Port 80

Following that unexpected and entirely-too-long work-enforced hiatus, I’m going to provide a quick and highly compressed (UNIX users are now free to groan at the title) summary of the month of April before I launch back into blogging again. So, in bullet form, what happened during the last month of radio silence:

• The fallout from the Malkinlanch reached a peak when Athena of Terrorism Unveiled added Port 80 to her blogroll. I have been remiss in failing to thank her for that, and am particularly flattered that I stayed on her blogroll over the last month of dead silence. (Of course, I might have simply stayed on Athena’s blogroll becuase she was swamped with the Mother of All Exam Weeks.)

• Thanks to an e-mail tip from Thaleia, I entered the Organic Shadows Weblog Content Contest. Surprisingly enough, Port 80 ended up taking first place in the “General” catagory.

  One of the interesting things about this contest is the sheer diversity of the participants - no two entrants cover anything close to the same material. If you’re used to reading one or two blogs, I’d invite you to peruse the contestants. Glenn Reynolds isn’t the whole blogosphere - he’s merely skimming the cream which has risen to the top of thousands of blogs covering thousands of different topics.

• Finally, if you’re not reading The Hatemonger’s Quarterly, you should be. The Second Annual Horrible College Student Poetry Contest is a good starting point, ridiculing bad poetry with all the acerbic flair of a really good English teacher.

And, with that recap out of the way, it’s time to get right back into full-scale weblogging. Enough of this self-referential twaddle — on to the ludicrously long essays you came here for.

… and I’m all out of bubble gum. — They Live

This week, the administrators at Blogsome decided to make Port 80 one of their first sites of the week. I’m immensely flattered by the guesture, and thought that I’d write a quick post to introduce people to Port 80.

The rash of political posts I’ve been on recently is a little unusual, and I doubt that I’ll stay on them much longer. Most of the time, I end up writing exceedingly long essays that somehow blend technology, security, global politics, and religion into some sort of twisted synthesis. If you’re new here, here’s a few of the better pieces (in my opinion) I’ve written over the years:

• The Future of the Internet: An essay on what the advent of counterstrike security systems will mean for the shape of the internet in the years to come.
• L’etat, c’est Google: A discussion of the prevelence of Google and the security implications of “trust” in information collection and decision making.
• Courage in the Face of Evil: A reflection on Yasser Arafat’s funeral, the thermodynamics of survival in cold weather, the rise of the Third Reich, and how all of these connect to current problems within the Catholic church. Thanks to the contributions of “serti,” I’d recommend this one for the comments section alone.

Enjoy your visit - I hope you find some of what you read here interesting. And, as always, feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line.

I’ve had a little time free, and have finished up a new design for the site. This is a task that I’ve meant to do for some time, and the move to a new server finally gave me the impetus to finish the project. Although I have some minor tweaks planned, the overall layout of the page is finished. Do you love it? Do you hate it? Have you found any glaring bugs? I’m open to suggestions.

I’ve now begun the process of migrating from my NeoPages Blosxom installation to a new WordPress site here at Blogsome. All of my old posts should be appearing here over the next few days - however, since I have to import them manually, the process will not be instantaneous.

As soon as I get this site reasonably complete, my old site will be redirected to this location. The administrator at NeoPages will be deleting the old site on December 18th.

Thank you all for your patience with these changes!

Update: All of the posts are across which I’m bringing across. The rest of the site will be coming shortly.

I had planned to spend my free time this upcoming weekend writing follow-ups to several of the posts I had put up recently. Instead, if I’m lucky, I’m going to be moving Port 80 from its current home at NeoPages to a new server.

The reason, ladies and gentlemen, is the work of those fine gentlemen at the “Q8Cracker Crew” (That’s Kuwait Cracker Crew, for those less experienced in deciphering hacker lingo) who, over the past few days, cracked the NeoPages web server and defaced dozens of the sites hosted here. No real damage was done to the server - most of the websites were quickly repaired.

However, the same is not true for our benevolent overlord and system administrator, Roy, who has finally had enough. As a result, the free hosting he has offered here will be ending no later than December 11th. Many thanks to him for all he has provided to date.

The upshot of this is threefold:

• I am on the hunt for a new host. I’ve got a few possibilities in mind, and I’ll post a URL here when I know where I’m ending up.

• I have a new personal policy on the philosophy of “hactivism.” Whenever someone attempts to explain to me exactly how web site defacement is a valid act of political speech, I will render him unconscious with a sharp blow to the head, and write a political slogan on his face with a felt-tip marker. When he comes to, I will proceed to explain to him how this temporary, largely harmless, defacement was a valid expression of my political beliefs.

• My policy towards those I meet who are self-styled “h4x0rs” is much the same as the above, but with less emphasis on felt-tip markers and more emphasis on sharp blows to the head. I’ve always thought crackers were basically a motley collection of antisocial teen vandals and organized crime syndicates, but that was purely an academic evaluation. Now, it’s personal.

  Furthermore, given the nature of their defacements, the fine gentlemen of Q8Crackers appear also to be hard-line Islamists, making them members of another group of people I just adore. (To top it off, these “hackers” write their HTML with FrontPage.)

I’m signing off for now, hopefully to return shortly. Check back before December 11th for a new URL.

Don’t you just hate them? Don’t you just wanna break their ribs, cut their backs open and pull their lungs out from behind? — Ina Faye-Lund, on script kiddies

Stephen den Beste once wrote that webloggers can be divided into two catagories: Linkers and thinkers. The former tend to find articles written by others and bring them to the attention of a larger audience. The latter tend to write longer posts, which focus mostly on generating original content or analysis.

Most of the time, I work in a “thinking” mode at this weblog. (Or, if that seems too strong a term for what I do here, a “poorly-directed rambling” mode.) In rare instances, I may write a post that does little more than provide a link to another website, and which contains no more than two or three paragraphs of commentary.

Part of this is due to my weblogging system, which requires a fair bit of work to add a new post. (This is deliberate - I like being forced to think over what I’m writing.) As a result, I tend towards infrequent, longer posts - shorter posts just aren’t worth my effort. However, this occasionally miffs me when I discover a particularly interesting piece elsewhere which isn’t enough to justify a full post to the weblog, but which I wish to share nonetheless.

That’s why I’m exited about del.icio.us. del.icio.us bills itself as a “social bookmark manage” - a site that allows users to share links they run across on the web, and which allows other users find your surfing interesting to keep track of what you’re adding to your bookmarks. I’m starting to use it as a very low-end “linking” blog, and will be posting odd articles I find about the web there. If you’re inclined to do the same, leave a comment - I’m interested to see what my readers are reading. (Yes, all two of you. Hi, Mom.)

Of course, del.icio.us has all of those essential features like RSS feeds, customizable preferences, an XML API, third-party clients - the list goes on and on, but why bother? I mean, for heaven’s sake, the site has “Social” in the name. It’s social networking! The next killer app! Why, start using this, and the next thing you know, you’ll be sipping chai in Starbucks and editing Wikipedia articles on Winer numbers through your smartphone which is hooked up to your WiFi laptop via Bluetooth. Really, hardwired broadband connections are so 1999.

It’s housekeeping time at Port 80: My last few posts need a few updates, and I’m going to take care of them all at once.

The War on Terrorism: “Surprise, Surprise, Surprise”

In “Surprise, Surprise, Surprise,” I promised to discuss why I felt that Jihadist terrorists could not be appeased or negotiated with. As I worked on this post, it began to involve into a general discussion of causes and roots of the War on Terror. However, this is a subject that many others in the blogosphere have already covered excellently. Thus, rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ve chosen to present a small selection of essays which I think best explain the current global situation.

I would start with “Out of Context” by Anticipatory Retaliation, which does a brilliant job of explaining the difference between what has been termed “September 10th thinking” and “September 12th thinking.” If you cannot comprehend the reasoning of those who prattle on and on about the War on Terror (or if you cannot comprehend the reasoning of those who don’t), this post is vital reading.

The quickest summary of the current situation and what must be done to deal with it is provided by Eric S. Raymond in his short “Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto.” On the other end of the brevity spectrum, there is Stephen den Beste’s “Strategic Overview.” While I don’t totally agree with all of den Beste’s arguments (notably as to the exact root cause of the current war), his work makes for a fascinating and thought-provoking read.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I did not mention “Three Conjectures” by Wretchard of the Belmont Club, who explores just how ugly the War on Terrorism could get. den Beste’s follow-up essay is also worth reading. However, don’t start on either of these if you plan on sleeping anytime soon.

Computer Security: “The Future of the Internet”

“The Future of the Internet” is the single post on this website that has gotten the most interesting responses. I’ve gotten e-mails from individuals in the computer security industry about the work, and have seen links to it reposted to other forums on the web. (I’ve also seen one individual try to repost the entire text - but trying to fit a 4000 word essay into a text box on a web page proved to be a bit too much.)

Now, however, the print media have picked up the article. The July 12th issue of New Scientist magazine briefly quoted the post in an article (”Vigilantes on the net,” by Barbara Moran) discussing the impact of counterstrike systems on computer security:

As web pundit Zachary Heaton of Dayton, Ohio, wrote online earlier this month, “Internet users everywhere are in for a wild ride.”

If you’re interested, the full article is available through the New Scientist archives, which you can get a guest pass for from the New Scientist website. (The exact issue is Volume 182, Issue 2451.) The focus of the article is far more on the short-range effects of counterstrike systems than the long-range effects I focused on, but it’s a worthwhile read.

While I don’t know about the claims of some that weblogs are “the new media,” it’s nice to see the “old media” taking notice of them. How else does an unknown self-published essayist get quoted in the same article as the network administrator of MIT, the head of the FBI’s Criminal Computer Intrusion unit, and miscellaneous other notable security experts, computer scientists, and attorneys?

Since I have moved from NeoPages to Blogsome, the NeoPages links in this post will no longer work.

Thanks to the extreme generosity of Roy and the entire community at Neopages, this site will soon be moving to a new location: port80.neominds.net. There’s nothing there now, I’m afraid, but I hope to move the site within the next few weeks. Until then, Port 80 will still live right here, but I intend to move as soon as possible. (It’s not a straight copy-and-paste operation — since I now have access to CGI scripts, I am taking this opportunity to upgrade the backend of the site. Among other things, I hope to add better archives and a combined comment and Trackback system.)