Best of intentions, yadda yadda yadda. Between various things happening on the home front that took time away from editing, my editor having a few medical challenges, the fact she’s doing it “on the side” and has to work around her work schedule, and the fact I am ending up looking at somewhat more substantive edits than I had originally planned, it isn’t ready quite yet. Cover art is taking longer than expected, too. All in all, The Stars Came Back is taking a bit longer than planned. *sigh*. An educational experience, if often frustrating and painful, all around. But I think the book will be much better for it. Now aiming for sometime in November, because it is national “write a novel” month.
Monthly Archives: November 2013
Computer security just got harder
This has been coming for quite some time (H/T to Jeff):
Triulzi said he’s seen plenty of firmware-targeting malware in the laboratory. A client of his once infected the UEFI-based BIOS of his Mac laptop as part of an experiment. Five years ago, Triulzi himself developed proof-of-concept malware that stealthily infected the network interface controllers that sit on a computer motherboard and provide the Ethernet jack that connects the machine to a network. His research built off of work by John Heasman that demonstrated how to plant hard-to-detect malware known as a rootkit in a computer’s peripheral component interconnect, the Intel-developed connection that attaches hardware devices to a CPU.
I wrote and demonstrated to some folks in D.C. a prototype of something like this in 2004 or 2005. Even before that lots of people knew it was possible.
You can remove all hard disks from your computer, install empty ones, and as the computer is booting up for the first time infect the new hard disk before the O/S even attempts to boot off of the CD drive. Of if you wanted you could just refuse to boot.
Imagine a stealth virus that infected some large percentage of all computers then on September 11th would only perform one function—format any storage device it had control of.
Sleep well.
Quote of the day—Robert J. Avrech
We return to Stalin’s omelet. Over and over, Democrats calmly and cruelly explain that only five percent of Americans will be booted off their insurance plans. And those insurance plans were substandard anyway.
First of all, five percent translates into roughly 16 million Americans. Each person whose insurance is terminated because Obama does not like his or her choice is a story of fear and panic and possible financial ruin. Further, does anyone even believe the Democrat apologists’ quote of five percent? That number will grow and grow as ObamaCare tightens its death grip.
The “only five percent” line of reasoning tells us a great deal about the utopian vision of Democrats. The individual does not count. Democrats claim to see the larger picture. But they see only a collective, a manageable herd. And once again, they know better. Forget that millions of Americans voluntarily entered into contracts they deemed right for themselves and their families. This counts for nothing to the Democrat political class. They are experts. They attended Ivy League schools. This makes the professional political class — overeducated, inbred elitists — better qualified to make decisions for us, the American people, that are truly about matters of life and death.
The core of American values is liberty, not government.
Robert J. Avrech
October 30, 2013
The Democrat-ObamaCare Purges
[You should never forget that “only five percent” line. Communists have used identical reasoning in their purges. The good of the whole is more important than the good of the individual. And if they have to “break a few eggs” they really don’t see what the problem is.
The differences between us cannot be resolved with a compromise. If they liquidate 1% or 10% it does not matter to me. They would still be committed mass evil and deserve whatever the “Nuremburg Courts” rule.—Joe]