Standard Mischief

For March 31, the “Button Guy” over at http://www.biggiantbutton.com/ (which is a big flash app which every day links to a new site) linked to my blog buddy, Jacqueline Mackie Paisley Passey. To tell you the truth, I think the idea is pretty silly, and I said so over there, but he has done something cool to earn himself a linkback. What follows is some basic standard *nix mischief.

I grabbed the flash file off his server using cURL and saved myself a copy:


standardmischief $ curl http://www.biggiantbutton.com/button.swf -o button.swf

Then I used a program called flasm to peek inside it:

standardmischief $ flasm -d button.swf|less

That should give you an idea of what’s inside that little app. I think it looks on your local system for the day of the month and then sends you somewhere based on a table inside the app. You can see it if you do something like this:

standardmischief $ flasm -d button.swf|grep -o 'http:[-a-zA-Z0-9/\._]*'|head -n31

Did you follow that? Good, OK, then I got this obvious “sock puppet” comment here:

?Hey there, stumbled onto your blog via the blog linked from the Big Giant Button today.

…?

Umm, OK, Hi Jay Button Guy. You do know that nowhere in the world is it April 1st yet, so that big button should not have sent you here yet unless your clock is off.

Suspecting a joke, I grabbed his flash file again, naming it differently this time:

standardmischief $ curl http://www.biggiantbutton.com/button.swf -o button2.swf

This is where he earned the linkback. Using the flasm line above, I got the same output as before, but the original files are different:

standardmischief $ md5sum button.swf
23fbd93380ce9dcd7ce7455abe605842 button.swf

standardmischief $ md5sum button2.swf
fbb59a2e1792dd06cd3940cf0b7d07f6 button2.swf

There’s an extra 220 bytes too:

standardmischief $ la button*
-rw-r--r-- 1 standard mischief 35348 2006-03-31 20:10 button2.swf
-rw-r--r-- 1 standard mischief 35128 2006-03-31 10:02 button.swf

So I assumed that he spoofed my regex expression [-a-zA-Z0-9/\._]* with something like this:

http://www.joecartoon.com@standardmischief.com

Which should send you back here. But that does not seem to be the case. I’m also not 100% sure that he really did link to me, or that is further is part of the joke.

Really gives that old gray matter a workout.

Because the decompiler output matches exactly (except for the filename):

standardmischief $ flasm -d button.swf> button.txt
standardmischief $ flasm -d button2.swf> button2.txt
standardmischief $ diff button.txt button2.txt
1c1
< movie 'button.swf' compressed // flash 7, total frames: 1, frame rate: 12 fps, 550x400 px
---
> movie 'button2.swf' compressed // flash 7, total frames: 1, frame rate: 12 fps, 550x400 px

I’m guessing that he threw in some kind of junk that breaks the Flash standard, but that’s just a Wild Ass Guess right now. Updates, if any, to follow.

Update: Sorry about the crappy whitespace around the code examples. I can’t figure out the style sheet right now to fix it. Bash can ignore extra whitespace, I hope you can too.

Update: What a letdown! See the comments.

First, a few assumptions that you may or may not agree with.

Assumption 1: You hold positions on arguments on the basis of reason and logical thought.

I put this one first, because if you don’t agree with this, we’re done. I have no interest in debating this any further, as you have no reason at all to agree with any of my reasonable arguments. You can stop reading now.

Assumption 2: You believe in equal treatment under the law.

I drank the equal rights and equal protection under the law “kool-aid” a long time ago. I don’t think melanin levels or gender chromosomes should restrict your employment options, and I don’t really care whatever two consenting adults care to do among themselves. I don’t really expect the legislative branch to pass laws entitling me to grow a uterus, and I doubt that such a law, if passed, would change basic biology anyway. Especially, however, I don’t think that some people somehow are entitled to be “more equal” than others.

Assumption 3: You support “anti-dead baby in a dumpster laws” (newborn safe haven law., “Baby Moses Law”, etc).

A lot of these laws were passed after there were a number of live born, but dead or nearly so abandoned babies in the news. Basically they give the mother the right, within a certain amount of time, to go somewhere like a hospital and hand over the kid along with all her parenting rights and responsibilities. The example, link here, [1] states that the mom, or someone with the mom’s permission may drop the kid off and “shall be immune from civil liability or criminal prosecution for the act”. It’s also clear from the reading that the mom won’t be on the hook for 18 years of child support. So it’s pretty clear that moms get a “get out of responsibility free” card here.

You can probably see where I’m going here, but I’ll spell it out for the particularly slow. If you support the “anti-dead baby” law, but you don’t think that men should be able to get out of child support, to be able to stand by your logical argument, you must not agree with assumption number 2. That’s fine, people can disagree, but at least be honest with yourself that you believe in special privileges for different genders. Also, perhaps you firmly believe that assumption one and two are correct, but moms dropping off kids should still be liable for child support, even if they never see them again. That’s fine also, and perhaps you think a law enforcing parental responsibilities is good for society as a whole. Despite the media attention, I don’t think there ever was a whole lot of abandoned babies out there, and I’m not 100% sure that a law like this will make an impression on someone who would abandon their kid anyway.

I think I bring a pretty airtight argument, but you are welcome to disagree in comments. If you do, however, please prefix your argument with which of the three above assumptions that you agree with. That should make your position that much clearer.

(more below the fold)
(more…)

For the few readers that I have that don’t also read SayUncle….

It sounds like the tobacco ninjas are again going about their heavy handed ways again.

No content. This is just a pointer and a trackback link, so I’ve turned comments off.

Please go over and take a look.

Saga starts here, then here, then here (which will contain the updates)

Related Tags: BATF, BATFU, ATF, Tobacco Ninja

Big DEA bust in California. The federal overlords have made another raid in the War Against (Some) Drugs. This time it’s a group called “Beyond Bomb” which I’ve never heard of but kinda reminds me of a group called “Food not Bombs” which is an effort to feed anyone who is hungry.

As a rule, I generally can’t stand dopers. What I call “dopers” are the recreational marijuana users that smoke daily, and can’t seem to function without that morning “wake and bake”. But there is no question that marijuana can be helpful for some kinds of maladies.

No one denies that dope has the side effect of giving someone the “munchies”, the desire to eat. No one (except the “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” folk) can seriously argue that something like a hash brownie is never useful to a chemotherapy or an AIDS patent that might not have any desire to eat, but needs to so they can avoid loosing any more weight. There are other anti-nausea and pain relieving uses to the drug too. There’s no sane reason to keep this drug out of the hands of the sick, but the gov-o-crats at the federal level keep it at schedule I, which means that they claim no therapeutic use and a high level of abuse. There are even therapeutic drugs that mimic pot, except they cost more, sometimes don’t work as well, and generate royalties to a drug manufacture company.

I’m sure the DEA would like to use ABC news to spread their FUD, and while ABC news didn’t pass up the chance for a catchy headline, it looks like they have avoided swallowing the ?moral panic? DEA Kool-aid, this time.

click for hi-rez 166 kb

Officials say the locations are part of Beyond Bomb, a marijuana candy manufacturer with products “that mimic the name and appearance of well known, name-brand candies and products.”

Products confiscated included Pot Tarts (a play on the name “Pop Tarts”), Stoney Rancher Lollipops (Jolly Rancher), Trippy Peanut Butter (Skippy Peanut Butter), Munchy Way (Milky Way), Budtella (Nutella) and Rasta Reese’s (Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups).

“[These] marijuana-laced candy bars and sodas look very much like the store-bought candy that we see on our shelves,” said Pena. “If someone was to take this unknowingly, it would be potentially dangerous to that person.”

click for hi-rez 484 kb

My my, think of the children! Actually it looks like they are hiding the dope in stuff that looks like normal food, not to hook the poor little kiddies, but so people can consume the medicine discreetly. They even show a picture of the “Pot Tart’s” packaging, which won’t fool anyone, but probably looks amusing. Kinda reminds me of “Wacky Packages”, parody stickers from my childhood.

In fact, if you click on the images and look carefully at the hi rez versions you will see that the packaging has dosing info, so the consumers can get a consistent amount, and is merely spoofing the other brands, probably to generate buzz. The photos, by the way, I got off the DEA website. Here’s the full quote from the agent mentioned above.

SAC Peña stated, “In a way, this case sort of answers the question, ‘What will they think of next?’ What so many people don’t realize is that innocent children may somehow get their hands on these products and think they are just normal candy or soft drinks – thus, making this action not only illegal, but potentially tragic.”

So, Special Agent Propaganda, what’s the LD50 of marijuana again?

(If you go to the DEA site, you will see one real Nestle Butterfinger wrapper in one photo, blotted out. I’m not sure what’s up with that.)

So yea, no moral panic here, just a bunch of dopers that are probably enjoying their supply of dope while they help sick people get effective drugs that our overlords have decided we can’t be safely trusted with. I also like the freelance “compounding pharmacy” approach to making more palatable medicine. Because it’s “Made in the USA”, no money is going overseas to terrorist, and no border police were distracted from their duties in the growing of these plants either. While local police, through modern police tactics of seizures that violate the 5th amendment have managed to turn a profit on petty crimes like dope possession in many areas, the stiff federal mandated punishments make me think that this type of enforcement is a net loss for the nation that really needs to be a bit more fiscally responsible and is, by the way, is still fighting that war on terror.

Related Tags: Beyond Bomb, DEA, Medical Marijuana, The War On Some Drugs, The War On Drugs, Marinol, FUD, Moral Panic

Way back when, the scientists in control of deciding all things that were healthy decided that saturated fat was the final word in unhealthy fats. They wanted everyone to reduce the amount that they consumed, and they wanted restaurants to switch to healthier oils to deep fry stuff in.

In 1993 a group called “Center for Science in the Public Interest” held a media event, claiming huge levels of unhealthiness in movie popcorn. The problem? To get that “movie popcorn smell”, they were popping the corn in coconut oil, which is loaded with saturated fat. The “Food Police” got almost everyone to switch over to partly hydrogenated veggie oil. Gone was that great smell, but hey, it’s all for the better, right?

Well no, the chemical hydrogenation of those oils produces the current evil bad fat, something called “trans-fat”. The food industry likes partially hydrogenated fats because they don’t go rancid as fast and they apparently taste better than straight veggie oil.

The Wikipedia trans-fat article claims that the fast food industry used to use beef tallow to make freedom fries with, and that CSPI badgered them until they switched over to the partially hydrogenated stuff, at which point they were left alone. Part of this might be because trans-fat was not seen as a big threat at the time, and maybe partially because they knew they would never get Burger Fling to cook fries in 100% olive oil. (Which also might be unhealthy now, something about too many omega-6s, not enough omega-3s.)

So science marches ahead, and we’re all the better for it. Life expectancy is increasing, and if I don’t make it to 200, it’s probably all that Crisco and margarine Mom fed me back then because it was low in cholesterol, thus “healthy”. (Good thing she fed me fish, four Fridays a year during Lent, to offset that stuff) Of course, a short time ago when I saw that bottle of 100% coconut oil at the health food store, I did a double take. I don’t know what’s up with that.

I kept that in mind when the obsessive-compulsive reading disorder kicked in tonight and compelled me to read what was before me, a box of Jiffy “corn muffin” mix. (I put the quotes around “corn muffin” because there’s apparently more wheat in the mix than corn. They put the quotes around “Jiffy” because, I don’t know, probably because they think 15 minutes in the oven really isn’t “jiffy” or something.)

Like everything else, they are required, as of 2006, to state how much of the evil meanie trans-fat is in their mix, and so, to appeal to the most people, they want to put down zero.

So how did they accomplish this feat? What did they use to replace the hydrogenated stuff with? Take a look at the ingredients.

Yup, good old lard. Animal Shortening. Mmm mmm good.