December 29th, 2009 at 2:01 pm (Fruit Bats)
The following excerpt was the inspiration for Chuck Jone’s Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cat-and-mouse team created at the Termite Terrace studio at Warner.
Chuck Jones and Termite Terrace (inset)
Excerpt from Chapter V of Mark Twain’s Roughing It.
Along about an hour after breakfast we saw the first prairie-dog villages, the first antelope, and the first wolf. If I remember rightly, this latter was the regular cayote (pronounced ky-o-te) of the farther deserts. And if it was, he was not a pretty creature or respectable either, for I got well acquainted with his race afterward, and can speak with confidence. The cayote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face, with slightly lifted lip and exposed teeth. He has a general slinking expression all over. The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want.
Illustration from "Roughing It"
He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely!—so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful. When he sees you he lifts his lip and lets a flash of his teeth out, and then turns a little out of the course he was pursuing, depresses his head a bit, and strikes a long, soft-footed trot through the sage-brush, glancing over his shoulder at you, from time to time, till he is about out of easy pistol range, and then he stops and takes a deliberate survey of you; he will trot fifty yards and stop again—another fifty and stop again; and finally the gray of his gliding body blends with the gray of the sage-brush, and he disappears. All this is when you make no demonstration against him; but if you do, he develops a livelier interest in his journey, and instantly electrifies his heels and puts such a deal of real estate between himself and your weapon, that by the time you have raised the hammer you see that you need a minie rifle, and by the time you have got him in line you need a rifled cannon, and by the time you have “drawn a bead” on him you see well enough that nothing but an unusually long-winded streak of lightning could reach him where he is now. But if you start a swift-footed dog after him, you will enjoy it ever so much—especially if it is a dog that has a good opinion of himself, and has been brought up to think he knows something about speed. Read the rest of this entry »
November 8th, 2009 at 12:40 am (Fruit Bats)
August 20th, 2009 at 11:20 pm (Fruit Bats)
As of the date of this post, the website is subject to the iron-fisted pre-emptive actions of what is called the Badware Website Clearinghouse. In a partnership with Google, they seek out websites that could be potentially harmful to visitors in terms of hardware, software, and data. They’ve peremptorily branded this site as a badware site. Who are these people?
StopBadware.org seeks to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers to make better choices about what they download on to their computers. They aim to become a central clearinghouse for research on badware and the bad actors who spread it, and to become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware.
The Badware Website Clearinghouse currently has more than 182 thousand reported URLs. You can search the URLs that have been reported to them by their partners and view statistics from their top clearinghouse pages. If you are a site owner and you are flagged by Google and you would like StopBadware.org to review the inclusion of your website in the Badware Website Clearinghouse, you can request a review by filling out their form.
Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Oxford University’s Oxford Internet Institute are leading this initiative with the support of several prominent tech companies, including Google, Lenovo, and Sun Microsystems. Consumer Reports WebWatch is serving as an unpaid special advisor.
John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center and Harvard Clinical Professor of Law, and Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard Law Visiting Professor and Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University (who not long ago wrote his best seller “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It”), are StopBadware.org co-directors. The Advisory Board also has some “big names” like for example Vinton G. Cerf, who is vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google. But he is more known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” he is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet.
In other words, they’re really big shots in the industry.
Their intentions may be sincere and aboveboard, but the execution of their mission is not all it’s cut out to be. For one thing, there’s no early warning that a site is being targeted by them. They just swoop down and strap a boot to the wheel, without so much as a by your leave. In most cases, webmasters are not aware their wards are under attack, but they pay the price of being locked out by an organization acting as law enforcer, judge, and jury, all in one go and with equal stealth.
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April 15th, 2009 at 11:28 am (Fruit Bats)
It’s considered gauche, not to mention, fruitless, to block ips, but still there are times when brute force is required just to introduce some level of serenity on a site exposed to attack by web server spammers. The provision of subsidiary Apache directives for this purpose usually are not available at the document root level of the web server, so as to avoid unnecessary hits on server performance. In these instances, one has to make do without the handy .htaccess file full of directives to do all sorts of nifty things, among them, blocking ips with the ‘deny from’ command.
An alternative involves using a php script with methods for accomplishing the same objective placed at the head of a file. The targeted objective in this case is not the individual ip address, but ranges encompassing whole countries — as best as can be determined from resources on the web. The resource of interest here is called Country IP Ranges Generator. A target country from the list provided is selected. Next, ‘formatting by input’ is selected. The format to use: {startip}/{netmask}. A complete list is spat out when the “generate” button is clicked. Each line in the list represents a range of possible networks in the country selected. Here is the most current list for the whole of Afghanistan:
#Afghanistan
58.147.128.0/255.255.224.0
110.34.40.0/255.255.248.0
117.55.192.0/255.255.240.0
117.104.224.0/255.255.248.0
119.59.80.0/255.255.248.0
121.100.48.0/255.255.248.0
121.127.32.0/255.255.224.0
125.213.192.0/255.255.224.0
202.56.176.0/255.255.240.0
202.86.16.0/255.255.240.0
203.174.27.0/255.255.255.0
203.215.32.0/255.255.240.0
210.80.0.0/255.255.224.0
210.80.32.0/255.255.224.0
For larger areas, such as China or the Russia Federation, these lists can be quite long, but still quite manageable. The ip ranges can be used selectively or wholesale depending on one’s policy. If you’re targeting a language group for inclusion in your web service, such as a forum or a weblog, you need to avoid wholesale blocking of countries who might include potential participants of the friendly sort. The thing is, the foes tend to wage their exploits from far-flung areas outside North America, if they can get away with it.
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