CAROLINA NATURALLY

Sunday, January 2, 2011

The Daily Drift

The Daily Drift

Today's horoscope says:
A friend's tale of woe may have you taking out the tissues and formulating a revenge plan, but hold off on moving forward, because there are three sides to every story.
What you know right now is only part of the picture and new information will be coming tomorrow that will change how you feel today.
Unless you want to get left with egg on your face, you need to avoid making any moves on behalf of this other person.
Let them fight their own battles and learn their own lessons.

Some of our readers today have been in:

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Perth, Western Australia, Australia

Paris, Ile-De-France, France

Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Sittard, Limburg, Netherlands

Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Annecy, Rhone-Alpes, France

Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Espoo, Southern Finland, Finland

Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan, Malaysia

Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Geneva, Geneve, Switzerland

as well as Bulgaria, Israel, Finland, Austria, Norway, Georgia, Mexico, Peru, Kuwait, Serbia, Bangladesh, Latvia, Greece, Scotland, Hong Kong, Denmark, Wales, Iran, Singapore, Poland, Taiwan, Sweden, Afghanistan, Belgium, Tibet, Croatia, Pakistan, Romania, Paraguay, Sudan, Vietnam, Argentina, Cambodia, Egypt, France, Estonia, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Brazil, New Zealand, United Arab Emirates, Slovenia, China, Iraq, Ecuador, Nigeria, Colombia, Chile, Honduras, Paupa New Guinea, Moldova, Venezuela, Germany, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Ireland, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Vietnam, Norway, Finland and in cities across the United States such as Canton, Toledo, Norwalk, Cincinnati and more.

Today is:

Today is Sunday, January 2, the 2nd day of 2011.

There are 363 days left in the year.

Today In History January 2

Today's unusual holiday or celebration is:

There isn't one.

Don't forget to visit our sister blog!

As the fortune cookie crumbles ...

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Man Found his Double on Facebook

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Graham Comrie of Aberdeen thought someone was impersonating him when he heard of a Facebook account of a Graham Cormie of Ellon, Aberdeenshire. Friends even thought Cormie was using Comrie’s photos, since they looked so much alike! But it was no imitation -just a eerie set of coincidences.

The Grahams soon realized they were both professional photographers.
And as the two men chatted online, they found out they both had red-headed wives and were both set to celebrate their silver wedding anniversaries next year.
Other striking similarities included that they both had two daughters and both owned Lhasa Apso dogs.
When they saw each other’s pictures, they realized they were the absolute spitting image of each other, too.

The Grahams are only two years apart in age -and live only ten miles from each other. They checked and found that they are not related, just new friends.

Full Story

Brand New Pair Of Roller Skates

Melanie

NHL game played in rain

Hockey game played outside in the rain

The Capitals and Penguins make NHL history in less than ideal weather conditions.

Warm gametime temp

Also:

Australia's 'biblical' flooding

'Biblical' floods sweep through Australia

Thousands more homes are threatened by record-setting waters in Queensland.

200,000 people already affected

Also:

Visitors snap up 100 trillion Zimbabwe bank notes

Western visitors to Zimbabwe are looking for zeros.
They're snapping up old, defunct Zimbabwe bank notes, most notably the one hundred trillion Zimbabwe dollar bill, as an economic souvenir.

Full Story

Cyber War Now Being Waged on Iran?

The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops."

So tweeted John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and cyberlibertarian activist, as attacks began on the websites of businesses that had spurned Wikileaks after it published cables of American diplomacy.

Websites of MasterCard and Visa, which had withdrawn services allowing donations to Wikileaks; the Swedish government, which charged Wikileaks founder Julian Assange with sex-related crimes; and a Swiss bank that froze Mr. Assange's account were among those attacked. None of the commercial sites was seriously prevented from conducting business. The attacks ended up being more like painting slogans on a wall than war.

But cyberwar actually has begun, and it has nothing to do with Wikileaks.

The Jerusalem Post reported recently that the Stuxnet computer virus may have caused the decommissioning of as many as 1,000 centrifuges at Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility. The virus caused the speed of the motors in the centrifuges to vary, creating vibrations that damaged the machines, the Post deduced from interviews with experts on the attack.

The Post cited speculation that Israel's military defense unit was behind the attack, possibly aided by the United States.

Taking out a tenth of the centrifuges at the Iranian facility is comparable to an air strike. Now that is war.

But even if the Wikileaks version of cyberwar was underwhelming, there are some lessons to be learned from it.

The attacks launched by a loose confederation of Web activists calling themselves Anonoymous aren't new or uncommon or even especially sophisticated.

The attacks on perceived enemies of Wikileaks and of Mr. Assange were of a type called Distributed Denial of Service attacks, in which computers controlled by the assailants flood a website with so many requests that the servers seize up under the onslaught.

Often DDoS attacks are launched by criminals using botnets, networks of compromised computers assembled by a worm. The owners of the computers in the botnet are unaware that their machines are being used to send spam or bring down a website.

But the implementation by Anonymous had an interesting twist not used by spammers or run-of-the-mill malware spreaders.

Riva Richmond, blogging for the New York Times, explained it this way:

The tool of choice is a new open-source software program named Low Orbit Ion Cannon, or L.O.I.C. Once a hacktivist downloads the tool, he can operate it manually or connect to "Hivemind," a control system that makes their computers part of a "voluntary botnet" that Anonymous commands.

L.O.I.C. in its various forms was downloaded more than 100,000 times during period of the Wikileaks attacks Some people believe that manual launches of the attacks were coordinated by Twitter messages such as "fire, fire, fire." That is presumably why Twitter canceled the account of Anonymous.

The new wrinkle is that users volunteer their computers to be part of the attacks, rather than having them taken over without their knowledge.

Craig Labovitz, posting on the site of the security firm Arbor Networks, said the attacks orchestrated by Anonymous were small and low-level.

"Despite the thousands of tweets, press articles and endless hype, most of the attacks ... were both relatively small and unsophisticated. In short, other than intense media scrutiny, the attacks were unremarkable," Mr. Labovitz wrote.

Although the attacks by Anonymous amounted to little more than cybervandalism, Mr. Labovitz warned that the trend of using DDoS attacks for protest is troubling.

"Overall, DDoS fueled by the growth of professional adversaries, massive botnets and increasingly sophisticated attack tools poses a real danger to the network and our increasing dependence on the Internet," he wrote. So 2011 may be a year that sees cyberwar between nations and protest attacks by citizens.

Son of Iran stoning woman wants sentence commuted

The son of an Iranian woman, whose death sentence by stoning for adultery sparked world outrage, demanded Saturday that his mother's verdict be commuted.

Full Story

Man says he committed burglaries to pay lawyer defending him on previous burglary charges

A man who police said has been in and out of jail several times since September is back in jail again, accused of committing half a dozen home burglaries. The arrest affidavits detail two of the cases against Michael Elias, 28, one of which dates back to June of this year. Both happened on the northwest side of the city.

The report shows Elias is a suspect in a June 18 break-in at a home in the 300 block of Cherry Ridge. The resident told police someone had ransacked his home, taking two laptop computers, two video game systems, jewelery and other items.

http://uploads.neatorama.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/elias-150x187.jpg

On Nov. 8, another resident reported a burglary in the 11500 block of Huebner Road in which a 50-inch plasma TV was stolen. Police said they recovered fingerprints from both locations that later proved to be Elias's.

The affidavit shows that after his arrest, Elias told investigators how he had learned to commit burglaries using a crow bar to gain access to homes. Elias also told investigators he had to keep committing the burglaries so he could afford to pay his attorney a $150 weekly fee to keep him out of jail.

There's a news video here.