17 September, 2003

VeriSign Kicking Up Yet More Of A Fuss

Still no word from BBC News on the bastards that VeriSign are being, but The Register are on to their second news report on the subject, and SlashDot have information about the technological “fight back”. What does a person have to do to keep their state news agency up to date these days?

Have you seen VeriSign’s web site at www.VeriSignSuckCocks.com (only works thanks to their own controversial configuraion changes)

In other news, I’ve worked out how to set up wildcard DNS of my own in BINDs configuration files. Now all I need to do is buy an interesting domain name, and I could run the next IsGay or YouAreLame site. Which would be cool. I have a few ideas… suggestions welcome…

Darwin Was Wrong

The more and more humans I encounter, the more I come to the realisation that Darwin was wrong. The internet provides endless examples of humans so biosociologically defective that whatever it is that makes them tick should have died out eons ago. Us and our damned supportive society harbouring counterproductive genes will be the death of us. But hey, who cares.

In particular, TimeCube.com is a great example of why some people shouldn’t be allowed to see sunlight.

In other news: I’m not getting enough work done. Back to it…

First Aid

Yesterday was a long day. After nine hours at work, had two and a half hours of First Aid refresher training at Aberystwyth ambulance station.

On the upside, I’d forgotten how subtly dark paramedics’ sense of humour can be… when one particularly overmoral woman expressed concern at a particular element of the training: “But they could die!”, one of the ‘medics responded, deadpan, with: “No; they’re already a corpse. They’re dead. They’re just lying there, being completely useless.” I like paramedics.

I have a lot of work to do this week – my final week full-time before starting again as a part-timer while I put some work towards graduating – and I’m getting bogged down in other people’s bureaucracy. I can’t get my client’s clients’ computers to connect to my client’s computer because my client’s network administrator has put a particularly secure firewall in the way, and he needs a list of IP addresses (unique identifiers for computers on TCP/IP networks, like the Internet) of all the servers on my client’s clients’ networks, but everybody’s got meetings at stupid times and I can never get hold of the people I need when I need them and… aarrgghh!!!

It’ll all be fine.

UserFriendly And VeriSign

Today’s UserFriendly cartoon strip plays on the issue highlighted by yesterday’s entry about VeriSign trying to take over the Internet. Really – the geeks are up in arms.

Still no word from BBC News, but the following other agencies have picked up on the story:

“VeriSign redirects error pages” from C|Net News

“VeriSign slammed for helping spammers” from ZDNet Australia

“ICANN up in arms over Verisign DNS hijacking” from The Inquirer, UK

And tongue-in-cheek technical debate on morons.org.

Told you this would kick up a fuss. You read it here first.