The truth is that exactly two things have made air travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing cockpit doors and convincing passengers they need to fight back. The TSA should continue to screen checked luggage. They should start screening airport workers. And then they should return airport security to pre-9/11 levels and let the rest of their budget be used for better purposes. Investigation and intelligence is how we’re going to prevent terrorism, on airplanes and elsewhere.

Bike Week KC starts up next week, and I joined up on Brent Hugh’s MoBikeFed Wheel Wizards team, for no other reason than b/c I got a mass e’mail from him about it. I couldn’t pick the man out of a crowd, but if it keeps him from buying dinner for other people I don’t know, and helps me with the whole biking thing…

Well, why not?

So… I’m signed up, and though I’ll need my car at least one day next week, I don’t see why I can’t ride to work the rest…

See you out there. And Noah if I see you, I promise I’ll wave back.

Keep ridin’…

Just watched this on the television… more ridiculous scare mongering from self-important local news personalities. To be fair, the advice was good, such as “Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in real life.” and the tips for parents

However, they lost me with the bits about the sex offenders and the lack of police manpower and time to check them all was completely glossed over. They ignored the fact that the list is so polluted with people who have no business being there, that the police may miss the real threats

In the end, it was irrational fear mongering in the name of ratings without any real perspective on the level of danger.

But that’s what I expected to find, so that’s what I found.

“Hi Readers — When you get right down to it, a lot of Free-Range Kids ends up being a plea for more community. More helping each other, more trusting each other, even more hanging out with each other. And here is a story of just that: A brief glimpse of how nice it is when [...]

When zero-discretion policies and accurate risk calculus collide we have… common sense. This story is remarkable by the very fact that it’s unremarkable.

Keep tabs on your child at all times with this small but sophisticated device that combines GPS and cellular technology to provide you with real-time location updates. The small and lightweight Little Buddy transmitter fits easily into a backpack, lunchbox or other receptacle, making it easy for your child to carry so you can check his or her location at any time using a smartphone or computer. Customizable safety checks allow you to establish specific times and locations where your child is supposed to be — for example, in school — causing the device to alert you with a text message if your child leaves the designated area during that time. Additional real-time alerts let you know when the device’s battery is running low so you can take steps to ensure your monitoring isn’t interrupted.

Or…

Helicopter parents rejoice! Now you can give up any semblense that you’re raising your child to be his or her own person. With this device, you can establish, without a doubt in your childs mind, that he or she is completely incapable of doing anything on his or her own. Do you want to raise children unable to make decisions on their own? Do you want to ensure that they rely on you for the simplest of tasks well into their adult life? Do you want to spend every waking moment worried about where your child is, what he or she is doing, and who he or she is doing it with? Are you convinced by the mass-media that there are abductors and molesters around every corner, even in your own yard? If you answered yes to even one of the above questions, then our Surveillance Tracker is for you!

If you call within the next 10 minutes (and we know you will, because every second counts when your child’s life is under immediate and extreme threat), we’ll throw in our home surveillance system that allows you to monitor every room in your home from your smart phone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the low low price of $24.99.

Restrictions and shipping charges apply. Only available in the continental United States.

All that said, I can see a use for this in tracking friends and fellows on long rides, such as the Triple Bypass.

A judge found Marvin Oberly guilty last week of driving on the wrong side of a two-way highway and passing a vehicle on the wrong side. Douglas Kenney died of [the tragic and needless] injuries he suffered in the accident on Nov. 9, 2007 [due to Oberly’s utterly irresponsible and reckless actions].

Oberly is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 30. He faces [a paltry] 30 days in jail for each of the counts and up to a year suspension [rather than the far more just complete and permanent revocation] of his drivers license. [It is left as an exercise for the reader to rationalize how 60 days in jail and a year's suspension balances out the irresponsibility and recklessness that resulted in Kenney's death.]

Prosecutors argued that Oberly drove up behind Kenney in his pickup and collided with the bicycle Kenney, who was riding his bicycle in a manner consistent with safety and law.

Oberly testified provided the lame and weak excuse during his trial that glare from the sun prevented him from seeing Kenney[, which would have been inconsequential had be been driving on the correct side of the road and not passed another vehicle on the shoulder].

Original here.

Reporting Unruly Football Fans via Text Message

Fans still are urged to complain to an usher or call a security hotline in the stadium to report unruly behavior. But text-messaging lines — typically advertised on stadium scoreboards and on signs where fans gather — are aimed at allowing tipsters to surreptitiously alert security personnel via cellphone without getting involved with rowdies or missing part of a game.

As of this week, 29 of the NFL’s 32 teams had installed a text-message line or telephone hotline. Three clubs have neither: the New Orleans Saints, St. Louis Rams and Tennessee Titans. Ahlerich says he will “strongly urge” all clubs to have text lines in place for the 2009 season. A text line will be available at the Super Bowl for the first time when this season’s championship game is played at Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium on Feb. 1.

“If there’s someone around you that’s just really ruining your day, now you don’t have to sit there in silence,” says Jeffrey Miller, the NFL’s director of strategic security. “You can do this. It’s very easy. It’s quick. And you get an immediate response.”

• Granted: It can be difficult to impossible to reason with unruly, and sometimes drunk sports fans.
• Granted: It can be dangerous to try to reason with unruly, and sometimes drunk sports fans.
• Granted: Security personnel have the power and authority to protect us from both each other and ourselves. Ideally. They’re only human, and have lapses in judgment just as the rest of us do.

All the same, this use of technology seems to be an excuse to not even try to handle things ourselves. It grants permission to tuck tail and hide behind mommy and daddy’s legs while they handle our problems for us. It makes it too easy to defer responsibility for our own feelings and actions, and hand it over to someone else, rather than buck up and stand up for ourselves… or at least try to.

Shouldn’t calling security be a last resort? This seems to make it too easy.

I welcome any and all views on this. In fact, I eagerly await them.

Mark Breeding attended the court proceedings and filed the following report:

Mr. Bondon was found guilty of attempted assault with the judge describing it as classic road rage. He escalated a minor exchange into a terrifying confrontation that required police involvement.

The penalties prescribed by the judge include: ninety day sentence with two days served in jail, two years probation and an anger management class. Mr. Bondon is presently free on bond.

Summary of the trial proceeding: Defense claims that the cyclists hit the Bondon Hummer with a water bottle and yelled profanities at him for turning in front of them.

Bicyclists Matt and Richard assert that they did nothing aggressive beyond the comment of “you couldn’t wait ten seconds” before turning. From this the stories converge to the point of the Hummer being driven across the yard to intercept the riders and a confrontation taking place. Bondon claims no bumping of the cyclists or physical attack took place. Richard and Rachel made it clear they thought that a possible life or death situation was taking place, initially believing that Mr. Bondon was carrying a handgun.

The judge felt that he needed to send a message to Mr. Bondon who he said obviously feels he did no wrong. He made mention of Mr. Bondon’s high profile as former Jackson County Sports Authority Chairman.

The defense attorney asserted that the riders had provoked the confrontation and that the prosecution was a vendetta by a group of avid cycling advocates. He worked the words “WMD” and “conspiracy” into the summation.

Character issues were emphasized during the trial, with testimony from bicyclist Matt Maher, a school teacher, Richard Gordon, a consultant for one of the nation’s largest nonprofits, and Rachel Thompson, a chemist.

The two defense witnesses were a Lees Summit police officer and Mr. Bondon’s second cousin, a two time convicted felon currently on probation.

Mr. Bondon tended to elaborate beyond the questions asked by defense counsel and did not keep his composure under cross by prosecutor Craig Sweeney. He gave the impression having some impulse control problems.

Much was made by the defense of discrepancies between the Richard and Rachel’s testimony and subsequent playing of their 911 calls. This was pretty much dismissed by the judge. There was some sharp give and take between defense and prosecution throughout the proceedings and I really had no idea how the judge would rule.

And now for a personal comment: Where were all of you? Aside from court officers and one spectator, Matt’s parents and myself were the only people there for the duration of the trial. You missed a great day for cyclists here in KC.

Another comment: If William Johnson had killed the Gaunts on the other side of Longview Lake, he would probably be in jail today.

The prosecution put forward by Mr. Sweeney was zealous. Much more so than what I witnessed during my time at the Gaunt trial.

Cars always will vastly outnumber bikes, he reasons, so allotting more street space to cyclists could cause more traffic jams, more idling and more pollution. Mr. Anderson says the city has been blinded by political correctness. It’s an “attempt by the anti-car fanatics to screw up our traffic on behalf of the bicycle fantasy,” he wrote in his blog this month.

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a conclusion.

Frankly, I’ve just not seen it. I’ve been out nearly every day riding my route, peacefully and almost entirely without incident. In fact, I can count on one hand the times I’ve been “harassed”, and both times it was very easy to chalk it up to idiocy. The first was a (pardon my stereotypes here) three toothed, chew spittin’ redneck on a country road yelling “Dip Ass!“, and the second was a pair of know-it-all high school jocks in daddy’s pick up.

Aside from that, I’ve had numerous men and women offer admiration and encouragement. Two quite attractive young women even offered me a ride. Stupid me, I didn’t think to ask where we were going to ride to. ;) Just the other day, I got into a brief exchange with a fellow at an intersection who good-naturedly told me I was crazy, and then said how he wished he could do the same. I talked about how much better I felt and how much gas money I’d saved, and told him if he really wanted to, he’d find a way. He looked thoughtfully at me, nodded, wished me luck and safety and the light turned.

I have no idea what motorists are *thinking* when I pass by them, or they pass by me. I know there are many motorists who hate cyclists. A visit to the comments section on any cycling story in the news will tell you that. (I like how the Tuscon Bicycle Lawyer puts it here). I do know that if they’re thinking anything negative, they aren’t saying it out loud, and more than a few times, they’ve said very positive things to me.

Is there a rising tension between cyclists and motorists? I’ve certainly not seen it, and I very much doubt it. Does reporting on such a phenomena sell papers? You bet it does.

Why do people laugh at creationists?

Only creationists don’t know.

I was working at a bank that had recently gone through a merger. In that merger, many of my friends and co-workers lost their jobs. It was a trying situation, but all of them eventually landed on their feet. One of them found work at a third party health plan administrator, and was in dire need of help. He set about recruiting me, and for many reasons, I took the bait.

When I arrived, I quickly realized how desperately in need of help he was. The situation was dire. The network was a mess. The hosts on the network were in horrific shape. End of life operating systems were still in production, some hidden away in closets. Win 95 (yes… 95) was hanging about. Likewise NT 4.0, of which some were original installs that had never been patched, even when those patches were readily available. Anti-virus installations were spotty at best, and of those installed, many were without up-to-date signatures. The firewalls had any-any-allow rules both for both ingress and egress traffic. The built in anti-malware modules were disabled, and logging was almost useful. While most users had actually been reduced to power user level, all users of the Citrix farm had local administrator accounts on the member servers. There were lot more issues, but that’s enough for the story, and to list them all would be tedious, to say the least…

On March 12th, all the NT 4.0 servers, and a few unpatched Win 2000 servers were infected with a backdoor trojan. My best guess and research pointed to W32/Rbot-AKU, though I was never able to confirm md5 hashes or find adequate documentation. The only real clues were the presence of %SYSTEM%\system32\qtask.exe, %SYSTEM%\system32\drivers\Oreans.sys, and %SYSTEM%\system32\irdvxc.exe).

How the infection penetrated the network is still unknown. I suspect a home user logged into the Citrix farm as a local administrator brought it in, but I can’t be sure. The behavior of the trojan indicates that it could have simply been a remote infection by random scanning. The firewalls would have certainly allowed it.

This infection caused 3 days of network outage during my second week when my primary technical contact/mentor was out of town. I was on my own trying to figure out firewalls I’d never worked on, a network about which I knew next to nothing and business processes I’ve not been trained on. There was, of course, no documentation. There was nothing in the way of traffic analysis software installed, and the firewalls had horrible logging and terrible connection management. I didn’t know what normal traffic was, or even if there was an issue with traffic. Several third party VPN connections were the source of the vast majority of management tension, so that’s where I focused my efforts for the first two days.

Finally, on the third day of complete outage, I realized that it was a virus. Not knowing the environment, I’d been troubleshooting the wrong thing. I finally found it, cleaned the infected servers I could clean, and powered off those I couldn’t, and the network came alive like magic. Though it wasn’t by design, the trojan on the infected servers was performing a DDoS attack on the firewalls. Their connection queue was constantly full, and they were dropping all traffic. They were simply unable to keep up with the huge volume of traffic being generated.

Years and years of never upgrading, never updating, never patching and pulling computers together from eBay and garage sales equaled infection by virus many and legion. Infection equaled downtime. Three days of downtime equaled hundreds of thousands of dollars lost and a major strike to the company reputation.

I bolstered the firewalls as best I can by tightening down the rule set, enabling the built in IDS and IPS, and prioritizing VPN traffic. I set up scans to monitor the %SYSTEM% folder on all the Win32 devices that I could, but there were 6 domains with incomplete and misconfigured trust, and I was unable to see all of them.

Over the next few weeks, the IT team and I worked diligently and hard to bring the anti-virus installations up to date and protect every machine on the network. We went in over the weekend and hit every machine by hand to make absolutely sure they were covered. Microsoft security patches were applied through this period as well, with some machines needing literally hundreds of patches. This had been done in large part prior to my arrival, but there was work yet to be done.

The trojan hits again on April 12th, but only for about an hour this time. One of the servers I was unable to physically get to for cleaning, having been shut down in March, was brought back online unbeknownst to me for a software install. Only an hour and a half, but it’s enough to enrage the CEO who informed us that anyone who touches a production server without approval will be fired on the spot. The good news is our efforts to protect the network appeared to have worked. This was the only server with an infection that was affecting the network.

Tuesday, April 17th, I noticed another NT 4.0 server was infected. Alarmed, I was relieved that no downtime, as of yet, had occurred. The changes I’d made to the firewalls and the work we’d done to protect the machines on the network were still working. This, however, was an original install NT server, and patches simply did not exist to protect it. As far as I, or anyone else on site knew, the trojan DoS symptoms could kick in at any time. I wrote my manager and the business owner of the server and informed them of the situation. I informed them that if I didn’t clean the server, I could not guarantee it wouldn’t bring the network down again. It had been infected for a few days so far with no affect, but given the lack of documentation, I couldn’t determine or predict how the trojan would behave. I concluded that we might be safe, but we might not be, and left the decision in their hands.

The business owner and IT Applications Manager gave me the go-ahead via e’mail to clean the server. I was in and out in 15 minutes. Following the cleaning, I scanned the network deeply with all the tools at my disposal to finally determine that the trojan was, once and for all, gone.

Wednesday, April 18th, my boss, the IT Infrastructure Manager was fired by the CEO on direction from the Board for lack of confidence. The downtime was too much for them to tolerate… never mind the lack of patching, lack of updating, lack of anti-virus and end of life operating systems that he’d inherited from his predecessors. He was given a no-win situation, did the best he could, and was fired for his efforts. It’s ironic that just three months prior, he was lauded as a hero in the company for the progress he’d made and given a very healthy bonus.

Thursday, April 19th comes and we were all still reeling from the loss of my boss, our friend. In an IT wide meeting, we were assured that it was a one time thing, and that no one is on the warpath.

Friday, April 20th, the CEO and HR arrive at my office door at 8:30am and informed me that my employment had been terminated. The IT Applications Manager apparently told him he had to talk me down from shutting off a production server. I’m too shocked to realize what he’s talking about and simply take what’s mine and leave. Only later do I begin to process what happened and come to realize what had been done to me. The IT App Manager sold me out, and misinformed the CEO regarding what happened with that last infected server. He neglected to mention the permission he gave me, and misrepresented our conversations to make it appear as if I was on a rampage and in a panic.

It is clear to me now that not cleaning that server could have easily resulted in further corporate wide network downtime, and that downtime would have gotten me fired. On the other hand, taking offline with permission for 15 minutes a single NT 4.0 server that is used by 3 or 4 people 3 or 4 times a day in order to guarantee no corporate wide network downtime did get me fired.

I was in a classic catch 22.

In short, I believe both my boss and I were terminated for political reasons. We tried to affect real and positive technical and security improvements in an organization that had, for the past 20+ years, grossly under funded IT, and given zero thought to information security. For the leaders of a company in the third party health plan administration industry to behave in this manner is disturbing. I believe the mindset was such that we simply did not fit, and excuses were found for the both of us to be fired.

Never have I regretted a job-related decision as much as my choice to leave a safe and comfortable job for that one. For that matter, there are very few decisions in any area of my life I’ve regretted more. Compound that by what I’ve learned recently… had I stayed, not only would I be making considerably more money, but I would have a decent chance of moving to Orlando, FL. Fah! *spit*

From what I’ve heard from friends who still work there, the situation isn’t much better. On the technology side, there have been improvements, and many of the safeguards I helped put in place remain and are maintained. On the political side, however, there is still plenty of uncertainty, upheaval and fear. All in all, though being fired had severe consequences in my personal life, a year later I can say without reservation that I am definitely better off.

Absolutely. And while we’re banning bicycles due to the number of deaths involved, we need to start in on motorcycles, b/c cars don’t see them. Then we’ll move to cars b/c other cars and trucks don’t see them. Then we’ll move to the trucks b/c larger utility vehicles and semi trucks don’t see them. Then we’ll ban the utility vehicles and semi trucks b/c they pollute the air, endangering the lives of pedestrians. That pollution kills and maims.

If we were meant to travel that fast, we’d have stronger and longer legs.

But that’s really not good enough if you think about it. Air travel needs to be seriously looked at due to the number of deaths caused by both human error and mechanical failure. Airplanes, commercial, corporate and private all need to be brought down out of the sky, with force if necessary. It’s plain irresponsible to be up there.

If we were meant to fly, we’d have wings.

Don’t forget trains, either. How many passenger trains run off the track every year, causing untold and tragic loss of life? How many deaths and dismemberments are caused each year at train yards during loading, unloading and switching?

If we were meant to be around train tracks, we’d have steel wheels instead of feet.

What about boats? How much loss of life will we tolerate before we ban boats? Fast boats lose control so easily, and slow boats get in the way of fast boats.

If we were meant to travel the water, we’d have fins and gills, possibly properly placed blow holes.

That’s just the major forms of travel… what about everything else that causes injury and loss of life? What about the loss of life and limb in wood shops, metal shops and factories the world over? If we were meant to work those materials, we’d have knives and hammers and tools for hands.

It’s not about banning. It’s about paying attention. That goes for everyone on our roads, highways, air lanes, and waterways… large and small, fast and slow, powered and manpowered vehicles all.

Aside from what I believe is absurdly flawed logic, I find his willingness to give up freedoms in the face of danger very disturbing. “Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” – Benjamin Franklin.