05:29 - Monday, May. 16, 2005
its monday!! its news!!! you seen it here first...or second.....whatever
and now, the news you can choose...

Cheesus H. Crispy Cremes, what a Monday! Did you know that The Pentagon has estimated that 25 percent of the nation's military facililties are unnecessary? Now military towns all across the country are bracing for recommendations today by the Defense Department to the Base Realignment and Closure Commission -- the first round of proposed cuts since 1995. If the Pentagon has its way, this highly fraught process may cut 20 percent of remaining facilities, much to the consternation of members of Congress with bases in their districts. But fear not -- The Pentagon plans to rebuild these millitary bases on the outskirts of the hotly anticipated vacation spots Baghdad City and New Tikrit, scheduled to open in February 2010 just in time for spring break.

After a nine-year run, CBS will air the final episode of "Everyone Loves Raymond," apparently one of those Most Popular Sitcoms Of All Time that no one under the age of 45 has ever seen more than once. Wait. This just in: It's actually "Everybody Loves Raymond." We here at who did it and ran, ink! apologizes for this error. Well, anyway, best of luck to Ray Martino and the rest of the brilliant cast. It's been a great run, guys.

Also today the United Negro College Fund will hold its 39th annual golf tournament benefittting, er, negros, held at the beautiful Quail Valley Country Club in Missouri City, Texas. It's a 9 a.m. shotgun start, but because Quail Valley is still a private club, any teams including African-American players will be required to tee off at dusk from the parking lot of the Wal-Mart shopping center just off of Highway 59. Best of luck to all participants.

Newsweek apologized yesterday for an inaccurate report on the treatment of detainees that triggered several days of rioting in Afghanistan and other countries in which at least 15 people died.

Editor Mark Whitaker expressed regret over the item in the magazine's "Periscope" section, saying it was based on a confidential source -- a "senior U.S. government official" -- who now says he is not sure whether the story is true.

The deadly consequences of the May 1 report, and its reliance on the unnamed source, have sparked considerable anger at the Pentagon. Spokesman Bryan Whitman called Newsweek's report "irresponsible" and "demonstrably false," saying the magazine "hid behind anonymous sources which by their own admission do not withstand scrutiny. Unfortunately, they cannot retract the damage that they have done to this nation or those who were viciously attacked by those false allegations."

Whitaker said last night that "whatever facts we got wrong, we apologize for. I've expressed regret for the loss of life and the violence that put American troops in harm's way. I'm getting a lot of angry e-mail about that, and I understand it."

The report, in the issue dated May 9, said U.S. military investigators had found that American interrogators at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed a copy of the Koran, the sacred Muslim text, down a toilet. A week later, when newspapers in Afghanistan and Pakistan picked up the item, it sparked anti-American demonstrations in the Afghan city of Jalalabad in which four protesters were killed and more than 60 injured. About a dozen more protesters were killed in the following days when the demonstrations spread across Afghanistan and to Pakistan and other countries.

"There had been previous reports about the Koran being defiled, but they always seemed to be rumors or allegations made by sources without evidence," Whitaker said, referring to reporting by British and Russian news agencies and by the Qatar-based satellite network al-Jazeera. The Washington Post, whose parent company owns Newsweek, reported a similar account in March 2003, attributing it to a group of former detainees. "The fact that a knowledgeable source within the U.S. government was telling us the government itself had knowledge of this was newsworthy," Whitaker said in an interview.

He said that a senior Pentagon official, for reasons that "are still a little mysterious to us," had declined to comment after Newsweek correspondent John Barry showed him a draft before the item was published and asked, "Is this accurate or not?" Whitaker added that the magazine would have held off had military spokesmen made such a request. That official "lacked detailed knowledge" of the investigative report, Newsweek now says. Whitaker said Pentagon officials raised no objection to the story for 11 days after it was published, until it was translated by some Arab media outlets and led to the rioting.

The item was principally reported by Michael Isikoff, Newsweek's veteran investigative reporter. "Obviously we all feel horrible about what flowed from this, but it's important to remember there was absolutely no lapse in journalistic standards here," he said. "We relied on sources we had every reason to trust and gave the Pentagon ample opportunity to comment. . . . We're going to continue to investigate what remains a very murky situation." I read TIME MAGAZINE, as do all good Democrats!

Security experts late Friday warned that a DNS cache poisoning attack may be underway and redirecting users from some of the most popular Web sites to a malicious URL where spyware and adware is invisibly installed onto their computers.

According to the Internet Storm Center, which posted an alert on its Web site, it had received reports that the attack was redirecting traffic from popular domains such as google.com, ebay.com, and weather.com.

DNS cache poisoning occurs when an attacker hacks into a domain name server, then "poisons" the cache by planting counterfeit data in the cache of the name server. When a user requests, say, ebay.com, and the IP address is resolved by the hacked domain server, the bogus data is fed back to the browser.

Another tactic, dubbed "DNS hijacking," is similar, but simply changes the domain server so that traffic is actually re-routed.

It's unclear which of the two tactics this attack is using.

Even security firms had difficulty confirming the attack, however. Dan Hubbard, the senior director of security at San Diego-based Websense, for instance, said that his team had been investigating the report for several hours but had not yet been able to hit a domain server that had been poisoned.

But Websense's monitoring of its customer's usage patterns did pick up a spike in traffic to the three malicious sites supposedly feeding spyware to redirected users. (In turn, the three feed users to one single site.)

"It's circumstantial evidence," he said, "but it seems something is going on."

Nor was Hubbard able to confirm the targets of the poison and/or hijack. "We haven't been able to trace a redirect from, say, Google," he added.

The hack could be quite localized if, for instance, the affected domain server was one operated by an enterprise or small Internet service provider. "It's certainly not at the root level, or we'd all end up at this malicious site."

Domain cache poisoning and domain hijacking, while rare, are not unheard of. In the late 1990s, a vulnerability in BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the software used by nearly all of the name servers on the Internet, was disclosed. A few exploits followed. And in 2000, RSA Security was victimized by a Web defacement that really wasn't: instead, domain cache poisoning simply fed bogus pages to users.

"One interesting thing about malicious Web sites is that the hackers have to get people to the site," said Hubbard. "How they get people to their sites is becoming very important. In this case, they're getting more creative than the traditional phishing or instant messaging approach where links are sent to users."

The adware and spyware on the malicious sites is thankfully "not very dangerous," said Hubbard. The sites try to download and install code and an Active X control called "ABC Search Webinstall" that changes the browser's toolbar, its home page, and search preferences, among other things.

For additional details of the attack as they become available, refer to the Internet Storm Center's Diary page, which promises to update as the Center finds out more.

Is using an empty baked-bean can to grab a Wi-Fi signal from a mile away high technology? The answer is yes if you're an entrant in Intel's International Science and Engineering Fair being held last week in Phoenix.

Steven Buss, an 18-year-old Wi-Fi buff from Palm City, Florida, built three different types of antennas to see which provided the greatest range for his wireless network. The best performer, made from a "biquad" antenna and a used DirectTV satellite dish bought on EBay, picked up the wireless signal 1.3 miles away.

But the cheapest and easiest, the one he calls a "cantenna," made from an empty baked-bean can, let him connect to his 802.11b wireless network from almost as far--a mile away.

Buss ran his experiments using an IBM ThinkPad on a long, straight Florida road to avoid obstacles that can block a wireless signal.

COFFEETIME!! OH YEAH!!! COFFEETIME!!!

gawd....i need a diary award!!!

On this day in 1777 Badenoch-born Lachlan McIntosh defeated Georgia politician - and signatory to the American declaration of independence - Button Gwinnett in a duel, after McIntosh had called Gwinnett a "scoundrel and lying rascal" in the Georgia Assembly. McIntosh was a leading light in Georgia's independence movement and rose to be a General in the Continental Army.

CAT OF THE DAY!

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