Monthly Archive for September, 2007

Jack Thompson pisses his miserable law career goodbye

It appears our favorite lawyer has finally done something so stupendous that he might’ve just as well just rip his bar association membership card in half.

It seems he got the bright idea to include hardcore gay pornographic images in a court filing having nothing to do with gay pornography. As any reasonable person might expect, the judge reading the filing was not pleased. In fact, he was so displeased that he’s called a hearing for the court’s Ad Hoc Committee on Attorney Admissions, Peer Review, and Attorney Grievance to decide on appropriate action.

Me thinks Mr. Thompson should start planning on reworking his business cards. The Esq. or Attorney at Law trailing his name will shortly be incorrect.

-TPP

Speaking of crime

We had a bit of excitement tonight.

My wife and I came home around 9:20pm tonight after a dinner date in the city. I try and unlock the door, and find out that it’s locked from the inside. I’m a little puzzled, but I’m thinking maybe my wife’s parents did that, because they had called earlier that they are coming over to drop something off. I unlock the security lock and open the door, but it doesn’t open all the way, because the chain is on.

Now it’s definitely getting weird. Nobody is answering and the lights are on. I take another look through the crack and see that drawers have been opened. Allrighty. Time to call 911.

I call 911 at 9:32pm. The cops show up after 10pm about 10 minutes after we break the chain and get inside the apartment.

We’d been burglarized. All my video game systems are gone, except the XBox 180, which apparently isn’t quite hip enough any more. Both of our laptops are missing, as is my GPS receiver and video player. Thieves scored big, it seems. The place is a complete mess. All the bedroom closets have been turned upside down, the jewelry box is open, and every drawer on our computer desk and TV stand have been opened.

Sir William Gibson, the youngest of our two cats, is scared shitless. He’s hiding under the bed, the sofa and is running away from everyone, including my wife and I. At first we thought he’d jumped out of the bedroom window left wide open by the thieves, but it was a relief to find him shivering under the sofa.

The cops take down our information including a preliminary list of things stolen, and they leave after about 30 minutes. The Evidence Collection Team (fingerprinting) is going to arrive later they say, and we’re not to touch anything while we’re waiting.

The Evidence Collection Team arrives at around 1:30am, and the two officers start collecting fingerprints. They find one fingerprint in a place there shouldn’t really be any prints. They leave soon after 2am, and we start cleaning up the place.

That’s when we find a surprise. It seems that the thieves had left something behind. They had stuffed a laundry bag of ours (yes, ours) with both of our laptops, the GPS receiver, an old camera and a video player, and they had left the bag on our bed under a whole lot of crap they’d gone through. They had left the most valuable, moneywise, things they were stealing behind. Of course the two laptops were also the most valuable to us in other ways. They have a lot of irreplaceable files on them. Family photos, Emails going back several years, personal finances, etc. Who needs backups, right? We are really lucky to have them back. Gotta think about that backup strategy next…

At this point I’m getting kinda curious. I have my laptop on 24/7, and so it would’ve been turned off by the thieves. I know there’s gotta be some information on the laptop to pinpoint the time of day they broke in. I turn on the computer and immediately check the Windows event log information.

The information contained in the logs startles me. Reading the logs I know for a fact the computer was on at 8:41pm, 40 minutes before we came home. There are entries in the system log that seems to suggest that the time the computer was shut down was 9:20pm. Approximately the same time we turned the key in the lock of our door. It looks like the thieves might still have been inside our apartment at the time we arrived home. Good thing I didn’t kick the door in like I thought and instead called the cops. Who knows what might’ve happened.

-TPP

Cybercrime brings in more revenue than illegal drug trade

Speaking at the 2007 InformationWeek 500 conference McAfee CEO David DeWalt told the audience that revenue made by criminals in cybercrime now exceed the revenue of the worldwide illegal drug trade.

Pretty cool. I wonder when the authorities start taking these things seriously.

Meanwhile nerds in Romania were seen celebrating by drinking Cristal from bathtubs inside their MB limos.

-TPP

All around douchebag Jack Thompson goes after GTA IV. Again.

Rockstar Games is busy working on the next installment of their hugely popular Grand Theft Auto (GTA) video game franchise. GTA IV is scheduled for release sometime early 2008. The GTA franchise has been, unfairly so, I believe, in the news for quite for a while for being too violent. Some people are going even so far as to claim that the game is a murder simulator training otherwise healthy human beings to be murderers.

One of the most vocal critics of the GTA games is one Jack “Jackhole” Thompson, all around douchebag. To fully explain his douchebaggery would take far too long, so I’m just going to refer anyone interested to Google. The evidence is everywhere. For kicks start by reading up on Janet Reno and Jack Thompson. If nothing, you’ll get a good laugh out of it.

Jackhole’s latest crusade against GTA and Take Two Interactive, the publisher of the game, takes him to yet another threat of a lawsuit or as if Jachole puts it “govern yourself accordingly, or else”. Yes, that does sound exactly like a schoolyard threat. Kinda makes you wonder who gets to call themselves a lawyer in this country, doesn’t it?

Jackhole is claiming that a character in the game is actually him, and since the game has the player kill this character in one of the missions of the game, Rockstar Games is “targeting” him for murder.

As usual, Jackhole’s arguments are full of holes.

It appears that the only resemblance to Jackhole this fictional in-game character has is that they both are lawyers. Well, in as much as a fictional character can be a lawyer. But I suppose since Jackhole is about to lose his bar association membership, he’s also soon going to be a fictional lawyer. So I guess there is some similarity here.

The in-game character doesn’t bear any physical resemblance to Jackhole, is named Goldberg (not Thompson), lives in New York (not Miami) and is a Second Amendment expert (not a First Amendment idiot like Jackhole). There simply isn’t any similarities between the in-game character and Jackhole anywhere else than in Jackhole’s delusional mind.

That has never, of course, stopped Jackhole from going after anyone. So he’s threatening Take Two Interactive with an unspecified legal threat unless the scenes of this in-game character’s killing are removed from the game. Take Two has until 5pm September 21st 2007 to remove the scenes. Or else.

Yes. He really says “or else”.

Anyway, the absolute best part of Jackhole’s little hissy fit is that he’s done the exact same thing he’s accusing Rockstar Games for. Except that he actually referred to a real person. Pot, meet kettle, he’s black.

In October 10th 2005 Jackhole wrote a video game script he called a Modest Video Game Proposal. In the “script” he’s depicting a murder of a person named Paula Eibel, a CEO for a video game company “Take This”. In 2005 Take Two Interactive had Paul Eibeler as the CEO.

So, if he gets to sue Take Two over a fictional character that has no resemblance to him, he should really talk to a real lawyer because his ass should be in a court room for the same reason sometime soon after he “wins” against Take Two. His “script”, after all, leaves absolutely no doubt whatsoever whom he’s murdering in it.

-TPP

TD Ameritrade owned by spammers for years

The anti-spam community has been long suspecting something’s not right with TD Ameritrade. It seems email addresses of new customers of TD Ameritrade leak to spammers very soon after they were used to create TD Ameritrade accounts. This has been going on for at least 2 – 3 years.

The leading theories for the cause of the data leaks has been either unauthorized access to TD Ameritrade customer information or a marketing partner of TD Ameritrade’s selling mailing lists to third parties.

Today the suspicions have been proven true, as TD Ameritrade published information that they have uncovered “unauthorized code” on their system allowing spammers access to their customer records. And that’s pretty much all TD Ameritrade said.

It took TD Ameritrade far too long to react to customer complaints regarding their leaking customer information. It also took them far too long to find this backdoor on their computer system. It’s incredible a leading brokerage company in the United States can operate for years without knowing spammers are tapping into their customer information in real-time.

-TPP

Breaking News: McLaren Formula One team stripped of its 2007 points. Driver points spared.

The ongoing espionage scandal in Formula One reached a conclusion today when FIA made a decision to disqualify the McLaren Formula One team from the competition for the remainder of the 2007 season as well as the whole 2008 season for stealing and using information from the Ferrari team.

This is incredible. The McLaren drivers, Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton, are currently one and two in the season standings and one of them was bound to win the 2007 championship.

This has to be one of the biggest scandals to hit ANY sport in history.

And there seems to be more coming as rumors are circulating that the Renault F1 team had the same information and also used it in their cars.

Update: BBC is now reporting that instead of disqualification, the McLaren F1 team is going to lose its 2007 points and be hit with a $100M fine. The McLaren drivers will retain their points, and the 2008 car is subject to a special inspection before it’s allowed to participate in the 2008 season.

-TPP

Even Russia agrees, Russian human rights are getting worse

Back in March this year, the Moscow Times reported on a human rights situation in Russia. It was based on Russia’s own human rights ombudsman’s report.

The ombudsman reported that human rights violations are up in every area; economic, cultural and political human rights violations are all up. The report also stated that the Russian citizens do not trust the Russian Government.

I wonder what has become of the ombudsman since? Critics of the Putin Dictatorship don’t usually last long in Russia.

-TPP

My Fellow American

That’s how a letter addressed to me sent by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Joseph Daniels, President and CEO of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum,
begins. The letter then goes on to ask, in 4 pages, if I would donate some money towards running the museum.

Well, gee, I don’t know. Maybe, if you wouldn’t have pissed me off by assuming I’m an American.

Quite frankly addressing the letter to “My Fellow Americans” insults me. It’s as if 9/11 was somehow an entirely American event. Yes, it may have happened within US soil, and yes, most of the people who died and got injured were American. However, people of many nationalities and ethnic backgrounds died, got injured and participated in the rescue and cleanup operations. Yet more were somehow affected, me included. I worked on the 38th floor of the World Trade Center.

-TPP

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me?

Looks like I’m going to be taking “advantage” of Microsoft’s “generous” new warranty program. Again.

Over the Labor Day weekend it seems as if my XBox 360 took upon itself to commit suicide. I got the dreaded ring of red lights. I managed to get the box running for an extra day by switching it from HDTV mode to SDTV mode, but that only lasted one day. My XBox 360 now dies regardless of what graphics mode I’m running it on. It does look like its graphics card got fried.

Funny thing. My Tivo is running 24/7 on the same stereo rack with no problems, and has been doing that for three years non-stop. My cable box is doing the same. My new laptop is running 24/7 as well, and it runs considerably hotter than my XBox 360. My wireless router is on 24/7, no problems, and so is my cable modem.

The PS3 I own runs Folding@Home 24/7 for months in a row. No problems. My Nintendo Wii is on standby (not quite off) 24/7 as well. No problems.

The only goddamn piece of electronic equipment that keeps dieing on me is the XBox 360, and I’m not using it nearly as much or strenuously as my other electronic equipment. What kind of garbage did Microsoft put inside this thing anyway???

-TPP

Pfizer spams for Viagra

Viagra spam is nothing new. It’s probably been going on even before the FDA approved it. Who knows.

But what is new is that Pfizer computers are spewing a lot of it out to the Internet. It seems that a whole bunch of Pfizer corporate computers have been infected with trojans and are acting as zombies in a botnet hired to send out Viagra spam. The irony.

You would think Pfizer would jump on fixing its zombies, but apparently this has been going on for a while according to Wired.

-TPP