DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

In case you haven’t already seen it (via Slashdot or Camworld or, no doubt, countless other places): check out Steve Gibson’s dissection of a distributed denial-of-service attack against grc.com. It’s long, but fascinating to read — reminiscent of Cliff Stoll’s The Cuckoo’s Egg, a 1980s techno-thriller about tracking an international spy ring.

Even if the content doesn’t interest you, you should probably go to grc.com anyway to run Steve’s ShieldsUP! program, which does some simple testing to see how vulnerable your Windows machine is to a network-based attack.

Workstation security is particular important if you’re a broadband user. Folks with cable modems and DSL are favorite targets for the IRC bots described in the article above. Windows users are more vulnerable than anyone else.

It’s a sad day for online journal fans… two of my daily reads (dack, eod) have gone off the air.

This is an interesting article on how authorities caught Abraham Abdallah, who is accused of forging the identities of, and stealing millions of dollars from, a long list of celebrities including Spielberg, Lucas, Winfrey, Perot, Soros, Icahn, Ellison, Geffen, and more. The crime relied on technologies that didn’t exist a few years ago, such as virtual voice mail and free web-based email, and yet the police relied on old-world techniques (staking out PO boxes, impersonating couriers) to finally make an arrest. Thanks to Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram for the link.

I bet this story ends up on the big screen before too long.

Damn, just when I stopped eating meat, I find a source for boneless human rump roast. Next time someone exclaims, “My ass!,” I can say something witty like “yup, $52/pound” to the confusion of all. (Thanks to Dack for the ManBeef pointer. That is one of the most gross sites I’ve seen this year.)

I’ve never consumed human flesh, but I do know what burning feet smell like. I can’t say the aroma made my mouth water, although maybe that’s just cultural conditioning at work. Or maybe “instep steaks” don’t smell the same as the stew of corns, bunions, and tinea pedis that was roasting at the firewalk.

Rich Karlgaard of Forbes makes a fascinating case that the failure of the web advertising market is due largely to Microsoft’s latest strategy for preserving their status as market leader: Microsoft’s War Of Attrition.