Happy Halloween.  Don't worry, be scary.

Unlike many recent years, I'm unlikely to spend anytime in Dreamland (cemetery) this hallowed eve.  I did, however, find some time to visit yesterday, run x-miles, and wonder at the fall display.

Something lurks here.  A flaw.  Unseen.  Awaiting discovery.  Who will rip the hole in this fabric of non-eternity?
[next thought]
*sex*
[next thought]
I just got a voicemail from an unrecognized number and someone whom I don't know telling me that Kim (whom I don't know) has gone back to Arizona.  Good luck, Kim.
[next thought]
*sex*
[next thought]
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has delved into the unknown.  Just listen:
     At the Pentagon press conference this afternoon, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld was asked what would happen if the Iraqi government failed to meet the
“benchmarks.”
Rumsfeld first responded that “it is not complicated,” but just seconds later
said, “This is complicated stuff. It’s difficult. We’re looking out into the
future. No one can predict the future with absolute certainty.” He added, “So
you ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it’s
complicated, it’s difficult.”
  - thinkprogress.com
     My reaction: "Donald, it's not that complicated or difficult.  I'm looking into the future now and see you gone from prominence shortly.  Final prediction."
[next thought]
*sex*
[next thought]
Work undone, awaiting future forgetfulness... future fortunes, awaiting spent remembrances...
[next...

I`m looking for what's impossible.  But what's impossible in the morning, may yet be possible by evening, and in the realm of the accomplished before the next day's sunrise.

I just finished attending a Web Application Security conference for a mixed gvernment audience.  Actually, I more than just attended.  Due to a late cancellation of a presenter, I was invited to give a 15 minute demonstration of certain web application attack techniques (crudely referrred to, by some, as 'hacking'). 

And so on Monday, all day Monday, I went back to a slide show I had developed on the topic, scripted my whole delivery, and practiced, practiced, practiced.  My greatest concern was in not exceeding the 15 minutes allotted me.  A huge concern since, as a professor, I could ramble on for hours expanding and digressing about the simplest of topics.

 Tuesday afternoon and my time arrived.  "Just 15 minutes," I silently warned myself,  "and keep to the script."  Then I proceded to explain and give a web demonstration using a phishing email (that I had constructed) to leverage a Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attack upon a Trusted site by a Malcious site (that I had constructed) inducing the victim (played by myself) to furnish identity information to the attacker's cross-scripted form.  Additionally, I provided a web demonstration of a SQL Injection attack where I established a test account with a user ID and password  in a certain SQL injection-flawed web application and then showed how I could bypass the need for a password by providing a crafted SQL statement to the password field instead.

The presentation ran 18 minutes.  But that's only because of a technical glitch at the beginning (not my fault, but I fixed it) and because I didn't anticipate that the audience wouldn't be able easily to read the phishing email (small text even on the presentation screen) and so I had to read it to them (not in my script).

Afterwards, at a reception, a tall fellow walked up to me, shook my hand, and told me that my delivery of those particular attack techniques was the sharpest, clearest, and most convincing live demo of such he's ever seen (and he assured me he had seen plenty).   And that's one compliment I'm never going to forget since it came from a leading industry expert, Jeff Williams, the CEO of Aspect Security  (Application Security Specialists) and the chairman of OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project).

Re: Full User Blocking

A "Full Block Everybody" that a blogger could invoke/uninvoke would be useful for going off-net temporarily rather than shutting the blog down permanently or removing/privatizing all the posts.

Re: Audio Blogging

How about providing automatic audio uploads via cell-phones?  I did audio uploads to Xanga years ago.  I used Odeo's automatic audioblog to record to Blogger and then linked from there into Xanga.  Odeo's audio upload is going away.  But Gabcast still provides a free phone-audio option.  Here's an example:

Re: Featured Content

Here's a future possibility for a feature:  Allow each user to customize, if desired, what they view as the Featured Content page to include ONLY themselves and their own subscribers.  Thus, if this feature were available and I elected it, when I'd go to my  Featured Content, it would feature only my top 50 subscribers.  This would further the creation of smaller communities - virtual xangasitas - within Xanga.  Or maybe just keep the two Featured Contents that now exist (Premium and Classic) and add a 'My Featured Content' tab as a third option.

I believe that the Internet and all the services and ventures it sponsors is essentially militaristically-aligned.

Clausewitz maintained that politics was war by other means.

I maintain that the Internet embraces an identical myth as that that compulses Modern Warfare.

How so?

We are about to lose both of our protracted and dearly-costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Why?  Because, as overly proud Moderns, we had no doubt that Apache Helicopters and Bunker Busters and Night Vision Weapons and Total Air Superiority were superior to the paltry spirit of any non-highly technologized guerilla resistance that might ever erupt amongst an indigenous people. 

And now we are about to witness that superior weaponry (as once before recently for the Russians in Afghanistan, and also in the case of our own curse of Vietnam) is again no match for the superior (although by no means necessarily cohesive) spirit of a motley resistant people.

The new commander of British military forces has just concluded no less.

Just so, we, as overly proud Moderns believe that the Internet has provided the technogically-superior template and platform for future social (networked) interactions - defying the fate of physical neighbors huddling together, attempting to supercede the actual pleasure of sensuous tactile contact, casting us non-contextually a-stage so as to be disposed to seek nothing better than the cyber-surrogates of true love.   So, too, does Modern Warfare boast of its provisioned pseudo-surreal assets (both technologically and ideologically supposedly-superior) as guarantees of the vanquishment of world-dispatched recalcitrant souls.

No Go, it seems, just as before.

Going to lose those wars.

Just as "social networks" will someday thump and fail in their promises of "replacement intimacy" for what sharing souls have always and will ever know only commingled with one another in secret gardens and never publicly shared.

Do you want a misty view of true intimacy most-delicately hinted  on occasion over a "social network" without a need for leveraging imposter cyber-ruses to compensate for the innate structural inadequacies of network-tempered relationships?

Foomanchu : a love has he celebrated beyond the contort of the Internet's hubris of technological seductions. 

Early yesterday morning, my daughter awoke as I was leaving the house for work and called out to me: “Daddy, Daddy, did a plane crash?  Where did the plane crash?”

“What plane, baby?”  I responded.  “There have been no plane crashes, hon.”

“But I just had a dream of the plane crashing.  I saw the face, the body, people screaming.  And whenever I have this dream, there’s always a plane crash.  I had this dream just before 911.  And three times since.  And there’s always a plane crash right afterwards.”

“Well, baby,” I said reassuringly, “there have been no plane crashes today—nothing in the news this morning.  Let’s just wait and see.”

“There’s going to be a plane crash, Dad.  I know it…”

Later in the afternoon, I heard the report on the radio of a single-engine plane crashing into a high-rise apartment in NYC.  Shocked, especially so by Jen’s prophetic dream, I called her to share the news.  “Oh my God,” she was freaked out, “Oh my God, why do I always have these dreams come true?”

She wanted more details about the crash, but I had none at the time—just first report sketchy highlights heard on the radio.  “Dad, did the engine fall away?  I saw the just engine coming at me—trying to hit me.   It fell away from the rest of the plane.  I had to run because the engine was going to hit me—I was screaming.”

From later news reports:

“They could see the pilot’s face…”

  -St. Petersburgh Times

“…two people were in one of the apartments when the plane struck, and both ran out into the hallway.”

“At a late Wednesday news conference, NTSB spokeswoman Debbie Hersman said most of the aircraft was outside the building with only the engine assembly inside.”
  -CNN

Yep, my daughter has “the visions”, too.  (Just like her Dad and her Aunt Jude.) 

Media Matrix is deemed by many as one of the best sources on trends amongst Social Networking Sites.  From the stats in the table provided (by them) below, they just concluded:

“MySpace.com has the broadest appeal across age ranges, Facebook.com has created a niche among the college crowd, Friendster.com attracts a higher percentage of adults, and Xanga.com is most popular among younger teens."

The ability to accurately state such comparisons, while interesting to us as simple bloggers, is extremely critical in understanding the multi-billion $ market that each of these networks is striving to capture.  For instance, if being "most popular among younger teens" is especially highly (or lowly) considered, such a finding could imply hundreds of millions of more (less) dollars of comparative worth for that Social Network (Xanga) in terms of valuation.   Advertisers relying upon such findings, too, will design their campaigns to address these differences.  If they base their demographically-catered campaigns upon false premises, they stand to lose millions of $ in returns due to bad targeting.

Source: comScore Media Metrix

I have a real problem with stats that don't add up.  And you can probably attribute my heightened sensitivity to the fact that I was a college stats prof for many years.  Above, the 'Total Audience' for each network is 100.0 (%), but the portions attributed to the subsetted demographic groups below each social network column fail to account for the full 100%.  The unaccounted-for %'s are below:

                              I-net      MySpace   Facebook    Friendster    Xanga

In a remote Corner of Dreamland, on unarguably the most pleasant and memorable sunny afternoon of early autumn, a guardian angel witnesses a solo but celebrative picnic of a visitor, while I, the interloper, capture it all for the blog.

Dreamland (Lakeview Cemetery), indeed at times, provides interesting surprises.  And stumbling upon this arrangement was clearly one of them.

The fall along the North Coast (Great Lakes), especially early-on and mid-through (like now), is generally a perfectly delightful season comfort-wise, but it is undoubtedly, for me, the most energetically seductive time of year also.  It is always harder for me to run in the early-to-mid fall—to keep my running disciplined and ongoing—than at any other time of the year.  The urge to stop, to forfeit, to submit to some cosmic call to shut-it-all-down tampers with my will most mightily at this time of change.  Yet I know that if I can just push on a little longer, into a later, riper autumn and closer towards grizzly winter, that I’ll be able to skate on through the winter running almost on auto-glide, back into the spring with an emerging gleam in my eye, looking forward and then sailing into a scorching summer once more. 

Incipient 21st century (take-a-snapshot-of-these-global warming) falls, in my experience, are great challenges for an outdoor running-warrior spirit.  To run on intrepidly, even as nature all about signals retreats and imposes terminal constraints upon itself, smacks of kick-ass defiance. 

Even as the leaves now fall,

I run to catch them before they hit the ground,

delaying, if but for moments more,

the inevitability of all-falls-down.

Truth is.  And so is silence.  But is the truth ever just mere silence?  And is silence always the truth?

There’s a great rudeness in this civilization of ours.  We either make noise to drown out the truth or we cling to a self-imposed silence to avoid speaking it.   We welcome public scandals because they reassure us that honesty has no incorruptible defenders even at the highest levels.  Yet we carry that ‘certain politeness’ around with us in our personal affairs that requires us not to speak the hard truth to a friend or acquaintance with whom we are having a falling out, but rather to spread ‘the unspoken’ as gossip behind those others’ backs.

Death is.  And so is silence.  Death brings silence.  And, so also, does silence sometimes bring death.

“Of that which we cannot speak, we must consign to silence,” advised the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Dear Ludwig, there is nothing we cannot speak of, if we put true heart to addressing it.  This does not mean that we should forever babble incessantly without sometimes shutting up and just listening to the world.  Shhh.   Really shhh.  And just listen.  What do you hear?   If all you hear is your own silence, you’re not listening to the cosmos spinning, infolding, unfolding.  It screeches cataclysmic destruction somewhere all the time even as it gently pelts ocean shores elsewhere with the susurrant lap upon lap of sloshing waters .  So listen truly to the world.  The living world might sometimes be little more than a hush but it is never-ever wholly voidly silent.  And when you learn of something that can assist the rest of us in living-surviving, in loving, in appreciating beauty or in observing its passing, then report back.

May your silence always be a sign of your attentiveness to the wondrous flow of life.  Or an indication of a strict observance in avoidance of an imminent danger.  Or a matter of healing when words would tend otherwise to obstruct.  And never a closing of your heart in dreadful anticipation of unlife.  

On the way to Dreamland today, I converged onto a road from one merging fork while another car did the same from the other merging fork -  but just in front of me.  (Graphic enough—or do I need to draw it?)

On top of the car ahead of was a cell phone, very clear to see.  And it was probablistically  apparent to me that the car in front had started up somewhere and driven away with someone inside having placed the cell phone on the roof (probably because it was in a hand and they needed both to open a door.)  Trying to save the phone, I started honking my horn repeatedly, waving frantically, and gesticulating madly for the driver ahead to pull over.  But since the advent of drive-by shootings and road-rage, such tactics never seem very successful unless you also happen to have a siren and police flashers available to you.  And I don’t.  Hence, I had to become more creative and actually pull into an oncoming lane (no traffic) and aside the driver and motion to her to drop her window. (no, I did not say ‘drawers’.)  First, she expressed to me a look of terror.  Then a surrendering look of acquiescence.  But when she finally rolled her window down and I told her of the bounty atop the roof and she realized the spirit of my intervention, she smiled ever so broadly and articulated repeated thank-you’s as if I had just stopped her from eating a piece of chicken infected with bird-flu (H5N1).

Then, a bit later while I was strolling about a Dreamland closed-down with gates locked for the night, I ran into a guy, along a converging path, who seemed kind of lost and reticent at the sight of me.

“You know this place is closed now?”  I asked him.

“Really?  Wow,” was his reply.

“Yep.  Do you know the way out?”  I asked trying to be helpful.

He pointed in the direction of a distant un-viewable gate and said “Yes, the gate up the hill.”

“Well, that’s closed now and so you, if you’re just on foot, you can hop the fence back there,” I said pointing to where I had just came from.

"Thanks.  Are you a cop? “

“Hell, no,” I said, “Even if I were, there's need to worry about that.”

He seemed much relieved and indicated that he was familiar with the fence out.  “But are there a lot a cops around here, here at night?  I like to just walk around here late at night but don’t want to get into trouble.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, “there are a lot of cops here at night.  I bet you’re standing on the grave of one right now.”

Funniest thing is that he took a little nervous hop away from where he was standing, looked down to where he had stood, and then realized my invented observation was no threat at all.

“Take it easy,” I said in parting.  He took my mention of exiting and headed to hop the fence out.  I followed my instinct for truth, justice, and the blogging way and proceeded to the heart of Dreamland, to sit at a picnic table, drink a beer, and compose this.

Cops: They intercept and enforce. God bless the good ones.

Me: I just interact as I happen upon.  I can't help it that I have that damn 'cop look' sometimes.

So big that, if you update your site today, you are literally just one in a million.

So big that, if you could leave 2 eProps for everybody who updates their site today, your trail of eProps, side-by-side, would stretch for over 100 miles.

So big that about 700,000 current Xangans have or will spend some time in prison during their lifetimes.

So big that about 20 Xangans die (on the average) every day.

Don’t ask: the source and methodology for generating these stats is nfp’d and not available in the public domain.

How much is Xanga worth?  As far as I know, Xanga has never sought or accepted venture capital nor has it made a public offer of stock.  So, its actual 'worth' is probably just speculation.  But other social networking sites like Xanga exist and a little more is either known or has been speculated about their worth.  Let's take a look:

"Facebook, which now has more than 7 million registered users, recently received $25 million in venture funding from Greylock Partners, of San Mateo. The valuation for the private firm was $550 million, a source close to the deal told me. Viacom Inc.offered Facebook $750 million for the entire company earlier this year, according to the source. For Facebook's right to maintain its independence, a half billion dollar valuation is just fine. What does that say about Internet valuations? They remain high."

- International Herald Tribune Business Sep 24, 2006

"Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million. At the time, many laughed. Now RBC Capital markets analyst Jordan Rohan said MySpace might be worth $15 billion in three years.

There's the $800 million acquisition offer from Yahoo that Facebook reportedly rejected, the $2 billion Facebook wants and the $25 million in venture capital Facebook got from Greylock Partners in April."

- internetnews.com Sep 29, 2006

When Xanga was recently fined $1 million by the FTC for violations of the Children's Privacy Act, several of you wondered if Xanga could come up with the money or if it was even worth that much.  Well, all I know is that Xanga agreed to the settlement and I doubt it would go bancrupt without a crying-bloody-murder fight.

So could Xanga be 'worth' $500 million?  $1 billion?  Or more?

I measure its worth in the friends I've made 'here', the inspiration they have provided, and the lovin' times that they've shared with me. And that's something that can't ever be evaluated by economy.