A New Explanation for Sea Serpents

Whale penises! Photos here and here. (Hat tip: Pharyngula.) (Note that this explanation doesn't work for the lake monsters like Nessie and Champy.)

Defending Against Botnets

My presentation on "Defending Against Botnets" for ASU's Computer Security Week is online in streaming video and MP3 audio formats.

Unfortunately, the audience was quite small. ASU's Polytechnic Campus is way out east of Phoenix, on the former Williams Air Force Base which ASU purchased and turned into its east campus. It doesn't appear that it has a very large student population yet. I was amused that the streets are named after military figures. To get to the Student Union I drove on a street called Twining, named after General Nathan Twining. Twining is a name well-known to UFO enthusiasts, as his name was used on one of the forged "MJ-12" documents known as the Cutler-Twining memo, and also authored a genuine document that discusses UFOs (and is often misinterpreted by UFO advocates as claiming that crashed saucers have been recovered).

My talk was followed by a talk on Wireless Security by Erik Graham of General Dynamics, which covered threats and defenses for 802.11 and Bluetooth.

Denver Legalizes Possession of Marijuana

Denver voters approved a measure to legalize possession of up to an ounce of marijuana by those 21 and older. Authorities say state laws against possession will still be enforced, and we already know the federal laws will be enforced regardless of what a state wants to do with the drug issue (Raich v. Ashcroft).

Sony's DRM--not much different from criminal hacking

Mark Russinovich at Sysinternals.com, a security professional who is careful about what software he installs on his computer, found a rootkit on his Windows machine. A rootkit is a set of applications designed to hide malicious activity from the owner or administrator of a machine. He found a hidden directory, several hidden device drivers, and a hidden application.

After further investigation, he found that the software installed on his machine without his consent or authorization included files identified via Sigcheck as part of "Essential System Tools" from a company called First 4 Internet. Google revealed that First 4 Internet has implemented Digital Rights Management for several record companies, including Sony. It turned out that a recent CD he had purchased, "Get Right with The Man" by the Van Zant brothers, contained Sony's DRM.

Additional experimentation shows that the software is poorly written, and creates a load on the system by scanning the executable files associated with every running process every two seconds, and querying file information including size eight times per scan.

The End User License Agreement (EULA) gives no indication that this software will be installed to your machine, and provides no mechanism for removing it. (They have apparently since modified the EULA in response to Russinovich's analysis.) Russinovich took the trouble to take the steps necessary to remove the software (and return his computer to a functional condition), but as his analysis points out, this would be very difficult for an inexperienced user. A typical responsible computer user who saw the rootkit files and simply deleted them would cripple their computer.

This software appears to me no different from spyware, which was made illegal in the U.S. under the SPY ACT (Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass), and also appears (as a commenters on Russinovich's blog note) to violate California state law, UK law, and Australian law. Arizona's anti-spyware law doesn't seem to apply.

Russinovich's detailed step-by-step analysis may be found here.

Don't purchase CDs with such irresponsible and sleazy DRM software.

Discovery Institute attempts to backdoor testimony into the Dover trial

This is old news, but I haven't noted it here before--the two planned expert witnesses from the Discovery Institute for the Dover trial were Stephen Meyer and William Dembski, who both withdrew from the case. The DI attempted to back-door their testimony into the trial in the form of an amicus brief. The judge ruled that the brief was inadmissible, concluding:

In addition, after a careful review of the Discovery Institute’s submission, we find that the amicus brief is not only reliant upon several portions of Mr. Meyer’s attached expert report, but also improperly addresses Mr. Dembski’s assertions in detail, once again without affording Plaintiffs any opportunity to challenge such views by cross-examination. Accordingly, the “Brief of Amicus Curiae, the Discovery Institute” shall be stricken in its entirety.

A fuller quote (as well as a Fuller quote) may be found at Stranger Fruit.

I seem to recall reading a comment from the judge with respect to DI's legal representation that he wasn't running a law school... if I find it I'll update this entry with a link.

Murders pinned on suicidal, child molesting, gun toting priest

The February 5, 2002 murders of Dan O'Connell and James Ellison in a funeral home in Hudson, WI have now been pinned on Roman Catholic priest Fr. Ryan Erickson, who presided over O'Connell's funeral.

Erickson, who committed suicide this year after investigators started questioning him about involvement with O'Connell and Ellison's deaths, apparently had knowledge of those murders that had not been publicly disclosed.

The current theory is that a teenage boy in trouble with the law went to Erickson, a youth pastor, who on at least three occasions served that boy alcohol and molested him. Unnamed sources say that O'Connell, whose father is on the church council, learned of the charges and confronted Erickson, who killed him and his intern, University of Minnesota student Ellison.

While Erickson's parents said the evidence is "weak" and "our son had nothing to do with this awful crime"; a judge and DA considered it fairly conclusive, including a reported confession from Erickson to a deacon at the church.

Spoofer Captured by Spoof

Chris Elliott, the "man under the seats" on David Letterman's show, star of the movie "Cabin Boy" and TV series "Get a Life," and son of Bob Elliott (of "Bob and Ray") recently published his first novel--The Shroud of the Thwacker, from Miramax books. The book takes place in 1800s New York, where a serial killer is plaguing the city.

The book includes a mix of fact and fiction, with features such as wooden gas-powered cell phones and a time-traveling investigator named Chris Elliott. It also includes a Victorian-era mechanical robot named Boilerplate, which served with the Buffalo soldiers and Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American war.

This latter feature, which Elliott learned of from a website his brother Bob Elliott Jr. pointed him to, has resulted in a financial settlement between Elliott and graphic novelist Paul Guinan. Boilerplate, an invention of Guinan, also appears in his own book, Heartbreakers Meet Boilerplate (IDW Publishing), published in July.

Apparently Elliott thought it was a spoof, but an old, public domain spoof.

The full story is at the New York Times.

William Dembski's Obsessive Complaints of Obsession

Ed Brayton comments on the "Isaac Newton of Intelligent Design"'s crazy accusations of obsession against his critics. Dembski's latest is to accuse mathematician Jeff Shallit of being removed as a witness in the Dover trial because "his obsessiveness against me and ID made him a liability to the ACLU." Actually, Shallit did not testify because he was a rebuttal witness to Dembski, Dembski withdrew from the trial, and the defense did not use Dembski's ideas in their case.

Dembski then dug the hole deeper, stating that this couldn't be the reason. Why not? Because he withdrew before Shallit's deposition was taken. He went on to challenge the ACLU and Shallit to release a transcript of the deposition. Unfortunately for Dembski, it was the defense that took the deposition, to make sure they would be prepared in case Shallit would be used as a witness--and the deposition (at least in the preliminary, uncorrected transcript) is already a public record.

Perhaps Dembski should work on responding to his critics, rather than accusing them of stalking him.

Deception by Dover School Board President Alan Bonsell

This trial just keeps getting more and more ridiculous. The board members who said they had no idea who bought the copies of Of Pandas and People have been shown to be liars on this and other issues. William Buckingham went in front of his church and solicited donations for the books, collected them personally, wrote a personal check (with a memo saying "for Pandas and People books") and gave it to board president Alan Bonsell, who gave it to his father to purchase the books and make the donation. Bonsell ended up receiving some angry questioning directly from the judge. Mike Argento of the York Daily Record has a funny column on this examination.

The Parable of the Roommate

This little parable/thought experiment was inspired by Steve’s comment in the Stirner birthday message, where he advocates for agnosticism over either theism or atheism.

Imagine yourself in the following scenario:

You’ve just returned home from a day at work. While you set your keys on the kitchen counter and remove your coat you can hear the familiar voices of your roommate and her/his S.O. in the other room.

You start to wonder about what you might make yourself for dinner when suddenly you are startled by a loud gunshot, followed by what sounds like a body falling to the floor. Rather than getting the hell out of there you somewhat foolishly run to the other room to see what happened. Once there, you see your roommate standing there, arm outstretched, holding a still-smoking pistol pointed at what is now, apparently, a corpse.

Your roommate looks at you and says “Santa Claus did it.”

Do you:

a) Sincerely believe that your roommate is telling the actual truth?
b) Decide that, because you didn’t actually see your roommate fire the gun, you just can’t know one way or another whether Santa did it?
c) Consider your roommate a murderer, and the claim to be the rationalization of a mind that has snapped?

If my point isn’t glaringly obvious, I think that the Christian/Muslim/Jew/whatever ought to take position A, since, according to most religious beliefs, faith is a virtue. The agnostic ought to take position B, because certain knowledge about anything is denied us. That leaves C, the only rational, reasonable, explanation, for the skeptics/atheists.

If you’re not a skeptical atheist, but you still chose option C above, well, then I applaud you for being reasonable. But I think you need to explain why you choose the analogous A or B when it comes to the equally dubious claim that there is a God.