To Face Death

Free
Free from pain, from prison, from silence
Free

Freedom
Fought for, painfully slowly, one bit
at a
time
And
slower
While love is ripped more and more
And slower
He fought
For Freedom

Lucky juxtaposed with misfortune
Freedom tied to death
Companions that should not be, but are
But, in the end
Free

Free

An Ode to My Father

Rest my father
Sweet dreams into the abyss
Orion, oh mighty hunter
Guide my father through the celestial night
Show him where to draw upon peace
Lay his head gently down int the starry sky above

John Lewis Passki, 1921 - 2009

John Lewis Passki
88 Years Old. New Brighton, MN.

Born in Buffalo New York, June 26th, 1921. Lost his battle with Parkinson's disease on November 9th, 2009. Beloved Husband of Marsha. Proud father of Jonathan. Stepfather to Lara Masica and Thomas Daryl Sanders (deceased). Also survived by grandchildren Kristina and Larissa Masica. As per his wishes no funeral or memorial services will be held.

A very special thanks to St. John's Hospital staff for their wonderful treatment and to Heartland Hospice for their gentle compassionate and loving care. Rest in peace my darling. We love you and will miss you.

Security Side Projects

Here's a list of side projects / cool ideas I want to spend some time on:

• Find the encrypted password on PGP Disk: Been wanting to do this for about 5 years w/ PointSec and Joanna's work on Evil Maid prompted me again. I got PGP for Mac and an external drive. Now I just need to play :-)
• Get a passive demux for modem signals: My gas company CenterPoint Energy uses my phone line to communicate information back to the mothership. I'm not only interested in what is communicated, but what security controls, if any, are present. For example, can I spoof my number or recover credentials to spoof as my neighbor? There are programs and devices out there that do this, but they are released to federal or state law enforcement agencies or are insanely expensive. UPDATE: found this, seems plausible!
  
• Bayesian Logging: This would be similar to profiling an application, but using the call frequency and patterns to determine unusual issues. The idea is to log when a function is being called within an application by inserting logging statements within each function. Intuitively, when I say log into OpenSSH, there are a set of common sequence of functions that run within some time frame. If an attacker finds a pre-auth issue in OpenSSH and exploits it, this sequence and/or time frame will be disrupted. A Bayesian-style analysis daemon on the back-end would hopefully notice this condition and alert as needed. False-positives could be reclassified, training the Bayesian filter
• John the Ripper running in Amazon EC2: Pretty basic. Install John the Ripper in the cloud and crack passwords. Maybe would do a pay model to cover costs. Any extra would be donated back to Openwall, if possible, or if not, some .org.

If any of these have been done, please let me know!

To My Father

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-- Dylan Thomas