] Operation Iron Promise

Its seems in the Texas Air Guard, they don't teach how Military Operations/Projects/Callsigns are supposed to be generic/non-specific names to refer to a plan without giving away information about said plan. They are not to be political statements in a poor attempt to slap legitimacy on your diplomatic foobars.

Turman wasn't such a dumbass he needed to rename Operation Overlord Operation French Freedom. He didn't need to sell his people on the idea. Hilter didn't rename Operation Barbarossa to Operation Kick-the-Russian's-ass or a more Bush-like Operation Free-the-Russians-from-a-evil-madman, though I frankly doubt Hitler cared about selling his war of aggression to his people the way Bush seems to.

Operation Mountain Storm, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom.... [sigh]

Operation Bullshit

Political Military Operation names: STOP!

So I tend to like crazy authors that do strange things in their books, like insert crypto. The problem comes down to is it really crypto?

Example: In Preston and Child's ThunderHead (one of their best), they include a block cypher text, supposed a substitution cypher. After a fter hours of frequency analysis, I'm nowhere fast Based on how close the frequencies were, it could be random junk. I email the authors if there is anything in there to look for. They replied back originally they were going to have a contest hidden in the cypher text but didn't have time. Its just junk. Oh Well

But know, cut to Dan Brown's Digital Fortress.I really didn't like this book. While the story involving David tracking down the ring was interesting, the rest was too over the top or simply incorrect. The 8 story tall code cracker. The plush prvate offices. 64 bit keys means 64 characters. How the "Tracking" bug worked through an anonymous remailer. Character motivations, etc.

Regardless, the end of the book had a nifty code:
128-10-93-85-10-128-98-112-6-6-25-126-39-1-68-78

Immediately I resist the urge to type it into Google. I know I can solve this. First thing I did was count the number of characters. 16. 16 * 8 = 128 bits. Could this be used to access an HTTPS page on a website? Dan Brown could have a personal page, maybe the book publisher. I check the copyright date: 1996. I doubt he had a page back then. Next, Its not an ASCII string (too many control characters, and even by adding 64 to bring the smallest number up to Letter range, then 128+64 is in the line drawing characters of 8 bit ascii.) Nothing higher than 128. What if it is 7 bit ascii, alined on 8 bit boundries? Well 128 bits doesn't /7 evenly, so no. Maybe there are page numbers? Nope, I dimiss that because that would change from hardback to softback. Besides its a 400+ page book, and the code would use less than half of it. That 128 is bugging me. 10000000 ... hmmm ... Wait a sec, there are 128 chapters, not including epilogue and prologue... (I remember because I hate small chapter books). I immediately notice that there are two 128s, 6s and 10s. I look at the first letter of these chapters, and think I'm chasing nothing until I see Chaper 10 starts with E. That makes 2 E's and 2 A's. So we have at least 4 vowels over 16 letters. Sounds good.

So I write down all the first letters of each chapter and I get this:

W E C G E W H Y A A I O R T N U

Well 4 vowels in a row is wrong. I look at the code for several more minutes, and then remember how they used Caeser squares alot in the book. In fact 2 seperate times, including once in the last few pages. Furthermore caeser squares were the only simply form of crypto they talked about in the book. Well I have 16 letters...

W E C G
E W H Y
A A I O
R T N U

We Are Watching You. Not Kryptos, but certainly made my morning.

] NEWS ALERT
] Al Sharpton says he will no longer campaign for
] Democratic presidential nomination but will continue to
] collect delegates. Details soon.

NEWS ALERT

The world stopped caring several months ago

CNN.com - News Alert Al Sharptopn will no longer campaign

] Bad Weather Closings for News 14 Carolina
] Raleigh, NC on Feb 27th, 2004

I would totally snarf my cheerios if "Sammy's House of CockRings" scrolled on the bottom of 11 Alive news.

Snotmonkey.com - News Closings

They may cut your dick in half
And serve it to a pig
And though it hurts, you'll laugh
And dance a dickless jig
But that's the way it goes
In war we're shat upon
Though we die, La Resistance lives oooooonnnnn!

While I've listened to this song several times when it comes up on my playlist, I only just paid attention to the lyrics. If they can bring the Lion King to Broadway, they need to bring this!

PS The guy who sings as Gregory, Howard McGillin, has stared in several Broadway musicals. He holds the record as the longest person cast as the Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera

South Park La Resistance lyrics

And the sun comes over us again
We lament, we pine, and we rescind
And we ask for understanding
But aren't we the stingy ones indeed
When it's asked of us in the end?
We watch the days go by
Compete and then we die
So few ever ask why
But so many just abuse the design

-Bad Religion

] "We Didn't Start the Fire" is an excellent education tool
] for teachers and students! Below are the song's lyrics.
] Click on the links within the lyrics for info on the
] major events of the 20th century!

Neat site with a link to more info about every event/person mentioned in the classic Billy Joel song. Some are fairly obscure

We Didn't Start the Fire

] I travel a lot and one of my favorite destination lead
] through poisoned with radiation, so called Chernobyl
] "dead zone" It is 130kms from my home. Why favourite?
] because one can ride there for hours and not meet any
] single car and not to see any single soul. People left
] and nature is blooming, there are beautiful places,
] woods, lakes. There is no newly built roads, but those
] which left from 80th in fairly good condition

This ~24 year old Russian talks about racing her crotch rocket through the Chernobyl wastelands. She talks about grewing up there, the day the disaster happened (her father is a nuclear scientist, and life in Russia since.

When you ride alone, you ride in Chernobyl

inignoct wrote:
] ] "As long as the warmonger Bush and the Nazi Americans
] ] live, who are worse than Hitler's fascists, world peace
] ] will be impossible to achieve," a North Korean schoolgirl
] ] says to Bartelsman.
] ]
] ] "The Americans enjoy war...it's part of their nature,"
] ] says a boy.
]
] [ So sad. Hate is learned... teaching a child hate is among
] the worst sins one can commit. What a travesty. -k]

I saw this British news crew that got to go into North Korea on PBS a year back (Frontline? maybe). Anyway, they were given 2 "guides" [cough]governmentagents[cough], who showed them around the country and answered their questions. Its was wild how literially brainwashed these people were.

The guides explained some monument that showed "The GreaT Leader repelling the evil imperialist Americans and Japanese tried to conquer NK in WWII." It was so funny to listen to the British try to explain that no, the Germans and Japanese started the war against Europe Russia and the US. The guide simply could not believe it, insisting the US started WWII.

In the rural areas, the guide were preplexed by the British questions about all the famine that has been reported and replied "no, there are no famines here." The British tried to explain, "Yes, the UN is giving you grain, millions are dying from lack of food," and even showed the guide newspapers from several different countries talking about the UN food relief effort. Again the guide looked at him like he said 2+2=5.

Here is an entire country that has been lied to about the events of the world for the past 60+ years. It is extremely sad to think of all the wasted potential.

CBS News | If Anne Frank Only Knew ... | February 27, 2004Â 18:05:26

] The company's long-term plans are more ambitious.
] Worm-killing functionality called "behavior blocking" is
] slated for next year, and will work, Gates promised, by
] spotting anomalous behavior by the operating system or
] applications. Using last year's Blaster worm as an
] example, Gates said the technology would notice that
] Windows' RPC service had begun downloading malicious
] code, and would intervene to prevent it. "The system will
] truly know what actions are allowed by applications and
] operating systems," said Gates.

Instead of trying fancy-pants AI to detect the 1 time out of a million you are downloading malicious code, why don't you fix your security model? You can start by removing the HTML rendering engine from the kernel.

The Register - Microsoft XP SP2 security attempts