Bloghorn

The semester is winding down, spring is in full swing, and I still don’t have a finalized job offer for the summer.

The last day of classes is this Friday, then a week of tests, and the parents are coming on Friday to take me home Saturday. At least the tests aren’t that bad, one on Monday, two on Tuesday, then one on Thursday, all thankfully after 1 PM, so I don’t have to get up early.

As for an internship this summer, I have four irons in the fire, but no definite yes yet. Iron number one is that Bear Stearns finds me a nice non-profit to work at, iron two is that Mount Sinai takes me in for the summer, iron three is a position in ABS at Penn State (which the girlfriend definitely won’t appreciate), and iron four is being a beta tester for some video game company in the NYC area. All of these jobs have my resume, seem interested, and would be a good experience, but none have gotten back to me yet.

I’ve also started getting the ball rolling for getting a chapter of the Collegiate Society of America started on campus. The lack of good old fashioned parliamentary debate is one of the things I missed in the transition from high school to college, and Model UN is way too geeky for me. I’ve contacted a few professors who might be interested, and I’ll see where it goes from there.

The campus looks really good too. Snapped a few shots with my phone.

I voted this afternoon for the first time in Pennsylvania. The polling place was in the HUB, so on top of the already packed lunch crowd, a string of poster holding politicians lined the path, handing out leaflets and recommending themselves for their position of choice.

Inside the polling place were 3 different setups, one for each district within the University Park campus. Yes, there’s more than one. The line for the East Halls district was practically out the door, but the West Halls line was nonexistent. I just walked up, signed my name, and went to the voting machines.

My experience in the New Rochelle voting system has led me to distrust mechanical voting machines in general, but electronic voting without a paper ballot (as these were ) made me just as uncomfortable. The interface was easy to understand, at least.

The voting machine interface

I met Ted on the way out, stumping for Obama with the rest of his Obamatrons. Seems there’s a new club on campus involving video games and politics that needs a president, and he thinks I’m up for it. I’ll have to ask him about it later. SRA497A this afternoon, then I finally get to relax for a while.

Over the last few months, traveling back and forth to class lugging my Lenovo R61 has been a pain. Plus, with the traveling I’m going to be doing this summer, and the HOPE convention on the horizon, I needed something smaller I could just dump in my bag and forget about, light enough to not be very noticeable, powerful enough to be usable, and cheap enough to not care too much when it gets destroyed. I thought about an Eee PC for a while, but the solid state drive and the price tag threw me off. I opted to go the eBay route, buying a used IBM X30 laptop for about $200. PIII M, 256 RAM, 20 GB HDD, relatively mediocre. But the wireess (802.11a, b, g, bluetooth, IR) and the size made up for it.

I got it on Thursday and spent the afternoon loading Ubuntu 7.10 onto it. It ran pretty slowly, so I dropped the visual effects to minimum and it worked pretty well. Ordered a gig of RAM off eBay and slapped it in this afternoon and the laptop runs like greased lightning, visual effects at full, wireless, VPN, the works. The only downside is the battery’s charge is down to 50%, giving me just about an hour and a half of charge time.

The best part of buying this thing is finally having a computer I can run Linux on as the primary operating system and not be too concerned about messing it up or compatibility problems. My desktop needs Vista for gaming, my R61 needs Windows for stability reasons and performance, but this little thing only needs to do web browsing and word processing, so having a standard OS isn’t that big of a deal.

The biggest problem was getting the wireless working with Penn State’s VPN. I tried using the binaries provided by PSU, but even patched, they didn’t work. So I shoehorned the PCF files into a Config file for VPNC and now it works perfectly.

Man I love IBM.

The reason I got into information security was through micronationalism. The hobby claimed to be about politics, diplomacy, and getting along with one another. But that’s mainly because it’s awful hard to attack a country that doesn’t exist in the real world. However, while the countries didn’t exist in reality, their online presence could be wiped off the internet with a well placed SQL injection.

Because of this constant fear, every nation had its own team of experts, working to strengthen the defenses of their own nations, while at the same time developing weapons against other nations. This led to spam cannons, like GoldenEye and Chimera, both Antican examples, that were created solely to spam the target forums with lengthy posts to max out the target server’s storage space. And more recently, a new attack method, that drops all the posts from a forum, essentially wiping out the history of a nation in one fell swoop.

This past month has brought two attacks in relatively rapid succession. The first was that the g00ns rooted invisionfree’s servers. And while it wasn’t a direct attack on a micronation, enough were affected that I was brought in by the Martinos for a damage and risk assessment. And my assessment was that, while their posts are still probably fine (g00ns don’t usually delete data), they should switch to a forum that they can back up as needed. Advice I wish more people had listened to.

This past week, another nation was hit with an attack that wiped their forums clean. And because they were on invisionfree, they had no backups, and no record of any of the work they did. All indications point to another nation, with whom they’d had a tussle recently, as the culprit. What makes this so prevalent is that most micronationalists don’t have the technical skill needed to set up and defend their own forums, and have to rely on sites like invisionfree to provide hosting for them, which means no quick patches, and no regular backups.

I have very fond memories of my days in the hobby, staying up late at night trying to fix a vulnerability that just took out another nation, and watching as GoldenEye takes down another nation’s forums. Things moved pretty fast, and the learning curve was incredibly steep, but at the end of the day, only one of the hundreds of attacks against the website I was defending ever made it through, and even then I had a backup that wasn’t even an hour old to plug back in.

For that reason, a few of my old buddies are turning to me to clean up their messes and help them out. And, being the good natured guy I am (and a little curious about analyzing the attacks), I’ve offered my help. Hopefully this won’t pull me back into that time sink of a hobby…

Slobovia: The most recent attack

The new constitution was approved last night, and most of the changes I wanted to make were shoehorned in without much ado. Among the changes were:

• Making the Fair Elections Committee (yep, stolen from JSA) a standing committee and integrating them into the system more.
• Allowing for the membership to remove an officer, making the exec board no longer an “old boy’s club”.
• Requiring the house as a whole to be consulted when amending the constitution, and allowing the house to repeal amendments.
• Updating the election system to allow for better polling.

And with that, the foghornization* of the constitution is complete. I’ve linked to it at the bottom of this post. And while my presidency wasn’t the shining star I hoped it would be, at least I’m leaving the floor with a functioning constitution and CSE accreditation.

*Foghornization: Antican term meaning “to make insanely more bureaucratic and harder to understand. Usually applies to legal documents or constitutions.”

IST Interest House Constitution rev. 2.2 RTM