I thought the Moon was made of green cheese!

To commemorate the 36th anniversary of the Moon landing, the good people of Google have put together NASA's pictures of the Moon ala maps.google.com satellite images. http://moon.google.com/ shows maps of the moon complete with landing sites of the various Apollo missions. Zoom in far enough and you discover the moon really is made of cheese.

Neat!

Rick

Security Stupidity

I can't take credit for this. Bruce Schneier published it in his latest Cryptogram e-newsletter. But this is a perfect example of how inflexible policies often don't make sense. Soldiers flying a charter to Kuwait can take assault weapons on the plane, but not pocket knives, fingernail clippers, nose hair scissors or cigarette lighters.

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/custom/blogs/guard/entries/2005/05/19/drop_those_nose_hair_clippers_soldier.html

This is living proof we are fighting the war against terror the wrong way. The statistics the airport security people publish of all the "dangerous items" they have prevented from being taken on board planes are not a success, but rather a failure because they prevented people who had no intention of using those items in a dangerous manner from taking them on.

We are focusing security spending on items the terrorists have already hit, or on "high profile" potential targets. Sorry, but this means the terrorists are winning. The terrorists can see where we are focusing our efforts...they will just attack somewhere else where the security is softer (or non-existent). The London Subway bombings are proof of this. The terrorists are winning because we are spending huge amounts of money protecting assets that will never be attacked rather than spending it on root cause of the problem, finding and stopping the terrorists. The terrorists are winning...they are increasing our taxes and decreasing our standard of living and forcing us to change the way we live.

Sorry for the rant.
Rick

More on the Masters of Disaster

I found an excellent article in an Arkansas paper about Bobby Younkin and Jimmy Franklin. It is a good read for those who are interested. I have been amazed at the response of the families. They universally say "They died doing what they loved." All I can say is Good on ya!
http://www.nwaonline.net/articles/2005/07/12/front/04fzyounkinobit.txt

Rick

Masters of Disaster

Blog as therapy...whodathunk.

Today I experienced one of the most frightening things I have seen in my life. Frightening partially because it involved loss of life, but mostly because of the sheer talent that was snuffed out in the blink of an eye.

Today I was at the Saskatchewan Centennial Air Show in Moose Jaw, SK. As usual there was an amazing array of piloting, and technology that is hilighted at all such airshows of its ilk. One group of people stood out from the crowd. It was a group of perfomers from a group called the X-Team (www.xteamairshows.com). To be specific it was Jimmy Franklin, Kyle Franklin, Jim Leroy, and Bobby Younkin...they amazed the crowd with their aerobatic abilities. I am an airplane buff, and aerobatics fan, and was amazed by the abilities of these pilots. They each performed solo earlier in the day, and Jimmy Franklin and his son Kyle did an amazing wing walking act like none I have ever seen for their second show.

Near the end of the day, for their finale, Jimmy Franklin, Jim Leroy and Bobby Younkin put on a unscripted dog fighting display ala WWI under the name of "Masters of Disaster", with Kyle Franklin acting as announcer. This show was to go on for 25 minutes, and the crowd was mesmerized and amazed by the perfomance these amazing aviators demonstrated. About 15 minutes into the show the three planes came together for a stunt where one plane crosses between the other two, and the remaining two pass over and under each other in a near miss. Unfortunately, they didn't miss...the one plane slammed into the bottom of the other and thye both exploded and plummeted to ground in balls of fire from about 300 feet. At first the audience thought that this was a pyrotechnics display and they reacted to the amazing spectacle. But when everyone realized that only one plane was still in the air, and silence overtook the crowd. The aftermath was that Jimmy Franklin (flying WACO), and Bobby Younkin (flying Samson) were killed.

Jimmy Franklin's claim to fame was as a stunt pilot in numerous movies including "The Rocketeer". The plane he was flying was "WACO" a modified 1937 WACO UPF-7 with a T38 jet engine underneath. An amazing flying machine that did things never before seen in aerobatics.

Bobby Younkin is a veteran of airshows worldwide. The plane he was flying was "Samson" a recreation of a plane built by Curtis Pitt in the 1940's. As amazing an aerobatic plane as I have ever seen.

Loss of life is always tragic, but the pilots knew the risks and accepted them everytime they performed. In my mind the more tragic thing is that amazing talent has been removed from this earth.

My condolences go out to Kyle Franklin and his family and the family of Bobby Younkin at this time of great sorrow.

Turn it off!!

One of the things I do in my spare time (yeah right!) is to help people out securing their home networks. I do gateway router installations and configuration, Wireless network setups, anti-virus installations and upgrades, spyware cleanups, etc. etc. None of these tools are expensive, but it does cost a couple of hundred dollars to secure your machine properly. But the long term cost of not doing this is usually an infection and reinstall.

Yesterday, somebody asked me..."If I don't want to do all that stuff, what is the best free thing I can do to protect my machine?" He was surprised by my answer "Turn off your computer when you aren't using it".

In these days of always on Internet connections, we somehow have gotten in the habit of always leaving our computers turned on. Why?

Most people use their machine only a few minutes each day. Turn off your computer when it is not in use and malicious users cannot probe and compromise your machine. If your machine does somehow become compromised, it will not add to the machines probing and compromising other machines on the Internet or fulfill whatever nefarious purpose the malware author intended. You may even save on your power bill and reduce wear and tear on your computer.

Sure it is not a good solution for computers that are used for hours a day, and you probably should still do the other things, but for the average home user it is a big step forward in securing your computer.


For my treatise on how to secure home computers please have a look at... http://www.whitehats.ca/main/members/Cerberus/cerberus_home_security/protecting_home_computer.html

Rick