Anyway, Phoenix is weird. I walked around outside, and it felt like 70 to me. In truth, it was 90. Without the humidity, it just doesn’t feel as hot. But I already hate downtown. Here are some things I noticed:

• The lights are not synchronized so you get stopped at over 50% of them
• Central street is under construction so it’s speed limit is 25, but the old 35 speed limit signs are not covered up
• People are no where near as friendly as they are in Texas. This is evident by the fact that a police officer jumped in surprise when I said hi to her.
• There are many people begging and loitering downtown
• There are signs telling you that a sidewalk is suddenly closed without recourse for an alternate route

At least the conference is good. Hopefully my allergies don’t ruin it for me. I dislike dry climates.

I got my disk, and proceeded to spend several hours trying to install it. I kept thinking that there must have been something wrong with windows (usually there is whether things work or not), and so I went through the lovely process of repairing it. Eventually, I gave up and stuck the disk in my mac, only to notice several files on the disk were unreadable. So, I took the disk back and asked if they verify their burns and was told that they do not. They then offered to burn another disk for me.

I get the disk later that day, and it doesn’t even mount!!!!! Examinations of the disk yield that the dye has disintegrated. I am going to go back tomorrow, and tell them to burn it again, but this time I will not accept the disk until they verify it. If they can’t do that, then I will bring my laptop and image the disk right there (since I can’t trust them to burn it again). What is so hard about verifying burns? It is worth doing especially since a single failure results in a tremendous loss of time and possibly even data.

• The career center or others encourage companies to come to campus to find potential students
• The company must do interviews that day or the next day in order to maintain their position on campus
• The company likes a student and asks to interview them on campus. They have set aside a room to do that day’s interviews, and so they request a student at a certain time. They contact the student directly
• The student shows up, and must sign in to indicate that they came.
• The career center sees the student’s name, and if they don’t have the fee on their bill, it is added

This happened to me, and has happened to others as well. At no time during this sequence is the student informed about the fee, much less asked for their consent. I had to call them to get them to remove it. Guess I won’t interview on campus unless I see it worth paying $50 to do so.

On another note: My cell phone’s battery has lasted over 100 hours on a single change. So much for the Sprint representative’s comment that I will never see more than 2-3 days on a change.

I have been keeping busy with school and other things. Teaching my class has been fun, and not too much of a time sink. I will have to design the firs test sometime soon. That will certainly be an experience. Hopefully it is better than the time that I was a TA and gave out a quiz. It turned out to be entirely impossible. I best make sure I don’t repeat that.

I am thinking of visiting my parents in two weeks. That will put me in Fredericksburg just in time for Octoberfest . That is not the reason I am going, honestly.

Anyway, best close. I shall write here when something new comes up.

So, what are these problems? Buffer overflow for privilege escalation. First, seven targets are installed on the system with suid root privileges, which means that when they are executed, they run with root permission. Our goal is to exploit small bugs in each program to execute some code of our choosing. Some of the techniques required to accomplish this are quite devious. Anyway, I feel sorry for the rest of the students who try to do this problem set. It is not easy at all, and there is only about 1.5 weeks left to do it.

Some things to note: The address above is www.cod3r.com. I have actually owned this domain for more than a year now, but just didn’t do anything with it. I finally decided that if I wanted to really use it, I needed it to be hosted somewhere. I decided to buy what is known as a virtual private server. Basically, I am sharing resources on a real computer out in the world somewhere, but I have full privileges to my little piece of the server. I get 5G of disk storage and 500G of data transfer per month.
One other advantage of running this server is I can do whatever I want with it. Basically pretend it is a slow server (by today’s standards, but still faster than my 5 year old linux box under my desk), with only 5G of HD space. For the curious, it is running Debian/Linux – Stable.

Anyway, what has happened since my last post?

School:
My advisor, who is also teaching a class I am taking, decided to give a homework assignment which requires access to a linux box. He asked how many had such access in class, and only about half did. He then asked me if we can set up one for the class to use. Well, I had a computer sitting on the floor of my office since Sept of 04, so I pulled it out and installed linux on it for the class to use. It was rather nice to have a nice and fast setup. It is an interesting project, buffer overflows.

Social:
I went to a book study, Pilgrim’s Regress by C. S. Lewis, but the books had not arrived yet. Last week when I went I was the only one there. At least this time there were 4 others. Hopefully the group will have a few more.

Programming:
In part of getting this server, I have decided that I am no longer going to pay for my .mac account (mac.com). While this server is slightly more, I have full access to it and can configure it to my liking. .mac doesn’t allow certain things that I really want and has always been rather slow. For instance, this blogging software cannot run on .mac no matter how hard you try, but I set it up on this server in about 3 clicks!
Anyway, this means that I will lose some of the .mac features. The iDisk is not of great importance, and backup can be hacked to still work, but iSync is another story. Well, last night a friend and I started to figure out its protocol. It doesn’t look too complicated. If all goes well, then with some php scripts on a server, and some modification of the hosts file, we can get all the .mac features of use without buying .mac. We will see how it goes. I don’t want to turn this into a rant about .mac; that will come later.

Anyway, best close, is it past 1am and I should be thinking about sleep.

Otherwise, school has been going fine. Been busy reading papers. It never ends.

My advisor wants to meet three times a week now. Likely a good idea. I mean, I need one more class, and then research and write my dissertation, and I am out of here!!!! I should get cracking and get it through.

I made it though my 663 and 668 classes unscathed. I then took two 689 courses the next semester. One was on Peer to Peer networks, and the other was Fault Tolerance, a continuation of 668. Both were fun, but the P2P class required a lot of reading research papers. I enjoyed it though.

Now I am taking a single 689 class on Survivable Networks. It is mostly graph theory and how to make it so a network can survive a link cut, or a node cut or things like that. A lot of theory, but it could be practical in the end. I have to present a paper on the 15th, and we have a project to start. I will write later on how this goes.

My research is slowly getting somewhere. I am no longer working on material for my masters but instead working on doctorate stuff. I am looking at the idea of detecting network anomalies by simply looking at packet counts on a multi-port router instead of looking at the packet headers or payload. I am also considering ideas for automatic reaction to the presence of a worm or virus in the network, but this is a very difficult problem to deal with.