I just read an article about how some in Iran are getting around the issue of prostitution and sexual slavery being wrong. The solution? They’ve evidently made it so that men can go and get legitimate 1-hour “weddings” to girls as young as 9-years-0ld.

Not only are they doing this for just 1-hour at a time in traditional prositution style, but the marriages are available in varrying durations. So you can “marry” one of these girls for longer if you want, and then take them home and use them for a sex slave.

Awesome. Good thing an Islamic priest made this all legitimate — otherwise I would have thought it was wrong.

Article

The light part is where the trees have been completely cut down. To me this presents an interesting moral dilemma: are people allowed to rape the land that they inhabit, to the detriment of the world? In other words, are they allowed to keep the rest of the world from benefitting from something unique to the planet? And if not, what should be done?

I think Bush would advocate a bombing strategy. I think public scorn is a better idea — something along the lines of international pressure to presserve the resource.

If you’re into cars, driving fast, or just technology in general you’ve likely heard of the Valentine 1 radar detector. It’s widely accepted to be the premier radar detector on the market, and few people question this status.

I got to thinking about what makes it so great, though, and my conclusion was startling. Evidently, the entire reason the Valentine is supposed to be so good is because it can show you whether a cop is in front of you or behind you. The entire idea is to have the ability to respond differently based on where the radar is coming from. What?

Who in their right mind is going to respond differently based on the direction radar is coming from?

Seriously, what are the options here? You’re going down a road listening to some music and all of a sudden you get hit with radar from the front. What do you do? Yeah, slow down.

Ok, so now you’re on the same road and you get hit with radar from the rear. Now what? Is this the Dukes of Hazzard? Cannonball Run? You’re still going to slow down unless you participate in an alternate reality.

I fail to see how showing you the direction of the radar helps anything for someone not wanting to get tickets in the real world. The prospect of accelerating if you know a cop is behind you is just asinine in the extreme.

So sell me on better detection. Sell me on less false positives. But don’t put a big ugly arrow on the front and tell me that knowing where the radar is coming from matters. It doesn’t. If I’m speeding and I get hit by radar — I’m slowing down.

With Apple OS X’s surging popularity many are wondering how vulnerable Apple’s OS X operating system is relative to Windows. You essentially have two sides — one saying that it’s inherently more secure (and hence less successfully attacked), and the other side saying that it’s only because of marketshare that fewer issues have surfaced.

A Model

I think I have a model for explaining the interaction between these two theories. Essentially, OS X has issues just like FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, or any other OS does; the issues just haven’t surfaced yet because of the lack of interest in exploiting such a small user-base. Where people go wrong, however, is assuming that it’s going to get as bad as Windows has been. It won’t.

Conceptualize this as if there are two ratings — one is the potential for attack, and the second is the degree to which the potential has been actualized.

So let us say that Windows has a 100% potential with an 50% actualized. In other words it’s highly vulnerable and has been and is being exploited considerably within that potential. OS X, on the other hand, has a much lower potential — say in the 30% range — but it’s seen virtually no exposure due to the lack of interest from attackers (due to limited marketshare). I’d say it’s actualized rating is around 5%.

The Future

What this means is that over the next year or so you’re going to see a massive increase in the flaws found in OS X due to the exponential increase in its popularity. Notice that using my model and numbers this means that OS X has 25% of its vulnerability potential untapped, whereas Windows (XP, 2003 Server, Vista, Longhorn Server, etc) has a full 50%.

The key here is that we’ve seen 50 points of vulnerability and exploitation activity come from the Windows side, while we’ve only seen 5 points from OS X. But as OS X becomes increasingly popular it’s numbers are going to spike radically.

Notice that OS X’s numbers can triple and even quadruple and still remain within its vulnerability potential. To the public this will seem to indicate it’s just as vulnerable as Windows, but in reality it will simply indicate how few OS X flaws have been previously discovered.

So, all the Mac zealots who think their platform is invulnerable are in for a violent awakening. But at the same time, the loyal Windows disciples are equally wrong if they think OS X is going to end up in as bad of shape as 2000, XP, or even Vista.:

Everyone’s seen the cool little icons/buttons for Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us shown under various articles online. They make it easy for users to submit to their favorite social site by automatically filling in the title of your page. I also think they subconsciously add legitimacy to a web presence. In short, they’re just great to have.

A number of plugins can be installed in your blogging software to enable this functionality, but what happens if you want to use these little jems on your own static content? I wondered the same thing and made my own.

Here’s the code (click the image):

Just edit the code to point to your own copies of the images and you’re good to go. Now you can have them on whatever content you create — even if it’s not part of your blog software.:

I’ve just created a local copy of the DMZ article I did for NewOrder back in 2003. It’s actually pretty funny to hear my writing voice from that time. I remember when Ken first told me about the concept of a DMZ; we were at our favorite Korean restaurant shortly after his trip from Utah. Good times.

Network Security: Building Yourself A DMZ

I’ve been a Wordpress user for a few years now but I’ve been quietly watching Drupal ever since Ken mentioned it to me many months ago. They just hit version 5 and I’m about to start looking at the solution very seriously. If you guys have any input I’d really appreciate your opinions.

I’m a bit obsessed with mastering vim. I kind of feel like I’m killing kittens every time I do something inefficiently. I know plenty of commands, but you don’t truly know a command (like in the Biblical sense) until you find yourself using it without thinking. I am on a continuous mission to raise the number of commands that I know in this way. This post is my latest attempt to lock in some good ones.

I compiled this list from a wide range of other collections online, including my own tutorial, contributions from friends, and this article, which is currently my favorite stand-alone introduction to vim.

1. View/edit two files at once.

   :vsplit foo.txt

   

   You can then switch between the windows with ctrl-ww.

2. Run an external command and capture the output.:r ! date
3. Repeat your last command by typing “.” (a period).

   So elegant.

4. Auto-complete text using ctrl-n.

   If the text is elsewhere in your document, vim will know and try and complete it for you.

5. Hide blocks of text by “folding”.

   Highlight the area you want to fold (using v or V) and press zf. Think “f” for fold. To “open” it, press zo.

   

6. Quickly switch between Unix and Windows file formats.

   Type :set filetype=Unix or :set filteype=dos respectively.

7. More easily edit code by enabling syntax highlighting.

   Create a file called ~/.vimrc and put syntax on in it.

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