True child of the 60's, I guess

Even though I knew what this was going to be about, I still misread the headline:

Dictionary says: What I was thinking of is supposed to be "pants suit" or "pantsuit." Oh, well.
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Via: Daily Pundit

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 23:49:06 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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I'm told cold showers help

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Malaysia's Muslim men are suffering sleepless nights and cannot pray properly because their thoughts are distracted by a growing number of women who wear sexy clothes in public, a prominent cleric said.

Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat, the spiritual leader of the opposition Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, said he wanted to speak about the "emotional abuse" that men face because it is seldom discussed, the party reported on its Web site Wednesday.

"We always [hear about] the abuse of children and wives in households, which is easily perceived by the eye, but the emotional abuse of men cannot be seen," Nik Abdul Aziz said. "Our prayers become unfocused and our sleep is often disturbed." -- Associated Press report posted at Fox News

Pathetic.

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Via: "Ward Cleaver"

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:55:42 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Moonbats to the right of me...

Never thought I'd see anyone call Little Green Footballs "...pro-Muslim, left-wing, politically correct, and basically a front for neoconservative foreign policy..."

Whatever, guys.


Via: Classical Values

Later: Gaaah! Now somebody's.calling Bill Quick a leftist!

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 23:39:29 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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What the CMU study says about blog coverage

You want to know the topics that are exciting the blogosphere. Your time is limited. Which blogs do you read?

That's the question behind a Carnegie Mellon University student paper "Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks," linked by a number of folks. The authors created lists of blogs using several "budgets" (you can only read 100 blogs, you can only read 500 posts, etc.). Bloggers + Lists of Blogs = Commentary. No exception here. Read on, as they say!
more...

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:55:36 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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McGurk hangs it up

You're Doing it Wrong:

Things have gotten very intense at work lately. I'm heading up a major project here, and its eating up all the spare time I have for my side projects. So, rather than let this blarg languish, I'm going to cap it off and say goodbye.

McGurk was one of mee.nu's beta testers (I was, too). He always has something interesting to say-- when he has time to say it. He'll be missed.

Message to McGurk: You'd better keep that promise to pop up at Ace's occasionally. And thanks for the acknowledgment!

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 18:00:16 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Great moments in management

Just suppose...
One morning you open up your e-mails and find a note from your mortgage company telling you to make your payments to some new address and new bank account. You'd check it out before sending anything, right...?

Supervalu Inc., the Eden Prairie-based grocer, fell prey to an e-mail scam this year, sending more than $10 million to two fraudulent bank accounts, according to federal court filings.
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The company said it received two e-mails -- one from someone purporting to be an employee of American Greetings Corp. and another from someone claiming to be with Frito-Lay.... Both e-mails claimed that the companies wanted payments sent to new bank account numbers.

Supervalu sent more than $6.5 million in nine payments between Feb. 28 and March 6 to the phony American Greetings account at HSBC Bank in Miami Beach. The company also sent nearly $3.6 million during the same period to the phony Frito-Lay account in Arkansas. -- Associated Press report at StarTribune.com

Fortunately for Supervalu, somebody there spotted the scam and called in the FBI.  The feds were able to block the accounts before the money could be withdrawn.

The real head-scratcher is how this could even happen in the first place.

Via: Captain Ed, who says it demonstrates how Sarbaines-Oxley is no match for fraud, stupidity, or naivete.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:06:28 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Don't you just hate it when that happens?

Fake terror exercise interrupted by, um, real fake terror alert

Lesson learned (?):

If you have bomb squads and EOD units converging on an area to locate and defuse WMDs, and they and their cars all smell like explosives, the bomb-sniffing dogs are going to have a time of it.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 01:42:20 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Alan Coren 1938-2007

I first ran across Alan Coren 40-some years ago when he was writing for (and later editing) Punch.  (Somewhere in the archives, IIRC, I have one of his books (I think it's the Idi Amin one), received as a premium for renewing my subscription.)  In those days I was making my acquaintance with the British humorous style, and it took a while to "tune in" on just where he was coming from.  Fortunately for me, I persisted, as did he.

Robbie Millen, at TimesOnline's Comment Central, has linked some of his best Times columns.

London Times obituary.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 00:59:21 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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Da-bum Bing!

Chef Mojo posts a question:

Hey, wasn’t there supposed to be a nationwide general strike the other day?

and "genes" comes right back

Well, you know how it is. You can’t tell the when the generals go on strike ’cause the sergeants do all the work.

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 00:14:58 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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If J.Random Hacker was doing this, he'd wind up in jail

Comcast has been caught running "Man-in-the-Middle Attacks" on its internet service:

Comcast's technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user.

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer — it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: "Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye." -- Associated Press story via msnbc

It's not just BitTorrent. How about Lotus Notes:

I finally have an end-to-end trace to share which shows that Comcast is filtering the port 1352 traffic. The images... [see linked post] show that Comcast is impersonating and using man-in-the-middle tactics to filter the traffic as stated in the CNet post.
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...the Notes client saw the RST packets coming from the Domino server IP and the Domino server saw the RST packets coming from the Notes client PC. However the trace doesn't show either one of them sending the RST packets which means something on the network in between was sending them. The Sandvine appliance (or whatever Comcast is using) sends the RST packets to both systems while imitating the other. -- Kevin Kanarski

This warrants far more fuss then the AT&T terms-of-service flap. The AT&T thing was just potential: No one's service had ever been cut off for saying something AT&T didn't like.

Comcast's spoofing is going on right now.

more...

Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 16:38:27 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
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