Sexual imagery in disco songs

So here I am sitting in a coffee shop, editing DV footage, and listening to 80s disco. In process it occured to me that a whole number of songs that are catchy and were really popular back in the day have tons of really explicit and suggestive sexual content in their lyrics.

Here is an example from “Abracadabra” by Steve Miller Band:

[…]
I feel the magic in your caress
I feel magic when I touch your dress
Silk and satin, leather and lace
Black panties with a ninja’s face

I see magic in your eyes
I hear the magic in your sighs
Just when I think I’m gonna get away
I hear those words that you always say

Abra abra cadabra
I want to reach out and grab ya
Abra abra cadabra
Abracadabra

Every time you call my name
I heat up like a burnin’ flame
Burnin’ flame full of desire
Kiss me baby, let the fire get higher
[…]

MP3 will be available until it is no-longer available.

Black panties with a ninja’s face. I like.

As an aside…. Can’t get enough ninjas? Look no further! Clicking on the “Shirts and Clothing” and then on “Intimates” on the sidebar provides some entertainment.

Then there is the infamous hooligan of the 70s, Tom Jones, with “Sex Bomb”:

[…]
I’m gonna fire, shoot me right
I’m gonna like the way you fight
And I love the way you fight, baby

Now you found the secret code I use to wash away my lonely blues
So I can’t deny or lie cause you’re the only one to make me fly
You know what you are you are a…

Sex bomb sex bomb you’re a sex bomb Uh, huh
You can give it to me when I need to come along give it to me
Sex bomb sex bomb you’re my sex bomb
And baby you can turn me on
You know what you’re doing to me don’t you, I know you do

Now Don’t get me wrong ain’t gonna do you no harm
This bomb’s made for lovin’ and you can shoot it far
I’m your main target come and help me ignite Ow
Love struck holding you tight Hold me tight darlin’

Make me explode although you know the route to go to sex me slow Slow baby
And yes I must react to claims of those who say that you are not all that Huh, Huh, Huh

Sex bomb sex bomb you’re my sex bomb
[…]

MP3 will be available until it is no-longer available.

Of course Tom Jones also sang “Delilah”, which is a murder ballad worthy of Nick Cave and Bad Seeds

So, I guess an obligatory opinion… I don’t care. I listen to these songs, I recognize the sexual undertones, but are these songs any worse then Boney M’s Daddy Cool? I mean, from a point of view of a bible thumper, isn’t that song advocating incest? Does that mean that everyone should stop listening to it?

There are two problems with this thinking that I see. For starters, “who died and made you judge” problem – in other words, how can anyone decide for anyone else? It might work in certain percentage of the cases, but isn’t a function of a parent to teach by example, and teach children enough morality to form their own opinions that would be “apropriate”?

Second problem is the divide between obscenity and the art. Is “Sex Bomb” art? What about Nick Cave’s “Stagger Lee“?

P.S. (and wild wild tangent that explains how I got familiar with Nick Cave’s songs) Many years ago, William Lee Irwin 3rd, back then at Purdue finishing a math degree , would drop by #unix on efnet (or on Unixnet, it has been a few years) in the wee hours in the morning, drunk, and quote verses out of “Stagger Lee” with every “Lee” replaced with “wli”. Then again, this was normal for #unix.

*** wli is wli@holomorphy.com (William Lee Irwin III)
*** on channels: #chess #prolog @#barbie_doll_torture @#unix @#haskell 
+@#fp @#compsci @#math @#scheme @#mathdepravity
*** on irc via server irc.idle.net ([216.34.2.113] Phoenix Rising)

Those were the times.

*** stany has changed the topic on channel #unix to <wli> 3 cigarettes 
+from now, I suppose I have to put pants on
> Good old vintage wli.
<wli> stany: heh
<wli> stany: Things aren't that different today. =)

I miss wli.

Bait

In previous post I gave a link to David Gerrold’s The Martian Child.

The Martian Child is supposed to be light fiction. In other words, most of the elements in it are supposed to be real. So when I’ve read in that story a reference to Jeff Duntemann, a Hugo award nominee turned programming book writer, I got curious, and googled.

The results didn’t disappoint.

Reading STORMY will take you at most 3 minutes, yet I am sure you will enjoy it as much as I did.

Red Book

“I appreciate your expertise. But I’m not without some knowledge myself.” I gave him what I hoped was my friendliest smile.

“Yeah, what—?” he looked skeptical. “You read the red book?”

“Um … actually, I wrote the red book. The ecological sections are mine.”

A Method for Madness, David Gerrold

I am really looking forward to the next David Gerrold‘s Chtorr book.

In the meanwhile, here are his The Martial Child, and The Man Who Folded Himself

P.SFull disclosure: I own all four Chtorr books, and intend buying the rest when they come out.

JFLAP

Mental note: If for some really bizzare reason I might need to draw lines pointing at circles, or try to figure out if
S -> aSb|aS|ε actually matches L={a^ib^j| i>=j}, I will try to solve the problem by hand first. However, in event I am really lazy, and forgot how to convert an NFA to DFA or actually want to trace the stack of a PDA matching a CFG, I will download JFLAP and use it.

Now, why did I discover this thing after I wrote my final exam? So that I could learn how to do it by hand, that’s why. It would have rocked my world about 3 months ago, but I probably would have failed the exams, relaying on it to do everything for me.

Oh, and notation it uses for CFG/PDA is somewhat different from one used in Sipser (Which is a damn fine book, BTW. Unlike Lawson it actually covers CFLs.).

P.S Mark Lawson actually makes reasonably good notes available on his page about basic automata. It still doesn’t go into CFLs/PDAs.

Trade publications

I love trade publications. That is, I love the ads in them. The ads are generally targeted to a specific group of people, everyone buying advertisment space in a publication knows who the main subscribers are, and thus you get full page ads such as “Congratulations on a job well done!” aimed at a particular achievment of NASA, and unobtrusively reminding the reader that such and such heavy industries were the pilar and staple of american freedom for the last century.

So here is a small, non-comprehensive sampling of the weird and wonderful. Please note that I don’t endorse them.

Next time you need integrated security solutions, airfield management or bare base construction, you should look no futher then this ad, that appeared in November 21st issue of “Aviation Week and Space Technology”:
KBR ad - PNG
I found a PDF of it online after googling for “targeted set of aviation services” (Was a google whack, too) on Janes Defence Weekly site, so obviously Haliburton decided that readers of JDW might some day need some program management for large complex projects too.

If those pesky adversaries of yours decided that they can stalemate you by mining your harbors, not a problem. All you need is an autonomous underwater vehicle, which will do the mine reconnaissance, bathymetric mapping, REA category 2-4 (overt, covert and in-stride), and even route survey for you. In case you didn’t know, REA is Rapid Environment Assessment.

CC-Tech ad

This ad came out of September/October2004 issue of Unmanned Systems, a publication of Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. If it caught your fancy, consider reading the military version of system description (After all, who’d want a civilian version?)

Lastly, just in case your grenades are not convincing enough, consider upgrading – these ones provide up to 60% more oomph in a package that is 25% lighter. So instead of 3, you can now take 4, wherever life takes you.
RUAG grenade ad

Defintely a big thumb up to Jane’s – they have their list of advertiserers up, with ads previewable in PDF format.

And you thought that you are out of options ever since villainsupply.com went out of business?

Ok, now I am curious. Just what factors do you measure, when you calculate a performance of grenade?

Steve Bellovin in Ottawa (Part II)

Actual lecture was on the 5th floor of Carleton’s Minto building.

It started with the Cognos folks giving a brief speech on how glad they are to see Carleton partnering with them, and how glad they are to see Professor Bellovin in Ottawa. Cognos is one of the larger employers in Ottawa, and hires a good number of Carleton’s comp sci graduates, and this time they were the ones who brought professor Bellovin into Ottawa (or at least that’s the impression I got).

After that, Carleton’s Dean of Sciences took the podium, and thanked Cognos folks, thanked everyone for attending, and introduced
Paul Van Oorschot, a Canada Research Chair in Network and Software Security. Dr. Van Oorschot, in turn introduced Dr Bellovin.

Seriously, I don’t know any of these people, so I have no comment.

Then Professor Bellovin took the stage, and for about an hour and 20 minutes kept the audience interested. Professor Bellovin is a great speaker – he interspersed the the slides with a number of personal anecdotes about first hand encounters with improper security design.

Do at least page through the slides – it’s worth while.

So here are a couple of photos:
Professor Steve Bellovin in the hallway after the lecture
Professor Bellovin.
Professor
Professor Bellovin in the hallway after the lecture.

Oh, and I got my copy of “Wily Hacker” autographed. 🙂

So now some questions on my part….

On page 3 of the slides, Dr Bellovin talks about NSA “Blacker Front End” project for end to end encryption and access control on a computer network.

In an article Uncultured Perl (use bugmenot to login, why do these folks want to track you?), Larry Wall says:

Like the typical human, Perl was conceived in secret, and existed for roughly nine months before anyone in the world ever saw it. Its womb was a secret project for the National Security Agency known as the “Blacker” project, which has long since closed down. The goal of that sexy project was not to produce Perl. However, Perl may well have been the most useful thing to come from Blacker. Sex can fool you that way.

Is that the same project?

Is security really in the interest of the operating system vendors? Commercial vendors see little motivation due to lack of demand. OpenSource/Free vendors see little motivation because crypto is hard, and making crypto user friendly AND correctly implemented is beyond the scope of what they teach you in the 2nd or even 4th year of Comupter Science program. Heck, it’s a multi-discipline approach, that requires user interface skills, math skills and programming skills.

Any joker can implement an RSA algorithm. Heck, I implemented it using libtommath and libtomcrypt for a group theory course in a couple of hours. But I won’t trust my implementation worth a damn – I know how poorly it is coded. I am not sure I can get it “right” at my current skill level.

So without demand and corresponding monetary inscentive and without gratification from a good job, do folks even bother? I don’t see former FreeS/WAN folks toiling hard on IPsec. Last release is in April of 2004 (2.0.6) (Their web site says 2003!), so I guess just user gratitude didn’t cut it.

Is Kame.org going strong?

The only folks that I know who are actually working on security now a day are OpenBSD folks. And when was the last time YOU installed or used OpenBSD? Using it right now? Good for you.

How do you educate users? Of course alt.sysadmin.recovery FAQ advocates one approach, which is:

4.3) What is the best way to deal with lusers?

Lusers are much easier to deal with if they aren't breathing.  240V across the
heart, a revolver round through the head, or even a simple little broadsword
thrust into their abdomen will improve your interactions wonderfully.
See next item.

4.4) Revolvers, cyanide and high voltages:  The pros and cons of various luser
education strategies.

There has been a great deal of debate on ASR about the best way of dealing
with lusers, and at this time no consensus has been reached.  What we can
suggest, however, is to be sure it is painful, clean, and doesn't harm
the computer.  That unfortunately leaves a lot of options out; you can't
just throw a grenade at them; it will hurt the machine.

At one point in the past, I would have agreed. Now a days, I am not sure that even these methods will work.

Does Unicode work?

Alan asked me to transcribe and translate an old song for him. I figure this is a good excuse to check if WordPress support Unicode apropriately.

Song is “Война” (Vojna) by Виктор Цой, гр Кино (Viktor Tsoj, gr. Kino).

Покажи мне людей уверенных в завтрашнем дне.
Нарисуй мне портреты погибших на этом пути.
Покажи мне того кто выжил один из полка.
И кто-то должен стать дверю, а кто-то замком, а кто-то ключом от замка.

Земля. Небо.
Между землёй и небом – война.
И где-бы ты не был, что-б ты не делал,
Между землёй и небом – война.

Где-то есть люди для кого есть день и есть ночь
Где-то есть люди у которых есть сын и есть дочь
Где-то есть люди для которых теорема верна.
Но кто-то станет стеной, а кто-то плечом, под которым дрогнет стена.

Земля. Небо.
Между землёй и небом – война.
И где-бы ты не был, что-б ты не делал,
Между землёй и небом – война.

Между землёй и небом – война.
Между землёй и небом – война.

And here is the translation:

Show (point out) me people sure of tomorrow.
Draw me portrets of those who died on this way.
Show me him, who was the lone survivor from a platoon.
And someone has to become a door, someone a lock, and someone a key from a lock.

Earth. Sky.
Between earth and sky there is war.
And wherever you are, whatever you do,
Between earth and sky there is war.

Somewhere there are people for whom there is day and there’s night.
Somewhere there are people who have a son and a daughter.
Somewhere there are people for whom theorem is correct.
But someone will become a wall, and someone will become a shoulder, under which the wall will tremble.

Earth. Sky.
Between earth and sky there is war.
And wherever you are, whatever you do,
Between earth and sky there is war.

Between earth and sky there is war.
Between earth and sky there is war.

I am not certain how long mp3 will last.

OCTranspo, I hate you.

Last two days I had to take a bus. Last time I did so was in July. Experience is just as shitty as ever – buses come either 5 minutes early, or 10 minutes late, so you miss them if you trust the schedule.

Some time in the summer I bought 10 bus tickets, which were in my wallet all this time, so I only noticed today, but OCTranspo hiked fares yet again. Now regular routes are 3$ a ride, express rides are 4$, and bus tickets are 95 cents each. The only way I noticed was because I were standing at the corner of Bronson and Gladstone, waiting for any bus to take me out of there to anywhere where I can get onto a 4 or 7 going to Carleton, and 14 came. As I were about to board, I noticed that 14 is now designated express route, and costs 4$ or 3 bus tickets to board.

Argh.

For that kind of money I’ll walk to Bank st, thank you very much. 4 bucks for 5 block ride.

Of course money grabbing bastards have the gall to claim that “A new fare increase will be introduced December 1, 2005 to help keep pace with inflation and increased operating costs resulting from the rise in fuel prices. Although the cost of taking the bus will increase, transit is still the most economical choice for most people.”

I remember when a bus costed 1.25$. That was less then 10 years ago. That’s inflation of 240% percent over 10 years. If you count the fact that 14 was always a regular bus, not express, that’s inflation of 320%. And not like OC Transpo service is any good – #4 I rode in today smelled of electrical fire, and there was smoke inside. Did I mention it was 10 minutes late?

I am firmy convinced that transit is still the most economical choice for most people that have no other means of getting around. If you have any other means of getting around, please do. Consider that once you paid for your car insurance, and assuming 7km per liter of gas in your car, for the cost of 3$ fare, you can go for 20km where you want and when you want.

My plan to get back home after writing a final in Automata Theory today is to take the free shuttle bus to Ottawa U, and walk from there. Free, healthy, and alot less frustrating.

And I am sure that some economists at OC Transpo are wondering why the company is losing money. All problems started with you, OC Transpo.

Edit: Just looked at the OC Transpo web site[1]. 14 is not designated as an express route. So are the working to rule job acting striking drivers padding their pockets this way now?

[1] Whoever designed that web site needs to go back to Algonqueen colledge and relearn web design 101 and web site functionality 201. And fix up the pages so it won’t load style5.css when you click anywhere on the text. It would help.

Steve Bellovin in Ottawa (Part I)

On Thursday, December 1st 2005, Professor Steve Bellovin came to Ottawa, and gave a public lecture. To me it was a very big deal. Here is why:

Back in early 90s my parents bought me a personal computer to replace Commodore VIC 20. It was a speedy 486 DX2-66 with 16 megabytes of 72 pin RAM and 420 (408 megs real) meg Seagate hard drive. 2x CD-ROM drive was on a special daughter card (Mitsui? Panasonic?), and the 4 meg ATI Mach 32 video card was VLB. At the time when standard for RAM was 4 megs, this computer was not really bought for me – it was bought so that my dad could learn drafting using AutoCAD, and was specced accordingly, but in essence it became “mine”. The first thing I bought for it was a 14.4 modem.

It was not my “first” computer, as before hand there was the aforementioned VIC 20 with basic, and a really annoying (in retrospect) keyboard, and somewhere around that time there also was a DEC VT320 white terminal hardwired into a DEC Scholar modem, and then into a phone line, and but it was a “real computer”.

DEC VT320 was not really a computer. It was a dial-in terminal with no local storage. However it had an important function – it allowed me to dial-in at 2400 baud into National Capital Freenet and into bulletin boards. VT320 was black and white, so it had no support for ANSI colors, so BBSes were not really a big deal. It was great with NCF – at 2400 baud it was slow enough that I didn’t need to page articles – they were scrolling on my screen slower then I could read them. Only later, when I actually started using a computer with local storage, I started differentiating between BBSes. Most public BBSes were ‘lame’ – at best they had door games like LORD, and at worst they had a rather pathetic selection of messages and files. In order to be on the ‘cool’ boards one had to be able to upload ‘0-3 warez’ (Pirated software that became available in retail up to 3 days ago). I didn’t have access to that (and even if I could buy something, I had no idea at the time now to crack it), cool boards were invite only, with phone numbers that were not published in Monitor magazine.

NCF was an exception – it allowed access to both local and global newsgroups thanks to Paul Tomblin, it allowed me to send e-mail, and supposedly even “chat” (I actually never chatted on freenet, so I don’t know it by ‘chat’ they meant IRC, or something else. Hrm). Eventually it allowed access to internet using lynx (text based browser) and elm was made available to read mail[1].

Someone I hooked up with over NCF had a Sun 3/60 box running SunOS 3.5.

Now, for all you kids who have no idea what a Sun 3/60 was, it was a 3 MIPS motorolla 68020 based workstation from Sun. VME based, single board. James Birdsall has a hardware reference somewhere on Beel’s sitethat lists old Suns, so you can take a look at what you missed 🙂 It run SunOS 3.x [2].

He gave me shell account to play with on his box for a few days. Catch was that because I didn’t have internet access, and neither really did he, he hooked up a modem to the Sun, and gave me a phone number to dial-in.

It was very sporadic, and only gave me a couple of hours of actual use of the system, but it was my introduction to UNIX.

At some point around end of 94, I were at a local computer store (that since closed), and ended up talking to a sales person. The guy (whose name I don’t remember, in fact, I don’t think I ever asked him his name) eventually told me to try Linux out. He said that it was just like SunOS on that Sun system, and I got interested. What sold me was his assurance that it includes Midnight Commander, which is the same as Norton Commander, so I ended up buying a Lasermoon 3 CD sets with Slackware on it. Kernel was 1.2.8, IIRC.

Installation of Slackware was… interesting. In retrospect, I don’t see a normal user going through this – remember the non-standard CD-ROM that required a daughter card and DOS drivers? Well, it was not supported by that version of Slackware, so eventually I convinced my parents to spend 20$ on floppy disks, backed up all the relevant data I had (I got really really proficient with ARJ archiver at the time) onto floppies, re-partitioned the hard drive, copied and labeled contents of each of the proper install directories (I think just base, network, and something else, like games) from the Slackware CD onto floppies, rawrited the boot and root disks, and eventually, after 3 or 4 attempts, did the install. Basically, it was an experience. No, CD didn’t work. I lucked out with X – ATI was one of the forward thinking companies of the time, so someone (Andrew Mileski maybe) already implemented ATI drivers. So I had X! twm, fvwm and an openlookish clone which name I forgot. But I were driven – I were trying to re-capture the SunOS 3.x feeling, and Linux at the time delivered.

In August of 95 an inaugural meeting of Ottawa Carleton Linux Users Group (OCLUG) was held at Algonqueen College Rideau Campus (Since sold by the college). I were there (Yes, I am a founding member of OCLUG. Back then I were proud of the fact, now a days I am much less so). For the next few years I used to go to OCLUG meetings religiously, and heck, it was there where I met Luc Lanthier and Eric Laforest, where Gert Jan recruited me to work for iStar in August of 97, etc. Folks I met through OCLUG also were the ones who influenced me to look into computer security, and around end of 96, beginning of 97 I bought the computer security book that was highly recommended – “Firewalls and Internet Security, Repelling the Wily Hacker” 1st edition, by William Cheswick and Steven Bellovin.

Over the years of working for ISPs, admining systems, then networks, that book was a great help. It had a bunch of mantras that are still true today – Security is hard, technology is not evil – people are evil, security starts with people, and people are lazy and stupid. It opened an entire new world for me, back in in 97. It helped me get my first “real” job – I knew enough about computer security and were making intelligent and helpful enough presentations at OCLUG for GJ to hire me as a systems administrator of iStar, at the time largest ISP in Canada.

So over the years authors of this book held a special place in my heart. In the book, they were witty, entertaining, explained complex technological problems in easy to understand terms. They were knowledgeable, and intelligent. For years, while lurking on BUGTRAQ mailing list, and deleting unread most drivel that was leaking through moderators at the time, every time I’ll see a post from Steve Bellovin, I would read it, and then go back and read entire thread. He was one of (few) people on the list who didn’t look for fame or tried to show how ‘leet’ his ‘mad hax0r skillz’ were.

So I were really looking forward to meeting Steve Bellovin in person for the first time. And I brought the book that changed my life with me :-P.

[1] As an aside, many many people in Ottawa, at least people who I kind of knew, dealt with freenet in one way or another – Gert-Jan Hagenaars was my boss at iStar, and also did work for FreeNet. Ian! D. Allen was an OCLUG member, and dealt with NCF. Paul Tomblin used to run NCF newsserver, vented in alt.sysadmin.recovery and was reasonably well known to John Henders, who in turn used to work for iStar with GJ and was one of the bofh.* nodes of usenet[3]. I remember e-mailing Paul Tomblin a couple of times asking for help with usenet. He was really charitable with his replies. I knew Mark Mielke from highschool, and he was responsible for getting elm mail reader to work with the FreePort software at NCF. Mark, if you read this, get in touch, we should do coffee/beer.

[2] I think there was a version of SunOS 4.1.1 that would run on 68K based systems. I am sure some sick souls out there still run sun3 arch. If you are one of them – respect. Give me a shout, I’ll scan in the right pages from old (covers some sun2, all sun3, all sun4/sun4c/sun4m and some sun4u arch) Sun Hardware Reference for you, if you want.

[3] I used to get my bofh.* feed from news.ott.istar.ca (or somesuch), which was propogating the newsfroop thanks to John. Ah, days of INN 1.4 on Pentium 133 desktop on my desk at iStar office.

2600 meeting in Ottawa

I’ve not been to 2600 meetings for years. I am not even sure if there still is one in town – I kind of stopped paying attention since Bishop stopped running them, and since San “NeTTWerK” Mehat stopped coming. Meant to go to one on December 2nd, first friday of the month, but instead went to Aikido class. Oh well, shit happens.

Last time I went to a meeting was a few years ago, and when I got out my SPARCbook 3000XT, a bunch of starry-eyed attendeed hobbled behind my back and started making commens to each-other: “Oooh. Slowaris, slowaris”, “insecure”, “easy to root”.

Meh. Whatever. I were bitter then. Right now I have nothing to prove.

Come to think about it, this was before I helped Chris “President Clinton” Petro (wankel) with AV at H2K2 (80% of the video of the second track was filmed by me. Chris did the first track).

So I stopped going, however something someone said kind of piqued my curiosity (or maybe I just were sufficiently bored).

Is there still a 2600 scene in Ottawa, and is it worth going, or are people still talking about stealing Salvation Army donation boxes?

P.S. Not like the official list is always correct. That’s why I am asking.

P.P.S. Just googled for “Chris Petro wankel”. Discovered that someone actually has a photo of me at H2K2 on line, attributed as Stanny. Actually, Figz still has #unix gallery online. Now, that is scary.