2010 April » Dreams of Arcadia

Ellis Island

Apr 282010

Imagine a cold September morning. You are standing on the deck of a large ship, along with a few hundred fellow passengers. The air around you is grey with an early morning light, threaded with a mist fine and mysterious that dusts your lips with a hint of salt from tiny, sweat like, beads of moisture. There is a mix of passengers on deck, hands in pockets, stamping their feet to chase away the cold. Each class of passengers is evidenced by the clothes they wear and, on a more subtle level, their tiers of residency on the ship. From the upper decks come the upper class, wearing the fashions of the day as if they were born in them. They mill about the deck in overcoats over tweed suits and satin dresses with polished leather pumps. From the middle decks come the middle class, businessmen mostly, with pudgy wives on their arms cautiously making eye contact with the third group, as if both curious and horrified to be in such close proximity. The crowds from steerage are recognizable for the shapeless similarity of the weatherbeaten clothing they wear in layers comprised of everything they own. Perhaps you are one of these, mingled here in the fog, feeling the cold in your bones and the thrum of the ship’s engines through the rusty steel plating beneath your feet.

You are all here because the crewmen have told you that this will be your last day on ship, for the shores of your destination will become visible sometime shortly after daylight. You have all picked yourselves from your beds, cots, or bundles, and made you way to the decks as if answering a siren’s call to fate. You are waiting for something, something that you could only dream about in vague images, pieces of tales told by others in letters long faded, but etched into your memory as if carved into the flesh of your soul. You have come to the deck to wait for the first glimpse of your future – apprehensive, fearful, but above all filled with a surging sense of hope that at last your future will be revealed in all its glory. Continue reading »

Education IS Important

Political Stuff Comments Off

Apr 272010

Student to Professor: “Do I really need to know all this?”

Professor to Student: ”Nope. The world will always need fry cooks.”

So we’re in the middle of an economic downturn, and everyone’s thoughts have turned to belt tightening and cutting back on spending. On a personal level, most Americans have begun taking long, hard looks at their lifestyle and finally asking themselves if maybe they might have been living just a tad above their means. Those that took the gamble of trying to live a life entirely based on credit have had the hard lesson of foreclosure and debt collection forced upon them by the very banks that promised an endless and steady supply of that very same credit. The government is, of course, bearing its fair share of blame, first for not controlling the willful excesses of Wall Street, then for apparently rewarding the bad behavior with bailouts of the most egregious offenders. Thanks to the collapse, tax revenues have fallen on both the national and local levels, and with deficits looming, talk has once again turned to bringing the traditional sacrificial lambs back to the chopping block.

It happens every time we face a budget crunch, but this time one of the cuts being bandied about by politicians secure in the comfort of leather lined offices and lifetime guranteed pensions at taxpayer expense, is one set of cuts that needs to be ignored: education. Continue reading »

Of Popes and Politicians

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Apr 132010

“Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.” – Matthew 25-45

[Author's Note: I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, complete with its stereotypical Irish priests and starchy nuns all too fond of rapping the knuckles with the metal edges of a 12 inch ruler. I attended catechism faithfully, if somewhat unwillingly, until my late teens, and during that whole time I believed in what I was being told. It wasn't until much later that I came to question the teachings of the Church, in particular its stances on abortion and birth control, and began having serious doubts about its sense of direction. While I was never the victim of molestation myself, I am deeply aggrieved for the victims of priestly abuse and their families. This essay was spawned from a sense of shame and the nagging feeling that maybe, just maybe, there was something I could have done, or might yet be able to do.]

The recent revelations that Pope Benedict XVI may have been personally aware of the presence of an active child molester, and did nothing about it, have prompted a firestorm of debate about the actual piety of his leadership. To many Catholics, the revelations have come as a serious blow to their faith, prompting questions of whether or not the Church has placed the needs of the institution over the needs of its flock. While the Church has a long and colorful history straddling the line between the religious and secular, many now feel that the balance may have tipped too far toward the secular, or the political. To many, the pope’s stance was eerily similar to recent utterances from government officials relating to the recent bank bailouts, which offered the questionable justification that what was “good for the economy” is apparently “good for all”. Neither position was received very warmly by the general populace, and both were greeted with a chorus of questions dominated by the recurrent theme of “How could you have let things get to this point?” Perhaps it’s time for the Church to change. Continue reading »

The Decline and Fall of the Adobe PDF

Geek Stuff Comments Off

Apr 062010

If you haven’t already heard yet, there’s another security vulnerability in the Adobe’s widely used portable document format (PDF). What’s different this time around is that the security hole affects not only a single vendor’s product (still looking at you, Adobe), but many alternate products that utilize the PDF specification itself. Take a look at the two links below to see how one newly discovered vulnerability has morphed into something far more dangerous:

Initial Report: http://blog.didierstevens.com/2010/03/29/escape-from-pdf/

Today’s Update: http://siemblog.com/2010/04/implications-of-recent-pdf-launch-hacks/

For those disinclined to wade through the technical discussion, they essentially state that it is now possible for an attacker to modify a PDF file, any PDF file, in such a way as to embed executable code that will run upon opening a document. User’s receiving and opening such a file a user will still be presented with a prompt requesting permission to launch the code, something an intelligent and informed user should recognize as an immediate red flag, but, as the examples in the above links illustrate, an attacker can modify part of the language of the prompt to be something as apparently benign as “Click OK to view this PDF”. As most uninformed users will blow past such prompts without so much as a second’s pause to consider the actual content, the probability of a successful exploit is high. If such a user allows the code to execute, it can do pretty much whatever an attacker wishes it to do: Erase files, launch malware installers, or, as the second link explains, infect every other PDF on the system by applying an incremental update that allows new executable code to be injected into previously saved, and previously clean, PDF files. It’s the “I Love You” virus all over again. Continue reading »