I love craigslist.

(not my craigslist posting, no idea who posted it)

My wife and I found an armoire in an alley behind our church last weekend. Being an antique lover, she immediately fell for it. It is from the late 19th century (she thinks), with intricately carved designs and six shelves. It’s made of walnut (that’s what she said). One of our friends said that it is extremely rare and we could sell it for several thousands.

We were going to keep it but we now think the armoire is haunted. My wife found a message carved under one of the shelves about a pox and there’s a giant pentagram carved on the very bottom (out of view and doesn’t affect the overall look) with a bunch of latin words. Also, when we first got it, there were some red stains on the bottom shelf, but my wife cleaned them because she thought they were Kool-Aid or some sort of juice.

Ever since we brought it into our house, she’s been really scared at night. One time, our lamp fell over (I think it was because of the wind) and our daughter came down with a little cold, but that’s all. She thinks we need to give it away to someone who can either deal with the “curse” or can make it holy again. I just wish I could keep it (because it is truly beautiful), but she won’t let me.

Free to anyone who can come pick it up. I’ll also take a six pack if you got that.

Wikipedia:

Ford faced two assassination attempts during his presidency, occurring within three weeks of each other: while in Sacramento, California on September 5, 1975, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, pointed a Colt 45-caliber handgun at Ford. As Fromme pulled the trigger, Larry Buendorf[70], a Secret Service agent, grabbed the gun and managed to insert the webbing of his thumb under the hammer, preventing the gun from firing. It was later found that, although the gun was loaded with four bullets, it was a semi-automatic pistol and the slide had not been pulled to place a bullet in the firing chamber, making it impossible for the gun to fire. Fromme was taken into custody; she was later convicted of attempted assassination of the President and was sentenced to life in prison.[71]

Artscape is this weekend in Bolton Hill.

I’m going to definitely make the Saturday 5PM J Roddy Walston and The Business show, then maybe try to get over to the DJ booth for DJ Vadim, then back to the main stage for the Old 97’s

Sunday Night, Sam Bush and Burning Spear are paying in the same timeslot.

It’s about 5 miles from my house, we’ll be driving I guess.

Thorsten Holz of the German Honeynet Project has posted a very interesting article describing the methods used by botnet owners to hide command and control servers. I’ve seen much of it in the wild myself, confirming the techniques described in the whitepaper.

Check it out.

I am obliged to record the things that I am told, but I am certainly not required to believe them–this remark may be taken to apply to the whole of my account.

• Herodotus

We’ve all been asked to use passwords that are more than just a word that could be found in the dictionary…

Waiting for a conference call to start I took a look at a dictionary attack in a live packet capture I had running. In this case, the attacker is trying to log into an FTP server.

[root@sensor-## active]# strings grant.20070628-104057.ftpscan.i.p.add.ress.lpc | grep -a PASS | grep -ao '[^ ]*$'

antagonism
antagonisms
antagonist
antagonistic
antagonistically
antagonists
antagonize
antagonized
antagonizes
antagonizing
antarctic
Antarctica
Antares
ante
anteater
anteaters
antecedent
antecedents
antedate
antelope
antelopes
antenna
antennae
antennas
anterior
anthem
anthems
anther
anthologies
anthology
Anthony
anthracite
anthropological
anthropologically
anthropologist
anthropologist
anthropologists
anthropology
anthropomorphic
anthropomorphically
anti
antibacterial
antibiotic
antibiotics

And so on…

The blank lines contained passwords that I’ve removed, some because I recognized them as real passwords for FTP users, some because they did not fit the pattern of starting with the letter ‘a’, suggesting that they were legitimate passwords of which I was not aware.

I like that proper names are capitalized and that the signal/noise ratio causes outliers to jump off the screen. I dislike that the server is running IIS6, which has a good vulnerability history but completely lacks any configurability to react to this sort of attack.

On Nat and Will’s dog Petey:

Will: we bought Petey a stuffed Platypus that makes a weird squeek noise

Will: when we gave it to him, he bit it and it made the noise, and he got all scared and confused

Pictured above: Petey, scared of my camera.

A large starbucks box on the kitchen table at work proclaimed in magic marker:

FREE TO A GOOD HOME

I peeked in the box to see what was being given away, expecting some vendor swag or gadgets. Inside was a dozen packages of decaffinated starbucks coffee.

From:

We have a lot of practice, all in the last five years and not counting helping friends move:

• Moving to Columbia
• Moving Ben in from Ohio to MD
• Moving within Columbia
• Moving to DC
• Moving within DC
• Moving to Towson
• And in a week, moving into a house we bought

The big move is happening Saturday, starting early.

We have rented a truck that is about half the length of a full 18-wheeler, and because of the size only comes in a manual transmission.