A new resource for information security documentation: SecurityDocs.com was founded two months ago with the intention of indexing information security white papers. The web site currently has about 1,400 papers in over 80 categories. I've submitted a couple of mine; we'll see if they show up!
[Via John Telford's Information Technology News]

I'm having minor outpatient surgery today, so I don't know if I'll be up to updating the blog for a couple days. We'll see. Toss a prayer off for me if you think of it.

Fontseek is a font meta-search engine. With it you will find both commercial and shareware/freeware downloadable, as long as you know the name of the font. Know what the font looks like but don't know the name? Try Identifont; it's a font identifier that enables you to identify a font from a sample by answering a series of simple questions. Want news on the latest fonts? Check out fontlover.com.

I thought this might have happened but it's dismaying nevertheless. In the great California fires on October 29, 2003, Camp Hual-Cu-Cuish burned entirely. Hual-Cu-Cuish (pronounced wa-ca-cush) was “my” Boy Scout Camp, the site of all of my summer camps with Scouts as well as my Order of the Arrow Ordeal. I am well and truly bummed. I love Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, especially Stonewall Peak, but the whole park is closed now until it recovers sufficiently from the fire to be safe. This really brings home the saying “my heart is heavy” because my heart feels like it weighs a ton right now.

I spent the day today at a Microsoft Security Summit at McCormick Place in Chicago. Yes, I did learn a lot about Microsoft system security (although I still consider the phrase to be an oxymoron) and I did get a copy of the Microsoft Security Resource Kit (a $49.99 value) and a copy of Windows XP Service Pack 2 Release Candidate 1 (SP-2 RC-1). But maybe the best thing I learned was why Microsoft bought Virtual PC: every demo was done on an entire virtual network all running on one notebook PC, with every node of the network running in Virtual PC. Truly stupid and destructive things could be done to the OS with literally “no harm done” and various security configurations could be installed without worry. We may have to rethink our use of Virtual PC as a pedagogical tool, especially because we can either prebuild VHD images or install an OS from scratch with the opportunity to really screw things up with “no harm done”. Yes, we may have to rethink some lab strategies in light of this...

Brooks Jackson, writing at the Annenberg Political Fact Checker, tells us:

Let me put the matter bluntly: an awful lot of the e-mailed messages zipping around the Internet are lies -- and too many are being sent on by gullible, lazy friends who ought to know better.

These falsehoods are multiplying like viruses as recipients forward them to their entire list of friends without making the slightest effort to verify what's being claimed, often with cover messages saying something like, "You HAVE to read this!"

This cyber-sickness should stop. All it takes is a little bit of common sense and skepticism, some curiosity and a few keystrokes. Nailing these lies can even be fun.

Read More...

The following email messages from Iraq have been sanitized for protection of the Marines involved but were relayed to me through reliable sources at the Pentagon:

Been a while since I've sent you an update. Hope things are going well for you and the family.

Don't believe what you hear on the news. Lots going on, but we are winning and winning big on all fronts. What you are seeing now are the death throes of two groups of evil people; one in the West and one in the South. Desperate men take desperate action.

The situation in the West is improving, Marines are hunting down and eliminating foreigners, smugglers, jihadis, and other assorted lawbreakers. Fallujah is cordoned off, nothing going in or out without USMC approval. The camp I'm in has been shelled three times in the last 24 hours. So far, no casualties. The bad guys are trying to do anything in their power to distract us from Fallujah. Give it a couple weeks and everything will calm down again. The Marines are going into an area that the 82nd Airborne Division never went into. A lot of really bad men fled to that area and used it as a sanctuary. We will clean it out.

The situation in the South isn't as bad as it sounds on the news. Most of the Shia population is waiting for us to come back in and flush the system, they are not backing the Mahdi Army. If you notice, there aren't more than a thousand demonstrators/thugs in any of the cities (including Najaf). Sadr's boys (aka the Mahdi Army) are a bunch of 20 something petty criminals and thugs that are out roaming the streets. The Salvadorians kicked the crap out of them in Najaf on Saturday. We are responding to all of the various groups, but in a manner that ensures that we don't alienate that 99+% of the population that supports us in the South. Give it some time and we will have a much stronger hand than we did even a few weeks ago.

This one is from the pointed end of the bayonet. The author is a rifle company commander waiting to attack into Fallujah. He is writing to his Dad, a retired Marine. The email came via the retired Marine circuit. All names have been removed. The author is obviously a bright young man and the type we want to see commanding a Marine rifle company. His words are most impressive. Of prime interest, he is thinking about his Marines, not himself. Also of special interest, he puts his finger on Fallujah as a safe haven for terrorists and “foreigners”.

Dad,

Things have been busy here. You know I can't say much about it. However, I do know two things. One, POTUS (President of the United States) has given us the green light to do whatever we needed to do to win this thing so we have that going for us. Two, and my opinion only, this battle is going to have far reaching effects on not only the war here in Iraq but in the overall war on terrorism. We have to be very precise in our application of combat power. We cannot kill a lot of innocent folks (though they are few and far between in Fallujah). There will be no shock and awe. There will be plenty of bloodshed at the lowest levels. This battle is the Marine Corps' Belleau Wood for this war. 2/1 and 1/5 will be leading the way. We have to find a way to kill the bad guys only. The Fallujahans are fired up and ready for a fight (or so they think). A lot of terrorists and foreign fighters are holed up in Fallujah. It has been a sanctuary for them. If they have not left town they are going to die. I'm hoping they stay and fight.

This way we won't have to track them down one by one. This battle is going to be talked about for a long time. The Marine Corps will either reaffirm its place in history as one of the greatest fighting organizations in the world or we will die trying. The Marines are fired up. I'm nervous for them though because I know how much is riding on this fight (the war in Iraq, the view of the war at home, the length of the war on terror and the reputation of the Marine Corps to name a few). However, every time I've been nervous during my career about the outcome of events when young Marines were involved they have ALWAYS exceeded my expectations. I'm praying this is one of those times.

God bless these great Americans who are ensuring we continue to fight an “away” schedule.

I'm on record as having been opposed to this war but others who remain opposed are now talking patent nonsense; especially Ted Kennedy who has called it “George Bush's Vietnam”. This only relects the fact that even today Kennedy does not recognize the true reason that Vietnam was an immoral war. It was not immoral because fighting Communism was a bad idea; it was immoral because the war was fought with no political will to win! Whatever you think of George Bush, there is clearly a political will to win in both Iraq and Afghanistan. This may not be clear to liberals in the U.S. and Europe, but it is abundantly clear to others in the world as evidenced by Muammar Qaddafi's turnabout on weapons of mass destruction as he recognized the resolve of the United States and Britain. And you can certainly see it reflected in these words from the field; if we are going to fight a war we should BY GOD be fighting it to win, and these boys say we are.

IT'S CALLED A CURVE. Good piece on grading and grading standards by Michael Lopez. Highlight of the discusson on curve grading:

The biggest problem I see is this: what if every student in a Combinatorics class actually gets all the right answers? Who gets the A's?

Personally I use standard-based grading: every student in my classes who who earns an A gets an A. Of course, students who earn them also get Cs, Ds and Es. (E is failing; Fs at IIT are reserved for Pass/Fail-graded courses).
[Via Highered Intelligence]

Fonts in Cyberspace links to more than 400 sources for fonts in 123 languages. Essential if you need that slippery foreign language font.
[Via the Internet Scout Weblog]

Make a strange person in a chicken costume dance, preen, fall over, and even execute unpleasant bodily functions. The the pretty dang scary chickensuited guy is at http://www.subservientchicken.com brought to you by Burger King (huh?).
[Via Brian Livingston's Brian's Buzz newsletter]

My eldest son, Andrew, is a fan of the “yo-yo of the 21st century”, Astrojax. His page on the Astrojax Web site was selected by the Astrojax site as this week's “Profile of the Week” so he is pretty jazzed. He's already IM'ed with the first member of the U.S. National Astrojax Team. I think he's a pretty neat kid but it's nice to see others recognize it as well!