Month: March 2016

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. While 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 chat 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) “Ransomware is the future.”
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.”

Gaming
March 15, 2016

New-U? No U.

So I finished up my first playthrough of Borderlands 2 yesterday, after about 3 weekend sessions. I have a few thoughts, and some of them are spoilers, so if you haven’t already been spoiled on a 3-year-old game, uh, watch out.

  • The Gunzerker is a ridiculously fun class. You get to play at any range, and while there are bonuses available to pistols, you’re not locked into them by any stretch. The bullet regeneration makes it feel like a whole new game, in a great example of addition by subtraction. By removing the concern of running out of ammo, it relieves a fairly pervasive stress that permeates the whole game, particularly after about the halfway point, where they throw numbers at you and start increasing quantity as well as quality of foe.
  • Mal in Eridium Blight gave me a pistol called the Fibber. There are a lot of variants of this gun, as is the Borderlands way. I got a hell of a variant, though. It’s a pistol, but it shoots a very slow moving blast of pellets like a shotgun. In my case, they’re also slag rounds, and the damage output is in the area of 8-10k per round at a time where SMGs are doing 200-400 damage a round, and shotguns are doing maybe 3k. Point-blank, this thing was absolutely lethal. It took care of the Jack fight, which I could tell would be a hell of a fight if you came in underpowered, in well under a minute. For that matter, it took care of every boss fight from the moment I got it onwards pretty much by itself, or gunzerking with another slow projectile weapon, just making a wall of sluggy slaggy death.
  • I have some gripes with the use of death as a plot device
… (More) “New-U? No U.”
Life
March 14, 2016

Sunrise Deferred

This is a year where I’ve been looking forward to Daylight Saving Time very much. With the job requiring about a 90-minute commute each way to work, in winter that meant I was going to work before the sun came up, and didn’t get out until the sun was down. So today, I know there’ll be plenty of sunlight when I get home, nearly another hour. But I neglected to think of what it would do to the mornings, which is essentially reset it to how it looked in November when I started this job.

There’s that part of me that always likes to tease out a deeper meaning to the mundane, that this would feel like a reset of my time at this job. That part of me is kind of a silly pseudointellectual asshole. The fact is, even if it was a reset, the last four months have been great, and were I to start again with the familiarity with the people and the experience with the infrastructure that I’ve accumulated, I’d crush it.

I’m in my probationary period with the state until this coming November, right around Thanksgiving. Last year it was pretty slick, getting to start with a three-day week and having all those holidays, and the relaxed atmosphere of the place. If you ever get a chance to accept a life-changing job offer, I highly recommend doing it around Thanksgiving.

I had a bout of…something, on Saturday. It felt an awful lot like depression, with a side-order of spring allergies. I know there doesn’t have to be something immediately wrong to trigger depression, and it has taken a long time to not blame myself for it. I felt fine again yesterday. Diana writes through her problems in a private diary. I write through them on … (More) “Sunrise Deferred”

Gaming
March 11, 2016

I’m probably bad at StarCraft, too.

So I saw the post yesterday on reddit on how Google’s AlphaGo AI beat a world-class Go player for the second consecutive time. This is a big deal given that Go has a rather intractable nature, it’s as much felt as analyzed at the top level. It also reminded me that I tried to learn Go like a year ago.

While I understand the rules, the aim of the game, and more or less how to score it, I’m missing something rather important, which is understanding the context of why I would want to, or not want to, make a particular move. How to defend myself, how to spot an attack before it gets out of hand. I’m so bad at this part of it.

For reference, the ranking system in Go starts with 30 Kyu at the bottom of the tier, it counts down as you get better, to 1 Kyu, then there’s 1 Dan, and it starts counting up. So 30 is the bottom, to be clear.

According to this Go AI, I am 32 Kyu. That’s like, bizarro world bad. I’m that goddamn bad. The game is spotting me 4 turns, and I still blow it most of the time. I was twice given four black stones at the start of the game and lost by 89.5 and 88.5 points. To compare, it would be like if you were playing basketball, and you were given 40 points at the start of the game, then lost 129-40.

I am 8-23 with an average play of 32.1 Kyu. I mean, it’s better than the Sixers. But it would be like if the Sixers were still this bad against, like, an elementary school. I don’t actually know at what age the average Go player was this bad. Five? Probably.

What … (More) “I’m probably bad at StarCraft, too.”

Nerd Stuff
March 10, 2016

Wheneverly

As I alluded to in my last entry, I tend to become fairly worthless if I miss self-imposed deadlines, even when they’re for things that really never needed to be on a deadline. Sometimes I can get around it by using the concept of “updated wheneverly.” On the bright side, I function pretty well in that setup. A significant problem, though, is that I end up with a lot of projects, all updated wheneverly.

In no particular order, here’s some of them:

Funcrusherpl.us – I overreached on this one initially and kind of got stung by a shitload of work. I got some good encouragement to get back into this by Ander Other, and it’s kind of fun to follow along with the release cycle.

bluesoul.me – Hey, I just launched this one! IT articles posted wheneverly. Sometimes the inspiration hits at work and off you go.

imissgrantland.com – This is one of the smoother launches I’ve ever had. Totally automated service that lots of people are enjoying. Those are ideal for me, people keep enjoying it and I don’t have to do a damn thing. Damn shame that Kimono is gone.

iskbook.com – This did technically work, but it needed a little more automation, and more sports offered. This was, for the uninitiated, a sports betting site playable only with the in-game currency of EVE Online. A related site that I wanted to get going, papersportsbook.com, is a betting site where you bet play money and see how well you do.

ogregamelabs.com – Great idea at the time. Unfortunately it takes way more free time than I actually have to do it in the way I envisioned.

statsonstats.net – This one is going hand-in-hand with a deeper education in statistics, as they can be applied to the NBA. The … (More) “Wheneverly”

Life
March 9, 2016

Vivisection: Deconstructing The Monster

There have been a number of times in my life where I’ve felt totally at the mercy of my various neuroses. Growing up it was being antisocial, to the point where I would avoid answering a direct question, stoic in the awkward silence, because they would “win” if I talked. I don’t understand the logic behind it now, I’m just able to explain what I was thinking then. I’ve been able to deconstruct a good number of those things over time, and once understood, I could stop following those absurd orders from some particular lump of brain-meat that probably took one too many thumps.

There are a few that still bug me, still won’t go away. Some are relatively harmless…self, why the fuck haven’t you figured out good posture yet? You’re 5-foot-fuck-two. You need every bit of that standing up straight just to get on the rollercoaster. But I don’t, unless I’m thinking about it, which gives me about twenty seconds of good posture. Damn fine posture.

But there’s two big ones I don’t seem to have made any progress on; one is life-threatening and one is merely way-of-life-threatening. They’re so similar that they’re probably driven by the same thing. I’ve mentioned before that I’m not comfortable with medicating a mental illness, I feel like that field of science is still very rough around the edges. See the number of drugs that list suicidal thoughts as a side-effect. I do have good health insurance now, where I could just talk to someone qualified, but I have this great idea that if I consult with my fucked-up self on the matter, I’m going to fix things about my fucked-up self. That sounds more defeatist than I really feel, but it is a useful reduction for me.

The less obviously dangerous problem, … (More) “Vivisection: Deconstructing The Monster”

Gaming
March 7, 2016

Unwinding on Pandora

For about a month now, I’ve been telling myself that I want to pick up a new free-to-play MMO. I knew most of the usual suspects, and that they wouldn’t really do what I wanted. I did download the fan-service MMO known as TERA, and I was showing Diana each of the characters and classes you could be while laughing my ass off. She, however, was the most pissed I’ve ever seen her about a video game.

I had another abortive search yesterday, not ready to go into the clunky mess that is EQ1. Landmark is dead, never having made it out of Early Access. I was getting a bit irritated, honestly. So I decided to deconstruct what it was that I was after. Interesting combat, not too grindy, good progression, lots of loot.

Probably just as important, I had to consider what I didn’t actually want from an MMO. I can’t play anything that needs a daily, or even weekly, commitment. Simply not enough hours in the day right now. I’m not actually doing this for the social aspect. Or, more precisely, I’d rather be social when I feel like it, and solo the rest of the time.

It turns out, the game I was looking for was Borderlands 2.

It really does scratch the particular itch I had. For being one of the go-to examples of the “loot grind,” there’s actually pretty much no grinding required, you can outpace the main story just by doing the side quests in a timely manner. It’s got nearly unlimited replayability, with lots of New Game Plus options. Multiplayer is opt-in for drop-in play. And it’s ready for me whenever I get back to it. It’s not free, but I’ve had it for ages and it never really stuck before. This … (More) “Unwinding on Pandora”

Blogging Life
March 2, 2016

This parrot is dumb and your recipe is disgusting. How are you?

It took a little over ten years of encroachment, little by little. I don’t even recall when exactly it began, probably three or four years ago. But social media has finally bested me. The diatribes I see from everyone with a fucking axe to grind about something or other, pushing causes in a slacktivist rendition of “check out my mixtape, fam,” sharing rehashed content that serves as little more than a way to get some ad revenue.

For once in my life, I’d rather see a picture of your ugly baby than see another article about why your candidate is Jesus Christ and the other guy is Shitbag Hitler III. I am worn all the way the fuck out.

I don’t even know why I have 500 friends. I talk to…20 of you at the absolute most? I don’t even recognize some of your names, and it’s from those teenage years where more friends = more better person. I think every generation was told by their parents and other elders that you’ll grow apart with time, and every generation could flawlessly see the future and indirectly told said elders to shove it up their ass. And then we grow apart with time like we were fucking told would happen. But now there’s this weird tether of social media keeping us in the peripheral vision of the people we otherwise would’ve dumped like last week’s garbage.

It’s not all bad. I probably wouldn’t have known that a six-year classmate of mine, just starting to dabble with a guitar when we left high school, made it into Rolling Stone magazine. I wouldn’t have known that someone I went to college with my freshman year was in a horrific accident, and had to learn to talk, walk, feed himself, and basically become a … (More) “This parrot is dumb and your recipe is disgusting. How are you?”