Spent awhile today helping my friend Dave track down some stuff relating to some fraudulent email pretending to be from ebay, taking him to a site asking him to verify all his information. The site, on first glance, resembled ebay, but the URL was wrong, it was something like http://something.ebay.com@1445.433.768.444/ebay.php (IP address changed to protect the guilty .. or the hacked). The IP resolved (well, whois-ed -- it didn't reverse-resolve at all) to a site in Korea, and although the source of the fake php wasn't interesting. Note to all of you -- the above URL does not take you to something.ebay.com -- it uses something.ebay.com as a USERNAME submitted to that IP address, which in this case ignores the username. It's just there for show. So, we know to contact ebay and the upstream provider for that site in Korea.. but wait, we're not done yet. Although clicking submit (not filling in the info correctly, that'd be stupid) takes us to ebay, I notice another URL flicker by in the location bar.. so I head back, view info (I use mozilla), and see the URL that it submits to.. using the GET method. I then use "wget" to grab that. Aha! A status message that suggests that it's using online merchant services of a bank. Good, another place to email. Given a bit more time, or bravery (the host site in Korea is running Windows and has some things that likely are hackable, according to nmap), I could probably get a name.. but might as well let the ISP and the bank handle it. The whole thing is a lot of fun though. I haven't done this kind of thing for awhile...

Some more schmucks are trying to hack my site. Look, as lame as it is that you're doing that to begin with, here's a hint. I'M NOT RUNNING WINDOWS. You're not going to find cmd.exe anywhere on the system. Sheesh.

Oh, and the moron in our military (no, not that moron) is saying he's sorry and that he never intended to speak ill of Islam, and that he was misunderstood. What a pathetic liar. Does he honestly believe people to think his very clear statements were just misunderstandings? No, that's not an apology, that's an insult. First, you don't get to say "You didn't understand" in an apology. That's a clarification. An apology goes more like "What I did was wrong, I regret doing it, and accept that I bear some blame. You understood what I did, I understand what I did, and I'm going to fix it". What he's saying has a very different flavour. Now, that being said, I have no problem criticizing Islam, or indeed any religion. Provided that it's not inaccurate, it's meant, and one stands up for what one says, I think it's fine to criticize faith. I've been known to do just a leeeetle bit of that myself :) However, I think it's quite a different thing to, from the perspective of someone in power in an organization/government, to make such statements in one's role as such, to represent the org/gov as such, etc etc. Conclusion? Boykin should be given a dishonorable discharge.

Of course, he won't be, and it's in fact possible to believe the Muslim Analysis on the whole thing. I'm worried that the modern liberal trend in western civilization, with its secular roots, will be swept away as religion-rooted conflict brings us into a new dark age. All this progress and growth as a society could be so easily lost.

Oh, also, yesterday I got a haircut... the barber said that she took off more hair than she left on. It looks decent, but I can't still get the "mad scientist" look I like. I need to figure out the right lengths in different parts of the head for that...