Boston Herald: Alabama Shooter Played D&D
A story I missed last month: After University of Alabama-Huntsville professor Amy Bishop was arrested for shooting up her faculty department, Boston Herald reporter Laurel J. Sweet blew the lid off a shocking angle of the crime: Bishop was an avid player of role-playing games.
Accused campus killer Amy Bishop was a devotee of Dungeons & Dragons -- just like Michael "Mucko" McDermott, the lone gunman behind the devastating workplace killings at Edgewater Technology in Wakefield in 2000.
Bishop, now a University of Alabama professor, and her husband James Anderson met and fell in love in a Dungeons & Dragons club while biology students at Northeastern University in the early 1980s, and were heavily into the fantasy role-playing board game, a source told the Herald.
"They even acted this crap out," the source said.
I didn't think the press was still capable of anti-D&D hysteria like this. Back in the '80s, Joe McGinness wrote a ridiculous true-crime book on some murderer who blamed D&D for his crime, Tom Hanks starred in the anti-D&D TV movie Mazes and Monsters and grieving mother Patricia Pulling began the scare group Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, blaming the game caused her teen-age son's suicide.
But these days, D&D and role-playing games are about as controversial as Yahtzee. Millions of people played the game as kids and grew up without worshiping the occult or committing murders. The deaths of game creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in recent years were major news covered across the globe, sparking countless remembrances by people who huddled around a table with dice when we could've been experimenting with drugs and alcohol. (I was going to say drugs, sex and alcohol, but who am I kidding?) Today, millions of people play MMORPGS and other videogames that are D&D in everything but name.
Like out and proud D&D geek Stephen Colbert, I was a dungeon master in my youth (and not the cool kind who wears assless leather chaps and ties women up on torture wheels in my basement). I've managed to reach middle age without killing anybody at all, not even a single drifter or truck stop prostitute.
The Heavy: David Letterman Likes Them Now
On Jan. 18, the British band The Heavy impressed David Letterman so much with their song "How You Like Me Now?" that he did something he's never done before in the history of his program -- he asked for an encore.
The YouTube video is the televised broadcast -- which edits out most of the encore -- but you can see it in full in high quality on Letterman's web site. Paul Shaffer and Letterman even perform part of the encore.
There have been some great live performances on Letterman, including TV on the Radio's Wolf Like Me and Phoenix's 1901, but that one tops them all.
Google Flags MSNBC.Com as Malware Site
I was reading news stories this afternoon on MSNBC when one of its pages triggered a malware warning in Google Chrome:
The website at www.msnbc.msn.com contains elements from the site adrotator.mediaplex.feed-mnptr.com, which appears to host malware -- software that can hurt your computer or otherwise operate without your consent. Just visiting a site that contains malware can infect your computer.
According to Google's safe browsing alert for that feed-mnptr.com domain, it has contained three trojan programs and five browser security exploits. The domain has been used as an intermediary to infect users of Digg, CNBC and MSN.Com.
I can't check without visiting the MSNBC page, which would be extremely dumb, but based on the domain the malware appears to be coming in from a third-party ad service. There was a report Wednesday that the Drudge Report had hosted malware, probably from an ad network.
AP Keeps Accused Rapist's Name Secret
The Associated Press reported today on a 51-year-old New Jersey man facing trial for raping five of his daughters, three of whom allegedly bore his children from the assaults. He faces 27 charges including sexual assault, child endangerment and criminal sexual contact, but the wire service has decided not to name him in its coverage:
The Associated Press generally doesn't identify victims of sexual crimes and is not reporting the names of the husband and wife to protect the identities of their children, now all over 18 years of age.
The longstanding media policy to shield some crime victims from being identified has always been a questionable one, since people who suffer rape aren't the only victims who might be harmed by the publicity generated by a trial. Here, though, the policy has been extended to the perpetrator of a crime.
I question whether in a free society it is acceptable to put someone on trial and potentially imprison them while never revealing the person's name to the public. What if someone has information pertaining to the accused that ought to be known to police? What if other victims are out there who might never know to come forward unless told of the arrest?
In any case, the web has made it considerably more difficult for information of this kind to stay secret. The New Jersey Star-Ledger and New York Daily News identify the accused rapist as Aswad Ayinde.
Deterring Spammers with Fake MX Records
For the past 48 hours, I've been dealing with a Sendmail server that was shutting down frequently with a load average above 13. The server's getting flooded constantly with spam attempts to non-existent users on more than 100 domains.
I've set up Sendmail to use a virtusertable that rejects every non-valid email address with a "user unknown" error. This is helpful, but Sendmail still has to take the time to reject each spam attempt. Since all but six domains on the server don't receive any mail at all, I wanted to find a way to stop Sendmail from receiving any requests for those domains.
After doing some research, I decided to try setting a fake MX record for the domains that do not send or receive mail. Here's how MX records are set for these domains:
IN MX 10 mail.example.com.
There's no mail server associated with that hostname.
On servers that do exchange email, fake MX records can be used to deter spammers. Most email servers are equipped to deal with mail servers that are unavailable. They queue the outgoing mail and try an alternate mail server, if one has been defined for the domain. Spam software can't take the time to queue an outgoing mail for delivery later because it is sending millions of messages. If it finds a mail server that's unavailable, it gives up and goes on to the next server.
Putting fake servers as the first and last MX record in a domain supposedly discourages spammers without affecting the receipt of legitimate email. Spammers hit the fakes and give up. Legitimate mail servers hit a fake, then try the next option and deliver the mail.
Here's how MX records can be set to achieve this:
IN MX 10 mail1.example.com.
IN MX 20 mail2.example.com.
IN MX 30 mail3.example.com.
The mail1.example.com and mail3.example.com servers are fakes that don't resolve properly. The functioning mail server is at mail2.example.com.
So far, the approach appears to work. Legitimate email is getting through and most domains aren't getting any spam attempts at all.
Former Sun CEO: Steve Jobs Threatened Patent Suit
Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz began a new blog three weeks ago called What I Couldn't Say to "put context around some of the decisions I faced at Sun," now that he's free from the corporate obligations to watch his words.
Schwartz writes today about tech company patent wars, revealing a 2003 meeting where Apple's Steve Jobs threatened Sun over patents:
In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphical effects were "stepping all over Apple's IP." (IP = Intellectual Property = patents, trademarks and copyrights.) If we moved forward to commercialize it, "I'll just sue you."
My response was simple. "Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence -- do you own that IP?" Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I'd help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they’d found inspiration. "And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too." Steve was silent.
As a longtime Java book author I can remember the Project Looking Glass pitch. I can't think of any reason why Jobs would threaten patent litigation to stop it. Sun proposed and abandoned countless big ideas over the years.
Meet Sarah Killen, Conan O'Brien's Favorite Twit
Since joining Twitter on Feb. 24, Conan O'Brien has amassed more than 534,000 followers and posted 10 tweets. Contractually exiled from late night television until September, O'Brien has embraced the new medium, sharing inane personal details of his life, airing petty grievances and even posting a Twitpic of how many people it takes for him to compose each tweet.
Friday afternoon, O'Brien announced that he has taken his first follower:
I've decided to follow someone at random. She likes peanut butter and gummy dinosaurs. Sarah Killen, your life is about to change.
Killen, a Fowlerville, Michigan, resident who has the username LovelyButton, has already acquired 10,200 followers and become one of Twitter's trending topics.
Furthering the insanity, her recent tweet calling Fowlerville resident Russell Bigos "an idiot" is making him a figure of scorn and sympathy. Killen's fiance John Slowik Jr. posted on Facebook Jan. 12 that he was "about to woop bigos in nba2k10," so this could be a videogame basketball rivalry gone terribly wrong. We'll have to wait for the media to dig for answers.
MTV did a video interview with Killen Friday night. She told MTV she was asked in advance by an O'Brien rep if it would be OK to pick her. Since her selection, she's received a free Apple iMac from HornBlasters and offered other freebies for her impending wedding.
Killen posted a link on Twitter to her Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure donation page, where she's raised $1,100 towards her $5,000 goal in nine hours.
By the way, I've also decided to follow someone at random. He likes Jewish action figures and the metric system. Jonathan Bourne, your life is about to change.
Update: Sarah Killen is friends on Facebook with Aaron Bleyaert, the former Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien blogger, so it's possible that the selection wasn't entirely random. This scandal could go all the way up to the top! What did Coco know and when did he know it?
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