zimbra

internet post!

So, earlier today, I got an email from the "Security Operations Lead" at NASA Ames, saying that a whole batch of people's passwords and account names had been accessed. I had an account there for a meeting I went to earlier this month; coincidentally, immediately after attending that meeting, I noticed that one of my peripheral email accounts had been accessed, and at the time I blamed it on the hotel.

Just now, I get an email from something called Zimbra, informing me that:

You requested your Email Account  on June 7, 2012 at 11:02 PM CS to be deactivated and deleted from a location in with this IP number; 201.130.47.33.

2. Click on  (https://secure.zimbra.com/verifyf?intl=us&.partner= cancelrequest) to cancel this request; else your email account will be deactivated and deleted within 24 hours

The sender's address was "bankofcard@yahoo.com". Yeah. Zimbra is apparently some sort of open source email server software for Linux machines. So this doesn't have anything to do with Zimbra.

The IP address leads to a machine in Mexico, with the URL niie2e.nextel.com.mx. This machine seems to have all ports open, i.e. it's either a totally open proxy server, or some sort of disguise for something else.

That URL to 'secure.zimbra.com' was actually an alias in the email (no I did not click on it, I am not stupid), for "http://www.contactme.com/4fcf723e2e22a2000103d1b6". From their website I can't tell what the hell contactme is, but it looks their site was probably co-opted. I wonder what's there...

Anyways, the relationship to the NASA thing is just coincidental timing, but makes me a bit paranoid.

*edit 6-19-12*
Got called down to to the network office this morning to change my password; apparently the NASA thing had gotten distributed to everyone whose ids were leaked. The admin forwarded to me the info he'd gotten through the Harvard IT director, and based on that I found this:


http://pastebin.com/nSJ9Nn9Z

who knows how long that link will stay alive. anyways, it's a list of the email addresses, but no passwords, for everyone that attended that workshop.

the header on the document:

[HACKED] NASA.GOV - AMES RESEARCH CENTER - By ZYKLON B
 ...
Join me on twitter : https://twitter.com/#!/bzyklon

Author : ZYKLON B
Target : NASA Ames Research Center - Ocular Imaging Laboratory (ace.arc.nasa.gov)
Reason : Curiosity, Challenge.

IS THE TARGET COMPROMISED ? YES.
Note : NASA Glenn research center already hacked 5-6 weeks ago.

anyways, that's interesting. you look down the document, and there we all are! yeah, hackers have twitter accounts!

temporal friction

We came to see the problem as one of material friction, rather than of abstract entropy. Information was still the key, but it was finally clear that what we perceive as information is just the tip of an iceberg.

The resolution of the dark matter problem demonstrated that the deeper structure of reality is anisotropic, made up of tiny needles of entropy - a material structure, now, not a mathematical description. And these needles, they are all pointed towards the past. Whatever part of the universe that moves away from the past is brushed through those needles, which scrape and tear and lacerate the informational structure that we recognize as reality.

That reality we came to see as the product of a long process of selection - some informational structure is torn apart as soon as it forms, while some is hardier, even self-correcting. Life was a structure, we saw, that had adapted to a long path through the deeper universe, even making use of the dark matter anisotropies, to store and convert energy, to drive its own processes of selection and sub-adaptation. But no forms of life could navigate through the darkness. Not until the humans came, and then, for them, it became a prime concern.

We navigated the Earth's surface, its skies and its seas. We navigated the first darkness, of space, and the surfaces of other worlds. All the time, there was that constant abrasion, wearing off man after woman, nation after world, age after eon. All along, we were looking for the way through - the clear way through the darkness. We found it - as I said, we came to see the problem as one of material friction.

Moving against the anisotropy disrupts information. Moving with it smooths information, conforms it, puts it in neat rows and columns, but this has the strange effect of making life uninteresting. If you're adapted to something, then when you lose it you notice it's gone. It's the same with entropy - when you go through life with information conforming rather than disrupting, you go from senselessness to perfection. This can be beautiful, but too often it's just another level of senselessness, on top of the fact that conformative memory processes take a lot of time to install and master, and you find yourself missing the old order of things, no matter how far beyond human you've gone. To have your thoughts and actions gather energy, collect and bind heat, and deliver it into your body... a useful novelty, a tool or practice, but nothing fundamental.

What was interesting was when you could remove the anisotropy altogether. No arrow of time, except for what you choose to arrange. Laws of thermodynamics become adjustable, optional. When we learned not just to navigate through the darkness, but to engineer it to our own purposes, then...

That, more than any other development, was what changed us.

transit venus

SO, I had been planning to actually get my old reflector out and make a little projector to watch a bit of the transit, before the sun set today. but, it's been days since the sun was out, so I never had any chance to test anything; actually, with no way to test a setup, and with the forecast looking like it was going to be the way it was, I didn't wind up actually putting any of the parts together.

In other words, it was too cloudy to see it from Boston.

I've been watching the NASA feed of it, it's better than nothing. I think the transit will be over soon; I'll stay up as late as I can to see if I can't see the planet crossing the limb.

That picture is awesome, right? NASA again.

sum.. sum.. summm... summation?

ok, so i'm working on this classification image paper, and it's going really well, and i'm pretty happy about it. i feel like i've got a good handle on it, i'm writing it in one big shot, the analyses are all good, the data are fine, it's all under control. i'm pretty happy about this one. i keep telling myself that, and then noticing that i keep telling myself that. i guess it's in contrast to the blur adaptation paper, which was such an ordeal (took 2 years, basically), and then the magnification paper, which just isn't much fun. i feel myself moving down that priority list - hey, i should do a post on the priority spreadsheet! i made some nice plots in there!

anyways, the CI paper, it's going well, but i'm constantly on the lookout for problems. so tonight, i finally thought of one. not a crucial, deep problem, but a problem with how i've calculated some of the modeling stuff, a serious enough problem that i'll probably have to redesign a bit of it before doing the final runthroughs. i'm writing this entry so i can just sort of kick off thinking of how to solve the problem. here it is, right plain as day in this little cluster of plots from last year's poster, which has become this fine little paper:

the problem is spatial summation - or, the problem is that you don't see anything about spatial summation in those plots. for the main models, i have a CSF that was measured using test-field-sized images. the thresholds measured must reflect a sort of spatial summation, then. the problem is, i've been using those thresholds to set the baseline thresholds for the models, and then summing over the spatial responses. i had kind of had an inkling that i was being lazy there, but had overlooked how obviously stupid that is. i haven't tested the models on the threshold tasks, but i think that they would necessarily get much lower thresholds than the humans; spatial summation should give you a lower overall threshold than you would get for any single location. i need to think of a quick way to solve this, because i don't want to wind up estimating the model CSF through simulations...

and the simulations then raise the problem of noise, and how many samples should there actually be, etc etc... i guess there are benefits to doing things the simple way first, but i think i've run myself into a weird little corner here. gonna need to talk to somebody about this, probably..