Diary of a Wolfeman

A parent’s primer to computer slang

No, I am not kidding. To wit:

While it’s important to respect your children’s privacy, understanding what your teenager’s online slang means and how to decipher could be important in certain situations and as you help guide their online experience. While it has many nicknames, information-age slang is commonly referred to as leetspeek, or leet for short. Leet (a vernacular form of “elite”) is a specific type of computer slang where a user replaces regular letters with other keyboard characters to form words phonetically—creating the digital equivalent of Pig Latin with a twist of hieroglyphics.

Ok, on the surface, the whole thing is almost legit – parents should be watching their children’s on-line activities. Anyone who says you should watch your own children has my attention for showing a brain cell.

Down at the end of the article, though, they go through a few examples of common leet words. Specifically, “Leet words of concern or indicating possible illegal activity”. You know, the ones that may indicate piracy, like warez, sploits and pron.

So, the message is that parents should check on their children, but the only real worry is whether or not they are pirating software or trafficking in pornography. Never mind the cyber-stalker your 12 yr old daughter has been chatting up in the dominatrix chatroom. It’s all about the bottom line, wot?

Please, stop the hurting…

The St. Petersburg Times writes today about a man being arrested for using someone’s un-secured wireless access point to gain access to the internet. They do not know what he was doing yet, but he was acting in a very suspicious manner, and the article goes on to describe some of the possible nefarious activities he may have been up to.

I can’t stress this enough, people: you have to set up the security features yourself. Wireless routers and access points ship from the factory with all the security features you could want, but they are turned off by default. If you follow the simple tutorial included in the documentation, however, you can turn all of that on – it only takes five minutes. Here’s a short look at what you can do:

Router Password This is the password you need to enter to access and change the router’s settings. By default, this will be blank or the same as the administrative login. Change this first thing to keep others out, and make sure the remote admin setting is turned off unless you really need it.

AD-HOC Networks This is what you call it when your computers connect to each other without the use of a router or access point. It can be usefull for file transfers to strangers, which is obviously both good and bad. Turn this off.

SSID or ESSID – This is the name of your network, so you can easily identify yours from your neighbor’s. D-Link routers use ‘default’, and Linksys call theirs ‘Linksys’ out-of-the-box. Not changing this value will lead others to think your network is open and invites hackers and bandwidth snatchers.

You can change this to anything you like, within a limit of 28 or so characters. In my line of work, we set up quite a few of these, and every time I set one up, I can ‘see’ at least one default network name. (Funniest SSID I’ve seen:” justworkdamnit”. Apparently somebody was having issues.)

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Or should I say belated review? It’s been a couple weeks since The Girlfriend and I went to see this.

For those that don’t mind a love story as long as there is some blood, gunfire and explosions, this is the movie for you. All I can tell you about the plot is that Mr. and Mrs. Smith are both assassins – but they work for rival agencies. Neither knows what the other truly does for a living, having both bought the other’s cover story when they met several years ago.

You can guess that this leads to some sticky situations. For example, one of Mrs. Smith’s assignments requires her to be a dominatrix as a cover, and she has to sneak out of the house in full leather gear, kill the mark and then go to a dinner party at the neighbor’s house. Everything goes well, with the exception that she forgot to take off her sexy fishnet stockings before changing into her pale little frumpy dress.

The acting may not be spectacular considering that Brad Pitt essentially plays himself, but you won’t be disappointed either. Looking through the IMDb listing for the movie, there are apparently some gun geeks out there with far too much time on their hands, but I assure you, the slight inconsistencies don’t interfere with the film for the rest of us.

All in all, a damn good flick with several lines that I’m sure will make it into this year’s vernacular.

“Honey, are you dead yet?” – Jane Smith

If you are like me and thought that the silliest court case you ever heard was the one about the woman who sued McDonald’s for spilling coffee, you were sadly wrong.

Yahoo! News reports that a Russian woman is currently suing NASA over the Tempel1 comet mission.

Marina Bai has sued the U.S. space agency, claiming the Deep Impact probe that punched a crater into the comet Tempel 1 late Sunday “ruins the natural balance of forces in the universe,” the newspaper Izvestia reported Tuesday.

Ok, the woman IS an astrologer who makes her living providing horoscopes to the public, but I somehow doubt she can resonably claim the $300 million she’s seeking as potential lost wages.

As a quick warning, I upgraded the blog tonight due to a security hole in the php – please let me know if you encounter any problems. The nice part is it took me only 15 minutes.

So, what does your friendly, furry, neighborhood techie-from-hell do on a Saturday? Does he rest easy? Does he lounge about chez Wolfe in a bathrobe? Nope.

He cleans.

Today we tackled the apartment en masse and got a number of things accomplished:

A trip to the Shack netted us the speaker wire needed to finally connect the rear speakers to the living-room media center. After which an hour so so was spent in trying to find the perfect movie scene to test said rear speakers. Considering the number of ‘caper’ flicks in my library, there were copious car-chase scenes to decide between.

Serious hoovering. The kind where you spend 20 minutes getting all the hair out of the hoover prior to using it to make sure you get all the crap out.

Floors have been scrubbed, as have toilets. Eww.

All of the above was also made possible by a trip to the store for supplies.

Why the veritable storm of sudsing? In preparation for the Great Annual Show-Up-If-You-Feel-Like-It Independence Day BBQ, of course.

That’s right, folks, hot dogs, hamburgers, chips dips chains and whips this Monday, including movies for your entertainment. If you want something that isn’t in the above list, bring it yerself. See you here around 2:00.