Day: March 18, 2016

March 18, 2016

Stream of Consciousness, 3/18/16

It’s no small concern of mine that nobody is asking me for a house-buying license during the process of trying to find a home in Santa Fe. At what point was I mentally capable of processing the reality of a 30-year mortgage? When was the class on repairing the myriad items and components that make up a domicile? I missed it. I missed a lot of classes, though. That’s not a big surprise.

That we collectively decided that agreeing to terms of payment on the next 30 years of life is odd. If you’re in a position where you need a mortgage, you’re also not in a position to guarantee that things will be just as good 30 years down the road, really. Hell, getting into state government is one of the safest possible choices in that regard, once you’re in and off your probationary period getting fired is a battle. Things could happen, though.

We’re looking at two more houses tomorrow, we’ve had an offer in on a different one for over two months now, but they weren’t lying when they said it was a “short sale opportunity for the patient buyer.” One is more “homey” and with a great location, a ten-minute bike ride to work if that. The other looks ridiculously nice, like in the realm of “What the hell? I get to live here?” kind of nice. So it appears in the pictures, anyway. Maybe it’s actually a small house photographed by a smaller human, or an iguana.

I was a little bit bothered a few days ago when someone mentioned that they were diagnosed bipolar and one of the markers was having days where they just stay inside and hide from the world, for lack of a better description. That was me not terribly long … (More) “Stream of Consciousness, 3/18/16”

Nerd Stuff

March 18, 2016

Ransomware is the future.

(crossposted from bluesoul.me)

When I first started fighting ransomware in late 2013, I had a premonition that this was something serious. WhileÂ CryptoLocker was rather easily defeated in the enterprise and ultimately killed by killing the botnet, media outlets and tech sites ran with the story. It showed this small group making millions and millions of dollars. Guess what? More people started writing ransomware.

Cut to now. Ransomware-as-a-service is a real thing you can buy, some variants have live chatÂ support to receive payment, and we routinely see new versions with bugfixes and feature-adds. One of the last major flaws in ransomware, the inability to enumerate non-mapped network shares, was overcome in the latest Locky build that calls WNetOpenEnum() to attempt to traverse every share on the network.

For several years, the endgame was more abstract. Hit the PC with your rootkit, join it to your botnet, sell botnet access to spammers for a fee. Now they can cut out the middle man and have less overhead, since there’s not a need for constant command-control oversight. It’s a path to riches hampered only by the still-high knowledge barrier to acquire and send bitcoin. And by affecting the user’s files, rather than a popup about the FBI or TotesLegit AntiVirus which can simply be fixed by backing up the data and nuking the PC, you’ve got them at your mercy.

This is going to get worse way before it gets better. You’ll see builds that try to invoke APIs for popular cloud storage providers to delete the versioning. They’ll find ways to avoid taking ownership of a file to quickly spot the vector of infection. While it’s almost impossible to be truly proactive to effectively block ransomware, there are things that can be done.

Avoid mapping your drives and hide your

… (More)

Life

March 18, 2016

I’m afraid it’s Exploding Head Syndrome.

I feel like there should be a better barometer for being an adult than completing unwanted medical appointments. Somewhere towards the top of my list of fears is needles, and I’ve been staring down this appointment for weeks, knowing that it involved an IV whereby they supplement my blood with some bullshit that is most definitely not blood. I completed the appointment yesterday and the whole drive home I was doing these sighs of relief like I had just spent 20 minutes outrunning a hungry bear.

I bought a Fitbit Surge a couple of months ago, and it’s pretty entertaining watching my own heart rate skyrocket when anxiety kicks in. With good breathing exercises, I can get my heart rate down to about 60-62. Normally it’s around 97-100. Five minutes prior to the appointment it was 135.

What was going on was a CT scan to try and figure out what the problem is in my lower abdomen. My digestive health in general has been lousy for two or three years. I had a bit of a breakthrough a bit less than a year ago when Diana and I figured out that I’m lactose intolerant. So I’ve solved one mystery, but I’m still living with more-or-less constant pain and spasming of my lower left abdomen, a section of the colon that is particularly vulnerable to chronic problems like diverticulitis, divertculosis, and IBS. The smart money is on the latter.

We seem to do a pretty bad job of conveying the severity of an ailment with its name. Shingles are a construction thing, not a nerve-damaging rash that will affect you for the rest of your life. (The iodine injection yesterday very nearly triggered a flare-up right on the table.) Lactose intolerance sounds like you’re a milk-racist. Fuck your “ebony and … (More) “I’m afraid it’s Exploding Head Syndrome.”