When you include an image from another website in your website (instead of making your own copy of it), you never know when that image might be changed to something potentially embarrassing:

It's Sad When Jihadis Hotlink

I always love discovering that some leftist or jihadist site has "hotlinked" to one of my graphics (i.e., linked directly to the image on the LGF server instead of making their own copy), because the possibilities for mischief are endless. Today Brian at Snapped Shot found AlJazeera.com (not affiliated with JihadTV in any way except ideologically) hotlinking to a photo at his site, and arranged a most excellent surprise for the mujahideen: Glorious Jihadi Linkage.

As of this writing, if you go here and scroll down, you'll find Mohammed (piss be upon him) with a bomb in his turban. Hope the webmaster's life insurance is paid up...not!

(I think this would've been a better choice. This (which is loaded by the previous link; you may need to refresh after it loads) is a demonstration of one way you can block image leechers.)

From a blog comment about John Edwards:

"Never trust a man that has more hair care products in his bathroom than a woman."

...the more they stay the same:

Senator Stone knows very well that the President is not going "to plunge this nation into the vortex of this 'world war.'" The Democrats in Congress who are hostile to the President have raised that cry for their own purposes. It may be said with all confidence that Germany has no desire to add the United States to her already formidable array of enemies. We are not likely to have any more serious trouble with Germany than that which has been brought upon us through the influence of her propagandists and her sympathizers in the American Congress.

That was from an editorial in the al-Qaeda Intelligence Service, if you can believe that. The date?

26 February 1916.

I think I've brought up the Copperheads in previous JEs, so you can see that this pattern goes back even further.

Don't take my word for it:

US Troops don't buy the "support the troops, but not the mission"

For those of you out there who still think that the "I support the troops but not the mission" is a position the troops accept as valid, this may finally make the point I've been making all along.

Go watch the video at the link.

Remember Cpl. Joshua Sparling? He's the Iraq vet who, while recovering from his injuries at Walter Reed, received a death wish from some "anti-war" puke. Fortunately, he remains among the living. Unfortunately, his right leg was amputated last month, after months of trying to undo the damage had failed.

He popped into DC this past weekend for a counter-protest against the unwashed (figuratively and literally, no doubt) moonbat hordes. The al-Qaeda Intelligence Service reports: (via Michelle Malkin)

In Washington, counterprotesters also converged on the mall in smaller numbers, but the antiwar demonstration was largely peaceful.

There were a few tense moments, however, including an encounter involving Joshua Sparling, 25, who was on crutches and who said he was a corporal with the 82nd Airborne Division and lost his right leg below the knee in Ramadi, Iraq. Mr. Sparling spoke at a smaller rally held earlier in the day at the United States Navy Memorial, and voiced his support for the administration's policies in Iraq.

Later, as antiwar protesters passed where he and his group were standing, words were exchanged and one of the antiwar protestors spit at the ground near Mr. Sparling; he spit back.

Capitol police made the antiwar protestors walk farther away from the counterprotesters.

"These are not Americans as far as I'm concerned," Mr. Sparling said.

Such nice people, those moonbats. That they don't realize they would be the first against the wall when the caliphate comes, were it not for the efforts of better people such as Cpl. Sparling, is baffling.

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling that thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
-- John Stuart Mill

If you have any doubts, watch this:

Kitty Washing Machine

"Kitty water torture" is more like it. :-)

An article came through recently on an anti-spam measure called nolisting. Basically, you change the primary MX record for your domain to point to an address with no running mail server and create a seocndary MX record that points to your real server. The theory is that spambots usually only try to send to the primary MX (which doesn't really exist), while properly-written MTAs will try all listed MXes in order until they find one that works.

My homebrew club's new vice-president needed to create an account on our TWiki to keep up with officer-type stuff. By default, if Net::SMTP is installed as part of your Perl configuration, it'll use that (TWiki is written mostly in Perl IIRC). If it can't find that, it'll call whatever sendmail-compatible program you specify. With TWiki using Net::SMTP and nolisting set up, TWiki was no longer able to send its new-user messages. It bitched about some sort of DNS error. Reconfiguring TWiki to use the sendmail wrapper instead got it working.

I also had some weirdness sending mail through alfter.us around the same time as I was testing these problems. Cox's SMTP server was acting up, so I opened an SSH tunnel from my Mac mini to alfter.us, with port 2525 on the Mac redirected to port 25 on alfter.us. When I tried sending mail from Thunderbird through the tunnel, I got DNS errors again (similar to what TWiki was generating). When I got rid of nolisting, those problems went away. With nolisting gone, I was also able to switch TWiki back to using Net::SMTP, and it works as it did before.

At first, I was going to attribute this problem to Net::SMTP as that's where I first noticed it. Now that I've thought about it a little more, it seems that maybe qmail is to blame. Net::SMTP wasn't in the loop when I was trying to send mail from home; that was Thunderbird (Mac) -> OpenSSH (Mac) -> OpenSSH (Linux) -> qmail (Linux). qmail has generally been well-behaved IME, but why would setting an intentionally-broken MX record cause it to spaz out like this? qmail-smtpd shouldn't care about its own MX records one way or the other; it should only be interested in other servers' records.

Looks like the peanut farmer has taken up Holocaust denial as a hobby:

Jimmy Carter Speaks on WWII & the "So-Called" Holocaust (Video)

On Sunday in a Town Hall Meeting that aired on C-SPAN, Jimmy Carter joined Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in defining the horror of World War II as the...

"So-called" Holocaust!

Such wonderful company he keeps, too.

Do you really want to leave your safety in the hands of clowns like this DEA agent who shoots himself in the foot? He's lucky he didn't hit anyone else while he was at it.

Here's some video of bumper cars in Portland:

It's Called Ice, And It Gets A Little Slick

Flooring it after bouncing around the intersection was a nice touch. Best comment: "I haven't seen this many cars trashed since the images from Paris."

Some are wondering if they've overhyped the "threat":

Climate scientists feeling the heat

Scientists long have issued the warnings: The modern world's appetite for cars, air conditioning and cheap, fossil-fuel energy spews billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, unnaturally warming the world.

Yet, it took the dramatic images of a hurricane overtaking New Orleans and searing heat last summer to finally trigger widespread public concern on the issue of global warming.

Climate scientists might be expected to bask in the spotlight after their decades of toil. The general public now cares about greenhouse gases, and with a new [Democrat]-led Congress, federal action on climate change may be at hand.

Problem is, global warming may not have caused Hurricane Katrina, and last summer's heat waves were equaled and, in many cases, surpassed by heat in the 1930s.

In their efforts to capture the public's attention, then, have climate scientists oversold global warming? It's probably not a majority view, but a few climate scientists are beginning to question whether some dire predictions push the science too far.

"Some of us are wondering if we have created a monster," says Kevin Vranes, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado.

Vranes, who is not considered a global warming skeptic by his peers, came to this conclusion after attending an American Geophysical Union meeting last month. Vranes says he detected "tension" among scientists, notably because projections of the future climate carry uncertainties -- a point that hasn't been fully communicated to the public.

The science of climate change often is expressed publicly in unambiguous terms.

For example, last summer, Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, told the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce: "I think we understand the mechanisms of CO2 and climate better than we do of what causes lung cancer. ... In fact, it is fair to say that global warming may be the most carefully and fully studied scientific topic in human history."

Vranes says, "When I hear things like that, I go crazy."

This ran in the local paper a couple of days ago. It's important enough to run it here in its entirety, as it'll otherwise likely go down the memory hole in a few more days:

Letters: Can't wait for that 'new direction'

To the editor:

So, the Democrats promise "A New Direction For America."

The stock market is at a new all-time high. America's 401(k) plans are back in positive territory. A new direction from there means, what?

Unemployment is at 25-year lows. A new direction from there means, what?

Oil prices are plummeting. A new direction from there means, what?

Taxes are at 20-year lows. A new direction from there means, what?

Federal tax revenues are at all-time highs. A new direction from there means, what?

The federal budget deficit is down almost 50 percent, just as predicted over last year. A new direction from there means, what?

Home valuations are up 200 percent over the past 3.5 years. A new direction from there means, what?

Inflation is in check, hovering at 20-year lows. A new direction from there means, what?

Not a single terrorist attack has taken place on U.S. soil since 9/11. A new direction from there means, what?

Osama bin Laden is living under a rock in a dark cave, having not surfaced in years, if he's alive at all, while 95 percent of al-Qaida's top dogs are either dead or in custody, cooperating with U.S. intelligence. A new direction from there means, what?

Several major terrorist attacks have already been thwarted by U.S. and British officials, including the recent planned attack involving 10 jumbo jets being exploded in mid-air over major U.S. cities in order to celebrate the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. A new direction from there means, what?

Just as President Bush told us on a number of occasions, Iraq was to be made "ground zero" for the war on terrorism -- and just as President Bush said they would, terrorist cells from all over the region are arriving from the shadows of their hiding places and flooding into Iraq in order to get their faces blown off by U.S. Marines rather than boarding planes and heading to the United States to wage war on us here. A new direction from there means, what?

Now let me see, do I have this right? I can expect: The economy to go south; illegals to go north; taxes to go up; employment to go down; terrorism to come in; tax breaks to go out; Social Security to go away; and health care to go the same way gas prices have gone.

But what the heck. I can gain comfort by knowing that Nancy P., Hillary C., John K., Edward K., Howard D., Harry R. and Obama have worked hard to create a comprehensive National Security Plan, Health Care Plan, Immigration Reform Plan, Gay Rights Plan, Same-Sex Marriage Plan, Abortion-On-Demand Plan, Tolerance of Everyone and Everything Plan, How to Return all Troops to the United States in the Next Six Months Plan, A Get Tough Plan adapted from the French Plan by the same name, and a How Everyone Can Become as Wealthy as We Are Plan.

I forgot the No More Katrina Storm Plan.

Now I know why I feel good after the elections. I am going to be able to sleep so much better at night knowing these dedicated politicians are thinking of me and my welfare.

Mark Wilson
HENDERSON

X-bit Labs is running this story on a crack for AACS, the copy-prevention method used by HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. A Doom9 post says that "BackupHDDVD is a tool to decrypt a AACS protected movie that you own, so you can play it back later using an HDDVD player software."

The format's not been out a year yet, and it's already busted? IIRC, it took longer to crack CSS. The tricky part is that you have to supply the key to BackupHDDVD from an unspecified source...somewhat of an "and then magic occurs here" solution perhaps, but it's a start.

On the radio, Doug Urbanski is subbing for Jerry Doyle. He's talking about the Charlie Brown Christmas special. On a lark, I decided to google "Charlie Brown Christmas tree," to see what would pop up.

You really can buy anything on the Intartubes these days. Even a Charlie Brown tree. Too bad they're sold out. :-|

(Even that would've been more than what I have set up at home...which is nothing, because I've only been in the new place one week today and I'm heading out of town Sunday.)

Blackfive found this:

Going Postal

It's an email exchange back-and-forth between what turned out to be a congressional aide and what he thought were a couple of "31337 h4x0r d00dz" who'd fix his college records to improve his GPA.

It's obvious the mark has never heard of RFC 1149. :-)