remove a knife from my book bag I can't say. Why I had an illegal switch blade in the first place is easy. It was a gift from a friend a few years ago who was leaving town on a plane and knew better than taking it to the air port. As I put my shoes back on and headed for the terminal I felt a sigh of relief move though my body, no arguing with the TSA goons about what constitutes an illegal knife this time. Things were looking up.

Upon arriving in Calgary, I quickly made my way to customs and started in on the rat race. Upon refection, this is the one place I could have strategically avoided the mess I was about to be in. "I'm just visiting a friend" is all I would have had to say. Instead I said I was on business, which then lead to the inevitable "what kind of business?" and catastrophically to "you ever been arrested?". At this point I did what I have done for the past 9 years when asked that question, or at least some situational variation there of. I though of course he was looking at my conviction for brining an illegal switch blade into the airport. I threw it out there, being truthful, "I accidentally brought a knife to the air port". He pried, "what kind of kife?" I dropped the bomb. "a switch blade". A tense silence gripped the air. "ever been arrested for anything else?" he dropped nonchalantly. "uhh yeah, I stumbled" quickly catching pace. "Once in Ohio, for disturbing the peace." "and what happened there" he quickly questioned. I knew I could leave out the details on this one. There was no need for me to dip into the gritty details. What good would do for him to know about how we were snaked from the back and chased down that icy river bank by an unknown number of cops with lazer guided tazers. "Oh you know, my and a buddy drank a little to much, just out side causing a ruckus." I though about sitting in that cop car on Christmas eve, as the cops tried to mad dog me. "we know what you did, if you admit we'll let you go" there wasn't a chance I was going to fess up. Apparently my buddy already had, and even though I refused to break, they let us go with a pay out ticket. It was then that the real bomb dropped. "what about 99, you get in any trouble then?" I knew right away this was a problem. Confused and shook, I answered with a question "in 99?", in the same way that Ron Burgandy might if some one were to throw a question mark on his teleprompter. "yeah it uhh says here you have a felony, trafficking a controlled substance, Marijuana". The last time I had heard or seen a word about this case was just over 9 years ago, and I was signing away some plea, that apparently I did not read closely enough. For the last 9 years I was under the impression that as my lawyer told me, the charge was dropped to some minuscule offense, "attempting to bring prescription pills into interstate commerce with out a prescription." This apparently was not the case. I pushed the confusion aside to deal with the matter at hand. If I was denied entry into Canada it could potentially have a relatively unsavory effect on my job. I was not prepared to let this happen. I was search and questioned relentlessly. Every credit card was removed from my wallet, the bottoms of my pockets searched for residue. I realized how bad things could really get it they were to run some swabs on my ID or probably half the cards in my wallet. I stared coldly into the air as the woman sifted though my underwear. I was taken back to the customs officer and asked to wait while they discussed what was to happen next. I pondered the Canadian law that kept felons from entering the country. I pondered the idea that I had been felon for the last 9 years and not known it. I was called to the desk by the customs official. I was convinced I was going home. He engaged me in some conversation about the quantity of marijuana I had on my possession at the time. "funny thing is I told him, we didnt even have any", Which is entirely true. (we did have Hash but they didn't even know what it was) He looked at me blankly. I though about explaining to him what had actually happened on that cool Nevada night. I though about the cute blond girl back home that I had a crush on, and couldn't stop thinking about. "two grams" I corrected. "thats it?" he said. "Yeah, Nevada is no tolerance state there is no such thing as a 'personal amount'." I said. "Really?" he said, "well in Canada there is, and there is also a thing up here that we practice called balance, I'm going to seize your passport, and let you go do your business, but I'm not actually admitting you into Canada". For that moment, I had a small amount of faith in humanity temporarily restored. I signed a few papers, he took my passport, I headed to nearest airport bar, gulped down two large Heineken's just in time to jump on my connecting flight to Regina.

I hate Myspace

Yes I did have a profile or two for some time, but for the love all things holy. Now that my job involves me to work on the internet all day, I don't get the same pleasure out of surfing the web. Its no secret the way these things work, its fun until it becomes your job and then no more right? Well maybe not. These days I am permitted to flow as I please across networks across the world. For the most part I am confined to the states, but on special occasions I make connections abroad. Dealing with IT folks is for the most part a pleasure. I guess that part of it is really relative to who you are though right? Back to the subject at hand though. I am convinced that internet is by far the most amazing and strange change we will ever see in our life time, or I should say has the greatest impact on the largest amount of people that we have ever seen. What that impact is or whether is good or bad is not my place to say. I am a participant, along for the ride so to speak. So where does myspace fit into this? And when I say myspace, I don't mean literally "my", "space" on the web. Funny thing is, I know that anyone and everyone who reads this knows what I am talking about. There are catchy buzz words to categorize this concept of interactive web, shedding light for the masses on transition of life and culture. But does it really matter where you lie in the whole spectrum of these things? At a company meeting/party today (yeah my work kicks ass) the president discussed with us Mircosoft's four postitions one can take on soft ware in respect to age. Cutting edge, not cutting edge, slow but steady, and 19 80. Well at least thats what I remember from it. Where do you stand? Does it really matter? Does it change? Myspace is so 2000 and I hate it. Perhaps I should make a list.

I hate Myspace because:

1. I did not come up with the idea.
2. I wasn't friends with the person that did.
3. If I add all my real friends I will be taken to court and my child support will go up.
4. Advertisements.
5. I thought I was bleeding edge because I made a fake profile to sell VIOP service.
6. It further complicate strange social circles that I never understood in the first place.
7. They sold out.
8. It introduced HTML to the masses.


Well thats about all I can come up with. Can anybody help me out with some of the finer points that I have missed?

Aftermath

I have to say I am incredibly disappointed with the direction or lack there of that the this the user revolt has taken. Kevin Rose posted this,

"But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you ’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be."

Everyone dugg it, then Kevin himself posted the numbers, and now all I see is a bunch of whiny ass people babbling out shit like this,

...
I truly cannot believe how many people decided they were going to stand up (while sitting down mind you) for a cause that 50% of them were not going to actively participate in anyway. If "protesting" or "sticking it to the man" as they call it, is in fact possible by simply clicking your mouse a few hundred times then I for one welcome our new carpal-tunnel ridden overlords.

IF we're all done acting like 5 year olds, I'm sure someone's got a great picture of a cute kitten in a computer to submit.

That's REAL Digg frontpage news... :)

For the love of all things holy. It was obvious that diggers DID recognize the importance of the issue at hand, but less than 24hrs later comments like the one above are getting Dugg hand over foot. I just don't get it? And for the record, let be clear on one thing, "protesting" and "sticking it to the man" can ABSOLUTELY, with out a doubt be accomplished with a few hundred clicks. A few million people clicking something a few hundred times.....hmmm that sound like a political bot net of sorts. Why wait for someone to create a bot net that actually stands behind a real cause or idea, not just extortion and greed, when we could do it with out all the zombie boxes? (Although I must say, Zombie box's are cool with me as long and they are not spamming and extorting).

Then there is this comment in direct response to Kevin's story, which it would seem by the number of Digg's clearly represents the overall attitude of the digg community.

"Well said. Can we move on now?"

This to me is what is really sad. Maybe the guy was right in the first comment above? Most of the people who were out there digging like mad last night were just a bunch of coffee shop revolutionaries, attention spans no longer than a few hours who have already moved on to the newest IPhone pictures , but I refuse to adopt that attitude (even though it may very well be true) simply because I am stubborn and I have faith in both political and conscious movement.
Really, if you sit back and look at it for a few minutes, what happened on Digg on May, 1st 2007 has some pretty interesting implications in the grand scheme of things. I encourage those of you who have yet to see it to take a closer look.

Internet Riot! 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

I am purposing to take this thing beyond digg have a full blown Internet Riot! If you don't know whats going on yet, I'm not going to explain the numbers, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 but you can head over to digg.com and read up on it. Lets really open our vocal chords and yell this time. Go to every Blog you can find (including this one) and post the numbers! Hit fourms, and fill out contact forms loaded with the numbers. Don't forget to be crafty and throw in the MD5 of the numbers for good form. Lets make sure that we make our selves clear this time! You cannot stop us! Your censorship is useless!

What a beautiful screen shot of Digg.com's infamous front page:

Bust a Spammer In The Grill

Heres a good post from Craigslist that a friend of mine made some time ago. The success rate to this method is not 100%, but it will work a good amount of the time. This is written with the average end internet user in mind, but if you read past the part about how to identify spam it gets into the good stuff.

"I have not been on here a for awhile, and I am amazed to see how much spam is flooding this section.

Just quick heads up for those that don't know:

If a posting takes you to a link that has no where to click except for on advertisements then it is spam!

For example this site,
http://www.lowincomebostonapartments.com/portland.htm
which was posted earlier today on portland craigslist IS SPAM!!
There are no apartments at all for rent, what they are trying to do is trick you into clicking on the google advertisement, which intern earns them money for each click you make. Also, try swapping the the /portland.htm to any major city for example, /denver.htm and look what happens! These people are making good money off abusing CL!!

(white hat method)
CL is a great service, and the best way to keep it that way and stop greedy spammers (who are to lazy to make a decent living) is being informed about what you are clicking on, AND recognizing and flagging these posts as SPAM.

(black hat method)
Now, if you are like me, and you dont have any problems fighting fire with fire, there is another way to cripple these spammers and render their scam useless. Now, a little heads up. IF you choose to undertake this, I warn you now that this is may or may not be legal, and it IS NOT the most up and up way to stop this particular kind of spam. Also if you get in trouble, dont blame me because you are on you own with this!!!

Now on to the good stuff:
According to wiki, Click fraud is defined as the following,

"Click fraud occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link. Click fraud is the subject of some controversy and increasing litigation due to the advertising networks being a key beneficiary of the fraud whether they like it or not."

So, what you do it take about five minutes of your day, and click on the SAME ad as over and over and over again on one of these sites (make SURE it IS a spamming site) and then just wait. It may take some time, upwards of a day for anything to happen, so be patient.;
Now, what happens is that this sets off red flags with the google people, and the person who owns that account (spammer) will have there google ad sense account frozen. Now for the good part, all the money that they have made and not been paid for up until this point, (which could be a whole lot) will be frozen as well. These ad sense accounts are bound to and confirmed by social security # and other things that are not easily scammed. So, although they may be able to setup another account and get back at it, it will not be easy and it will probably take time. "

Exposing a Script Kiddie

I'm not a huge myspace fan. I had a profile for awhile, but recently bailed on the whole thing. A few days ago I was checking out the myspace page for Radio Discon and I noticed that a comment had just been made from a friend of the station that obviously was not real.

"Oh, my fault I must have gave you the wrong link then. The people I use to
make make money should be just go here (click here).
Well I hope it works for you this time, remember that
if the site is not up they are not excepting anyone else. I told you I'm making
about $900 a week and it's consistent. Just make sure that you take taxes into
consideration, it's a little different than that job your always complaining
about.LOL anyways that is funny about Laura, what else did
she say about it? I'm not even going to worry about it ya know? Oh well,
call me later or I'll catch you on here, see ya. "

My curiosity set in and I decided to do a little research on the nature of this beast. The click here link directed you to game-blast.net/paidetc.php. Before clicking on the link I headed over to the root of the domain. game-blast.net/. It was an Apache server directory listing;

By navigating to the admin folder, game-blast/admin you end up at at jumbled up web page that will happily generate errors for you when clicking on some of the different links. At this point I went ahead and clicked on one of the PHP pages. game-blast.net/scout2.php. The page redirects you to some online money making scam. Not bad, considering it does not appear to be infecting you with malware or anything of the sort. I checked out a couple of the other pages from directory listing, including the original link that came in the myspace comment. What really got this scavenger hunt going was when I noticed the affiliate account being passed in plain text in the address bar of the scout2.php redirect.




Now I had someone to look for, Ksruckman. I started off with a simple Google search. Within 20 minutes I felt like I knew ksruckman, or Ralph Ruckman as he's known to Uncle Sam. After seeing that his PHP scripts were nothing but redirects to cheesy money making sites, I began the profile of ksruckman as a low end Internet scammer, or to be nice, marketeer. Most of my initial information came from forum posts. For example, on one site in the fall of 2006 he had some serious issues with premissions on his wordress blog. Someone kindly explained to him the CHMOD command and he was back on track. This lead me to believe that he likely knows very little about the back ends of websites, html, and/ or FTP. At this point I had pretty much pinned him as a script kiddie. As I read through various forum posts and searched popular photo sharing sites my profile became more in depth. On one set of forums he boasted on recent earnings of a Craiglist scam and then about his earning mantra of three dollars per site within the first five days. It really makes me wonder how different the Internet would be with out all the junk sites. Who's to judge though I guess? Moving along, just a few pages in to the Google search I stumbled across another huge piece of the puzzle, Ralph's eBay profile. For the most part he was purchasing Xbox live cards and the like. One auction in particular brought the search full circle:

Yes that's right, he bought the script off EBay. For less than $20 none the less. I'd imagine that he probably made a pretty good little stash of cash off the exploit. At this point, I'm feeling pretty satisfied, although I do still have a few questions about the specific exploit.

!EDIT!
I decided enough was enough, your name has been removed. Google should be clear of it soon.
Sorry Bro It Had to Be Done.

DRM and the new world order.

As a tech support representative I have been asked quite a few times in the past few months what I think about Windows Vista. As a side note, it should be noted that average caller in my support center tends to know about as much about computers as a squirrel does toasters. I have no problem with this as it pays my bills and I have reasonably good time doing it. In the past my responses to this dreaded question have remained trivial and and far from honest. I have found it much easier to respond with a simple "I'm curious to see" than to dig deeper into my philosophy on operating systems, open source, pirates and end users. Truth be told, aside from an episode of Security Now and a few articles here and there, I don't know much about Vista other than that it supports IPV6 and 64 bit processors.
What little faith I did have in Windows took a serious blow today when I read this article I found on Digg. http://polishlinux.com/gnu/drm-vista-and-your-rights/. I strongly recommend reading over this article. I used to think of DRM like the barking dog that never shuts up in your neighbors yard, yes its annoying, but if the music is turned up loud enough you won't hear it anyway. I am now realizing that this is not the case. The serious implementation of DRM into operating systems is a huge problem and will likely mark a whole new era of hell and headaches for the average end user. While companies like Microsoft and Sony struggle, kicking and screaming to hang on to old ways of doing business, it becomes more and more clear that the model of taking advantage people who don't know any better is not that all that cool. What I don't understand is how these companies really think that by implementing DRM they will be able to protect there products. The fact of the matter remains, no matter how hard they try, or how stiff the punishment, there will always be crackers and pirates. The end result to me really seems like Windows is polarizing the internet universe like never before. While typing this up at work, I recieved my first call on a Vista Machine. It was unable to connect to the internet, and I sent him off to the OEM for support. I only have one more day of work here and as far as I'm concerned I have no desire to learn about Vista unless I really have to.