Country roads, take me home /
To the place I belong...
Friday, August 31, 2007
Will I ever finish?
Am overwhelmed, at the amount of work still left to be done in writing up my dissertation. And frustrated, at having been able to have the end in sight, for the past few months, but somehow just.not.being.able.to.get.any.closer to it.
*sigh*
Trying not to think about it, and just put my head down and grind away at it, one small step at a time.
*sigh*
Trying not to think about it, and just put my head down and grind away at it, one small step at a time.
National insecurity: moronic passwords
Just read about Dan Egerstad's posting of the login/password information for the e-mail accounts of a 100 different embassies and govt. offices around the world, on his "DEranged Security" blog. Holy effin' crap. Check it out. It'll pop your eyes.
DEranged Security
The blog-post itself
Slashdot's page on it.
Some of the passwords are just too funny: "temp", "123456" (Spaceballs, anyone?), "1234", "password+1", "india01", "Password",<name of the city or country that the embassy is in>... And some of the worst ones are those of the Indians. ::rolls eyes:: Fucking hilarious.
Surprisingly, there's nothing on CNN or BBC about it yet. The Indian Express and Ars Technica have it, though.
Hmmm... like "Anonymous Coward" says on /. :
This, after Egerstad himself explicitly said:
Ha!
DEranged Security
The blog-post itself
Slashdot's page on it.
Some of the passwords are just too funny: "temp", "123456" (Spaceballs, anyone?), "1234", "password+1", "india01", "Password",
Surprisingly, there's nothing on CNN or BBC about it yet. The Indian Express and Ars Technica have it, though.
Hmmm... like "Anonymous Coward" says on /. :
Looks like the [Indian Express] took due dilligence a bit too far...
From the article:
"The email account of the Indian Ambassador to China contained details of a visit by Rajya Sabha member Arjun Sengupta to Beijing earlier this month for an ILO conference. There was also a transcript of a meeting this evening which a senior Indian official had with the Chinese Foreign Minister. Similarly, accounts of NDA and DRDO officials reveal phone numbers, commercial documents, official correspondence and personal mails."
This is probably very illegal, even if the information has been posted for all to see, actually using this info to access someone else's account should be a no-no.
This, after Egerstad himself explicitly said:
"I would like to remind everyone that using ANY of this is a serious crime and I trust that nothing here will be used, ever! If you do anyway you are a fucker, idiot, moron, lamer, scriptkiddie, criminal and obviously don’t get the point of this publishing."
Ha!
(See below)
I've become addicted to footnotes --- yet another fallout of thesis-writing.
Item #16 on the "You might be a grad student if..." list, from the Facebook group, "Grad Students: they're Not Bad People, they Just Made Terrible Life Choices":
See the second entry in this blog, for example. :P
Item #16 on the "You might be a grad student if..." list, from the Facebook group, "Grad Students: they're Not Bad People, they Just Made Terrible Life Choices":
...you get irresistible urges to use in-text citations in casual e-mails.
See the second entry in this blog, for example. :P
Just me and the road. And all my neighbours.
Went for a run yesterday. I think it's been about a week or so since I last ran. Did my usual 3-mile circuit, and matched my previous best time of 26 minutes flat --- so last week's achievement (shaving a full minute off my then-previous best of 27 minutes) was no fluke. *Excellent*!
Stopped and chatted with --- or waved out to --- almost every neighbour on my street during my cool-off walk-around. (One lady yarned on for a good 10 minutes about her ex-father-in-law, who was Greek and climbed mountains and worked till he was more than a hundred and died at a hundred and twenty-two, or thereabouts.) They've all become a lot friendlier of late. Probably gotten used to seeing me around, after my having been here for the past three years. It's a nice feeling. It's a shame I'll quite probably be moving away soon.
Stopped and chatted with --- or waved out to --- almost every neighbour on my street during my cool-off walk-around. (One lady yarned on for a good 10 minutes about her ex-father-in-law, who was Greek and climbed mountains and worked till he was more than a hundred and died at a hundred and twenty-two, or thereabouts.) They've all become a lot friendlier of late. Probably gotten used to seeing me around, after my having been here for the past three years. It's a nice feeling. It's a shame I'll quite probably be moving away soon.
The Case for Christianity
Started reading C. S. Lewis' The Case for Christianity last night [1]. Got through the first two chapters, but I'm carrying the book around with me now, to read whenever I have down-time. Love the way that guy writes.
[1] As part of my continuing quest to find out if Christianity/Catholicism makes sense, not just as a way of living, but as a representation of the nature of God. To find peace in my soul, really.
[1] As part of my continuing quest to find out if Christianity/Catholicism makes sense, not just as a way of living, but as a representation of the nature of God. To find peace in my soul, really.
Dear diary, today I ....
I started a blog a couple of months ago --- my first ever --- and it went through a few initial existentialist birth-pangs while I tried to figure out what exactly I meant to do with it. (And then abandoned it completely for about a month while I focused on little else but my dissertation.)
I've arrived at a solution: spawned a new blog, this one, meant specifically for the inane, mundane, stream-of-consciousness -type diary entries. That other one will remain devoted to the more philosophical, inspirational, things-that-make-you-go-hmmm, which is what I had originally intended it to be. You can check it --- and my very first blog entries --- out here.
I suppose I could've maintained a single blog, and simply tagged the "inspirational" posts as such, but, for the purpose of keeping the two sets of content distinct/separate, this seemed the easier solution. Maybe some day I'll merge them. *shrug* Let's see.
I've arrived at a solution: spawned a new blog, this one, meant specifically for the inane, mundane, stream-of-consciousness -type diary entries. That other one will remain devoted to the more philosophical, inspirational, things-that-make-you-go-hmmm, which is what I had originally intended it to be. You can check it --- and my very first blog entries --- out here.
I suppose I could've maintained a single blog, and simply tagged the "inspirational" posts as such, but, for the purpose of keeping the two sets of content distinct/separate, this seemed the easier solution. Maybe some day I'll merge them. *shrug* Let's see.
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