So this guy running for congressman in Louisianna is getting rocked for saying that many black people in Alabama don’t know how to swim. It’s a big deal with people saying it’s a stereotype, it’s not true, etc.

In other news, from a while back, the swimming requirement was dropped for cops in north Miami because it was seen as discriminatory against black people. Here’s what the black police chief had to say on the matter:

“Our swimming requirement may give the false perception that we are not serious in our efforts to hire Haitian police applicants,” police Chief Gwendolyn Boyd-Savage, who is black, wrote in a memo.

“They have been intimidated because they don’t swim; very few of them swim,” said Mayor Joe Celestin, who is Haitian-American. “They have the ability to learn how to swim, but many of them are not that great of a swimmer. … We want to bring them in and give them a chance to learn.”

Hmm, so the black police chief has to remove a swimming requirement so that black people can be cops, because, in his own words, “they don’t swim; very few of them swim.” But this guy in Louisiana says the same thing and gets called a racist.

This country needs to learn how to acknowledge differences without equating doing so to racism. Especially when the difference is clearly cultural and not racial.

This country needs to learn how to talk to itself like an adult. If we continue handling social tension like 4-year-olds we’re going to be facing major social upheaval in less than a decade.

All about doing spoiler tags in HTML…

Here’s an example; roll over it to see it…

The guy helping the hero through chapters 1-7 is the bad guy.

The Bruce Schneier Jokes

Bruce Schneier once faced Chuck Norris in a fight. Unfortunately, the shockwave instantly killed everyone within a ten mile radius, so nobody knows what happened.

Ever wonder what mail servers the top U.S. companies run? I found myself wondering what the top universities used a while back, and I just recently got curious as to what the Fortune 100 companies used as well. The results were quite interesting; it’s always fun to see what some of these admins put in their mail banners:

220 plgmler2.imr.gm.com ESMTP Sendmail GM Secure; Thu, 17 Aug 2006 23:23:21 -0500
220 mail11.disney.com Postfix EGGS and Butter 
220 IBM ESMTP SMTP Gateway: Authorized Use Only! Violators will be prosecuted
220 Medco - Ready 220 mailgate2.safeway.com ESMTP ***** SMTP Ready *****
220 mail1.cat.com ESMTP Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Service 5.5.2657.72) ready
220 Northrop Grumman Corporation Ready
220 mms01bas.mms.us.syntegra.com (IntraStore TurboSendmail) ESMTP Service ready
220 [12.43.78.22] ESMTP
220 wamu.com Proxy Server 220 fdsmail01.fds.com Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version:
5.0.2195.6713 ready at Fri, 18 Aug 2006 00:31:58 -0400

Quite a few of the banners warn anyone reading not to use the service for spam, although I have to wonder whether or not a spammer has ever changed their behavior due to a warning like this.

We also get to see some personality in the way the servers say goodbye (SMTP 221):

221 Bye
221 Until later [69.214.242.13]
221 Catch you later

Anyway, here are the complete results as well as the stuff I used to run the test:

Input

The Script The Company File

Output

The Complete Banners The Exit Messages

–

** Note: There’s a fine line between being curious about interesting service banners and portscanning. If you don’t know what that difference is then you probably shouldn’t be doing this at home. :)

For some reason I’m giving Internet Explorer another chance and making an effort to use IE7. They’re claiming “we heard you” as a tagline for the product, but I don’t think they did.

I just tried going to a couple of wallpaper sites as a test of the next generation of Microsoft’s browser. Guess what I was greeted with? A Windows dialogue box telling me that it’s “preparing to install”. Excellent. Any chance we can discuss what exactly you’re installing?

Then, of course, I’m taken to like 4 sites via popups that are doing god knows what to this VMWare session. I finally got tired of dealing with it and opened the URL in Firefox. Guess what? No popups, no software installations — just wallpaper. Interesting concept.

It appears that, just as with Vista, the IE project has had a lifetime to get where it needs to be but has utterly failed to do so. Why is this? I refuse to believe the programmers are inept; I’ve heard too much to the contrary. So the question remains: what’s making Microsoft so impotent? Why does IE continue to suck so horribly? Let’s see:

1. The interface is crap. It’s not consistent, it’s not intuitive, and it even looks lame.
2. Rumor is that they’ll continue to not support web standards.
3. I’m using a relatively late beta and still can’t safely navigate a goddam wallpaper site due to on-the-fly software installs. They could get away with this being “a feature” in 2000, but today it’s just inexcusable.

Seriously, why can’t these people get their act together? Is it management? No leadership? Resting on laurels? I’m really curious. It’s just a sad joke at this point.

Now with X-Windows.

I’ve just completely redone my write-up on infosec certs. Enjoy.

LINK: A Guide To Information Security Certifications

My favorite speed test site just got upgraded; now it’s got a really rich Flash interface. Excessive, to be sure, but it’s pretty nice.

Link: Speedtest.net

The other day I was in the middle of doing something very invasive at an organization during a penetration test and I was struck with a thought: “Why is this so easy?” The answer was immediately obvious:

It was easy because I knew I could go to the CSO if I got caught.

Were I to be there illegally, i.e. without permission from top management, I probably would have had a much harder time pulling off the acting. I think pentesters should keep this in mind when they get the urge to claim that social engineering is easy.