90 Miles From Tyranny

Friday, May 30, 2014

The Devoted Wife...

The woman's husband had been slipping in and out of a coma for several months, yet she had stayed by his bedside every single day.

One day, when he came to, he motioned for her to come nearer. As she sat by him, he whispered, eyes full of tears, "You know what? You have been with me all through the bad times. When I got fired, you were there to support me. When my business failed, you were there. When I got shot, you were by my side. When we lost the house, you stayed right here. When my health started failing, you were still by my side. And you know what?"

"What dear?" she gently asked, smiling as her heart began to fill with warmth.

"I think you're bad luck."

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NASA's Lost Satellite Just Made Its First Contact With Earth in 17 Years

It's official: ISEE-3, the 36-year-old satellite that NASA left for dead over a decade ago, is back in touch with humankind. This afternoon, a group of citizen scientists who raised almost $160,000 to fund the process of taking control of ISEE-3 announced that two-way contact has been established with the little satellite that could. So what's next?

"Over the coming days and weeks our team will make an assessment of the spacecraft's overall health and refine the techniques required to fire its engines and bring it back to an orbit near Earth," explained the Reboot team in a triumphant comment released today. Contact was made at Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico, where scientists collaborated with a worldwide network of like-minded space fans to fund and engineer the project.

Now comes the fun part: Getting ISEE-3 back to the business of studying space. We'll have more updates as they come.

Your iPhone has been taken hostage. Pay $100 ransom to get it back

A large number of people, mostly located in Australia, are reporting they have come under an unexplained attack that holds their iPhones and iPads hostage and demands they pay a $100 ransom.

The attack appears to work by compromising iCloud accounts associated with the disabled devices, according to an Apple support forum discussion that started Sunday morning and quickly accumulated several hundred posts. Commandeered devices typically emit a loud tone that's associated with a feature that helps users locate lost or stolen devices. iPhones and iPads also display the message: "Device hacked by Oleg Pliss. For unlock device, you need send voucher code by 100 usd/eur (Moneypack/Ukash/PaySafeCard) to email:lock404@hotmail.com for unlock." In some cases—specifically, when a user hasn't assigned a strong passcode to a locked device—it can only be unlocked by performing a factory reset, which completely wipes all previously stored data and apps. The mass compromise is a variation on so-called ransomware scams, which initially targeted Windows PC users and earlier this month was found targeting smartphone users running Google's Android OS.

The forum accounts provide strong evidence that victims' Apple IDs and passwords have been compromised so that attackers can remotely lock connected devices using Apple's Find My iPhone service. But so far it remains unclear exactly how the attackers are compromising the iCloud accounts. While it's possible the hijackers used phishing attacks or hacked password databases to obtain the credentials, those explanations are undermined by the observation that the vast majority of victims were located in Australia and reported using a variety of e-mail providers. Typically, phishing campaigns and database compromises involving multiple providers affect users from more geographic regions.

DNS poisoning?

GOOGLE, MICROSOFT, PAYPAL, OTHER ROMANIAN SITES HIJACKED BY DNS HACKERS
Incident is one of several DNS hacks to strike in recent weeks.

One participant in the online discussion theorized the mass compromise may have been the result of hacking domain name system (DNS) servers used by Australian service providers to translate human readable addresses such as Apple.com into the IP addresses Internet routers rely on. Such an attack, which has yet to be confirmed in this case, works by "poisoning" the lookup tables of DNS servers so they secretly direct people to impostor sites. Assuming this technique was at play in the iPhone and iPad locking, affected users who entered a password on what appeared to be Apple's site could have unknowingly provided it to the people behind the attack.

I am sure that everyone will be relieved to know that there is now a sure fire way to get free medical care. Become a convicted criminal and you get free Medicaid.

According to the New York Times:

Opponents of the Affordable Care Act say that expanding Medicaid has further burdened an already overburdened program, and that allowing enrollment of inmates only worsens the problem. They also contend that while shifting inmate health care costs to the federal government may help states’ budgets, it will deepen the federal deficit. And they assert that allowing newly released inmates to receive Medicaid could present new public relations problems for the Affordable Care Act.

Ya think?

“There can be little doubt that it would be controversial if it was widely understood that a substantial proportion of the Medicaid expansion that taxpayers are funding would be directed toward convicted criminals,” said Avik Roy, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy group.

This is where your tax dollars and medical fees are going towards. Hallelujah! I know, you play the knockout game against me, I get to pay into my huge deductible out of my own pocket, and your poor injured fist gets fixed for free (those bones and teeth in my face are really hard.)

When is the revolution?

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