I was reading earlier tonight about the Yahoo!/Flickr censorship issue that happened recently and thought to myself, wow that really sucks.

Such was my opinion of Yahoo! when I went to login to my email account there and received this wonderful little nasty message:

For those not willing to click-thru, it basically says that since I haven’t logged into Yahoo! email for more than 4 months, my account (of at least 10 years) has been deleted including ALL of my email from that time. Not only that, but nothing is recoverable. No warning message saying, “hey, log in more often” or “recover your email this time, but if you don’t log in more often…it’s gone”. It’s just gone. Just like that. Despite the fact that I log into Flickr on a daily basis. Despite the fact that I’ve had that account since Yahoo! began offering email. I can appreciate them trying to clean up, but this is simply alienating their users. I’m too peeved to write anything more intelligent at the moment. I realize that it’s only email, but I’m just more upset at how the account is deleted without a trace. Should I have logged into my Yahoo! mail more often? Sure. Should they have deleted it without question even when I was using other Yahoo! services…I don’t believe so.

Thanks a lot, Yahoo!…

It’s funny what a similar line my sister and I have been on with respect to housing in the past 8 months or so. We moved halfway across the country within about one week of each other and are both again sharing some grief over housing. Mine is best illustrated with the picture below:

This is a picture from HousingMaps that combines Craigslist and Google Maps - that big blank area in the middle (between 99 and I-5) that shows no rentals…exactly where I want to live. The area around the lake is insanely popular and any good rentals usually gets snatched up in less than a day. I really would like to buy as there are a _ton_ of places for sale in the area…but I just don’t happen to have $500,000 lying around, which is what most of these places _start_ at…if you’re lucky. I’m hoping the lull in rentals is mostly due to people being away for Memorial Day weekend…but we’ll see.

If I haven’t blogged in a while, there’s a very good reason - I’ve just been super busy. So a quick brief about what I’ve been up to!

I’ve been working on a fun research project for work that’s taken up most of my time when I’m not doing something else. More on that later.
I’m dancing, as usual, and working on a Rumba, (something secret), and a Viennese Waltz to perform this summer, just when the parents happen to be coming to visit me. On a side note, I was interviewed for a brief radio bit about Dancing with the Stars and Apollo - I have no idea when it aired, but it was pretty fun. And hopefully (!!) I should have my videos soon from my most recent competition!
And finally, I’m getting booted asked to move out of my current apartment. Yea…that one that I just had a housewarming for, barely two months ago. I’m really quite bummed - it was an amazing space that I have really come to love and feel at home in. Unfortunately, the landlords want to move back in and as such, I am left trying to find another place. No luck yet, but I’m optimistic something will come along. Regardless…it’s an great deal of stress that I really didn’t need right now…or at any point!  On a positive note, it does mean I get to have another housewarming. *grin*

There was a recent post on the Nmap Development mailing list about an nmap/vmware osx bug.  I recently experienced the same thing and after brief mention from a co-worker about VMware Fusion’s network interfaces not being “real” interfaces, and confirming this by opening up the Network Preference pane and not having the vmnet interfaces be listed under Network Port Configuration - I dug into the problem a little bit deeper.  The specific error I was getting was the following:

$ sudo nmap –iflist
Starting Nmap 4.20 ( http://insecure.org ) at 2007-05-14 14:09 PDT
getinterfaces: Failed to open ethernet interface (vmnet8). A possible cause on BSD operating systems is running out of BPF devices (see http://seclists.org/lists/nmap-dev/2006/Jan-Mar/0014.html).
QUITTING!

A quick look at my process list for vmware stuff (ps -aux | grep -i vmw) showed the following processes:

root 108 0.0 -0.0 27296 56 ?? Ss Wed01AM 0:00.00 /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet-netifup -d /var/run/vmnet-netif-vmnet8.pid vmnet8 vmnet8
root 111 0.0 -0.0 27296 56 ?? Ss Wed01AM 0:00.00 /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmnet-netifup -d /var/run/vmnet-netif-vmnet1.pid vmnet1 vmnet1

Ahh, so they aren’t “real” interfaces.  A quick `kill -9 108 111` and Nmap was again able to run successfully.

From time-to-time, I need an old version of IE due to application compatibility or for “other” security testing.  MultipleIE has saved me numerous times, so I figured I’d blog a blog about it. I also came across some good tools on the Edge-Security site, many of which I’ve had the inclination to begin in previous lives but ended up never finishing. Thanks, guys!