Viet-Justice

F-Secure is reporting that a new Trojan disables anti-virus and security updates via packet filtering. These people are definitely becoming more creative as time goes by. I expect we will see new tricks from the usual SPAM suspects very soon.

Physics teacher Larry Neace will get a hearing on July 26. He was terminated for lowering the grade of a student who was sleeping in class. The hearing is scheduled for 11 a.m. in the executive board room at the state Board of Education, 2053 Twin Towers East in Atlanta. The hearing is open to the public.

Board policy forbids teachers from lowering grades as punishment. He did violate policy, but lets be realistic here. If this were an employee evaluation I think I could knock a few points off for sleeping on the job in some category of the performance review.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay recently called embryonic stem-cell research the “dismemberment of living, distinct human beings.”

Um yeah. And I suppose not implanting the embryo in a woman’s womb would be child abuse through starvation?

Oops! Now we’ve done it. By not following the wishes of the SCLC, DA Danny Porter has brought a protest down upon us. Gwinnett is soooo afraid now. I can commend Porter for his comments. With an attitude like that he should go work for Carl’s Jr.

“I was denying their request because I could not allow them to dictate to me either charges or evidence that was presented to the grand jury,” said Porter.

Porter said the SCLC told him if he wouldn’t do as they asked, then not to do anything. “So, I won’t do anything,” said Porter.

Danny Porter has done the right thing for the tax payers of Gwinnett. We’ve wasted enough time on this silly case case involving Frederick Williams who died from being zapped by a Taser. It’s a simple concept, if you’re resisting the cops you had better be bigger than them of fake that you’re dead. Williams decided that he wanted to resist and was shocked until immobile.

Quite honestly I can’t find any fault with the cops in this scenario. If a woman were assaulted on the street I would suggest that she blast her attack with the Taser until the battery runs out. Some of the newer models let you lock in the electricity while you make your escape to prevent your attacker from coming after you.

The idiots at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference are upset at the decision Porter relayed to them in a letter today.

Steele said he would not release the letter to the public.

A typical case of hate mongering. If the letter is so upsetting why not show it to the world?

“Mr. Porter was very arrogant in the letter,” said Charles Steele Jr., SCLC president. “The way I interpret the letter, Danny Porter was saying, ‘You don’t tell me what to do.’ “

Um, Danny Porter serves the voters of Gwinnett County. You, Mr. Steele, do not tell him what to do. At least the SCLC president is rather observant.

Edward Ray Barton was recently convicted in a Walker County Superior Court case involving posession of child porngraphy. This is currently being appealed to the state supreme court. In the past the mere presence of it on a hard drive has been considered posession and we have utilized the same definition during the course of our investigations at the office. If the defense is successful merely visiting a web site and having its images cached in the “Temporary Internet Files” folder will no longer be considered material posession .

This is one of those legal cases that is sure to cause controversy and inflame many people. Sure most people think that child pornography is bad and that Barton should hang for posession. On the other hand this case is going to quite possibly end up protecting a lot of people.

According to some news outlets Barton is claiming his wife planted the child pornography on his computer. That’s an extremely plausible situation and quite honestly if you wanted to get back at someone planting some kiddy porn on their computer and calling the FBI on them would be a hell of a lot easier than hiring a hit man to off them. Barton’s wife would have had physical access to his computer, but something just as easy could happen without touching his computer. Spam email or popups from less than reputable sites could also plant images in a persons “Temporary Internet Files” as well.

Or take this scenario:

Get a webserver in a country where porn workers under the age of 18 are legal. Use Tor, SSH, or some other encrypted protocol to setup your web server. For added paranoia route through a computer in a neutral territory such as the Caymen Islands. Setup a political blog, or some other site to entice your future victims. Add some child pornography but set the display size to 1px by 1px. The visitors to the site will be downloading the full sized images to their computers without knowing it. Then take down the site and put up a real kiddy porn site, forward the logs to the FBI of all the people who had been visiting your site and claim that they used stolen credit cards to access your site. When the FBI sees what kind of site they used stolen credit cards on they’ll get a warrant to search for child porn and the usual stolen credit cards and identity theft. And of course they’ll find it because you’ve been seeding their hard drives with it the entire time.

As I said before it’s an inflamatory issue and I’m sure many people would argue that taking this avenue of catching pedophiles out of the picture would be wrong and limit the courts in prosecuting these sickos. To those people I would say beware of who you piss off. There’s no telling how far a former friend or disgruntled co-worker would go to ruin your life and the way the law is today it’s very easy for them to do just that.

I read on MSNBC that the Carl’s Jr. TV ad with Paris Hilton is going to be expanding into more markets. We should prepare for the American Family ASSociation to rise up and call for a boycott of Hardees since the southeast is one of the new target markets of the commercial. CKE Restaurants stock appears to be doing quite well for now. Up about $2 since the end of 2004 isn’t bad. Obviously the advertising hasn’t been hurting them. I just wish they would get rid of that stupid star shaped mascot. It’s just too cute, but I have to admit it does make a tempting bullseye.

Melissa Caldwell, research director for the Parents Television Council, has called the commercial “basically soft-core porn.”

What is “basically soft-core porn”? Is it real soft-core porn or is it sub-standard? Since basically comes from the word basic, it must mean that the commercial is a beginner’s version. In that case I hope that Carl’s Jr. airs an Advanced version of the commercial soon. In that case I can certainly agree with the PTC’s dislike of the commercial. We should be striving for Advanced everything rather than wasting time on basics.

New studies have shown that for some unknown reason people who drink diet sodas are more likely to become obese.

“If you offer your body something that tastes like a lot of calories, but it isn’t there, your body is alerted to the possibility that there is something there and it will search for the calories promised but not delivered,” Fowler says.

“People think they can just fool the body. But maybe the body isn’t fooled,” she says. “If you are not giving your body those calories you promised it, maybe your body will retaliate by wanting more calories. Some soft drink studies do suggest that diet drinks stimulate appetite.”

This would appear to explain a lot about our eating habits and why some people have difficulty losing weight. Since it is widely been discussed that starving the body does not assist in the loss of weight due to the slowdown in metabolism, it would make sense that people who consume large quantities of soda and switch diet soda would essentially be starving themselves. A noticeable reduction in 600 to 900 cal per day might be enough to trigger metabolic slowdown resulting in greater difficulty for the person to lose weight

Jennifer Wilbanks has just created another controversy. It seems now that she will receive a lot of money in a book and/or movie deal. The mayor of Duluth,Shirley Fanning Lasseter, is not very happy and neither is District Attorney Danny Porter. I don’t really see why everyone is upset over this turn of events. This is pure American capitalism at its best. The Wilbanks family found themselves in a situation where they could make money, and they decided to take advantage of it. What moron would expect them not to? Even more important than that, what kind of rock, are these people living under to think that such a story would not be in demand. We live in a tabloid society, and I am quite confident that a made-for-TV movie would attract a large number of viewers. Perhaps the people of Gwinnett County should simply give this whole thing a rest and quit being jealous, because they don’t have a story to sell to the media.

Local citizens are attempting to find ways around Gwinnett County’s red light cameras. A spray that actually seems to work against flash cameras has already been banned in other states. Unfortunately it doesn’t work on Georgia’s cameras which do not use a flash. Apparently the legislature has also banned the only countermeasure. Starting July 1, a clear plastic license plate cover also sold by Phantom Plate that distorts tag numbers and letters will be unlawful.

I did not know the legislature had banned these devices. Actually the best course of action would have been for Gwinnett County to go back to Lasercraft and purchase an upgrade. This is an opportunity for Lasercraft to upsell new technology. The same holds true for Phantom Plate. I shouldn’t be surprised since the south is known for protecting the income of special interest groups. Legislated communism is the right term.