Maw's Friday Question: Week 158.

1. What's the single most important thing you could do to improve the quality of your family life?

2. What single thing that you plan to do this year will matter most in ten years? In eternity?

3. What's the most childish thing about you?

4. What is the worst advice you’ve ever received?

5. What habit would you most like to establish?

6. What is your most important financial goal this year, and what is the most important step you can take toward achieving it?

7. What book, other than the Bible, do you most want to read?

8. In your opinion: What previous experiance if any "should" a President have before they become President?

9. What skill do you most want to learn or improve?

10. If those who know you best gave you one piece of advice, what would they say? Would they be right?

Bonus Question:
Have you had enough of winter yet?

The Big Ten went 0-5 in bowl games Saturday.

The Big Ten went 0-5 in bowl games Saturday.

A wonderful cap to a wonderful day.

It started with Northwestern losing to Texas Tech 45-38 in the TicketCity Bowl in Dallas, and then ended with Big Ten co-champion Wisconsin losing to TCU 21-19 in the Rose Bowl Game.
In between, Alabama, the fourth-place team in the SEC West, blasted Big Ten co-champion Michigan State 49-7 in the Capital One Bowl. Penn State fell to Florida 37-24 in the Outback Bowl, and Mississippi State blasted Michigan 52-14 in the Gator Bowl.

Big Ten teams went 0-5 in bowl games Saturday.

Add to it Nebraska, which becomes the Big Ten's 12th member next season, was upset by Washington 19-7 in the Holiday Bowl.

Here are some of the Big Ten's lowlights from New Year's Day:
• TCU's defense shut down high-powered Wisconsin's offense to become the first team from a non-AQ conference to win the Rose Bowl.
• The Spartans, who finished the regular season with an 11-1 record and argued they deserved to play in a BCS bowl game, suffered the most lopsided defeat in the history of the Capital One Bowl, which has been played every year since 1947.
Alabama had 546 yards of offense and led 28-0 at the half.
"It's a reality check," said Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio, who fell to 0-4 in bowl games with the Spartans.
• Michigan suffered the worst bowl loss in its storied history, losing by 38 points to Mississippi State.
It was the most points ever allowed by the Wolverines in a bowl game and the most ever scored by the Bulldogs in the postseason. Mississippi State gained 485 yards of offense, scored 21 points in the second quarter and converted five fourth-down plays.
• The Big Ten went 0-3 against SEC teams, losing by a combined score of 138-45.

There's still hope for the Big Ten. No. 6 Ohio State, the eighth Big Ten team playing in a bowl game, takes on No. 8 Arkansas in Tuesday night's Sugar Bowl in New Orleans.
Then again, the Buckeyes have never beaten an SEC team in the postseason, losing nine games in a row against them.
(Fingers crossed nine will become an even 10)

Week 151 Maws Friday Questions

Week 151 Maws Friday Questions as asked by: Raughammer.
(A bit early but here you go....)


1.) If you could give the world one piece of advice, what would it be?

2.) What do you value most in other people?

3.) What would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?

4.) What is the best advice you've ever given and received?

5.) If the whole world were listening, what would you say?

6.) a: What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?

b: What turns you off?

7. Do you excercise regularly and how often? If not, why not?

8. Ever come close to death?

9. Who is your favorite USA hero (past or present and to whom you are NOT related to)?

10. Does Churchill's words "If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain." have any validity?


Hope y'all have a great weekend and a VERY merry Christmas!

Mac or Windows...if they want you they will get you.

Researchers Show How to Remotely Steal Pics, SMS Texts From iPhone
Jason Mick (Blog) - March 25, 2010 9:01 AM


Charlie Miller pwned yet another Mac computer at CanSecWest. He says Macs are easier to hack than Windows 7 computers. (Source: ZDNet)

Peter Vreugdenhil managed to hack a patched 64-bit Windows 7 machine using tricks to bypass the operating system's memory protections. (Source: ZDNet)Safari on a Mac and Internet Explorer 8 in Windows 7 were also exploited


It's been an action-packed couple of days of Pwn2Own hacking contests at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver. Hackers eroded Apple's image of superior security, making quick work of both Microsoft and Apple products alike.

The fireworks began with an iPhone exploit coded primarily by Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf Philipp Weinmann. The exploit works on fully patched iPhone 3GS (and presumably other models). It allows a malicious user to lure a target to a website and then steal any or all of the following -- the person's SMS text database (including deleted messages), their contacts, pictures, and iTunes music files.

Describes Iozzo, "Basically, every page that the user visits on our [rigged] site will grab the SMS database and upload it to a server we control."

Halvar Flake also helped the pair develop the exploit. He says that the iPhone's sandbox protections don't do enough to protect the user fully. He states, "This exploit doesn’t get out of the iPhone sandbox. Apple has pretty good counter-measures but they are clearly not enough. The way they implement code-signing is too lenient."


The exploit currently crashes the browser, but the collaborators are planning a version that allows the browser to keep running. They sold the rights to the vulnerability to TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative, which is in turn working with Apple to come up with a patch.

Iozzo and Winmann scored the iPhone 3GS they hacked and a $15,000 cash prize.

That wasn't the only Apple product exploited -- as promised, Charlie Miller successfully hacked a Mac computer for the third year in the row. Conference organizers navigated to a prepared webpage which downloaded content without informing the user. That download was used by Miller to gain root access to the machine.

Miller is a champion of a hacking/testing technique known as fuzzing. Fuzzers throw random inputs such as environment variables, keyboard and mouse events, and sequences of API calls to try to get a program to do something it doesn't usually do (like compromise its security).

For his efforts Miller scored another MacBook Pro (though he probably doesn't need it). He's cooperating with Apple on a patch and won't release details of the vulnerability until it lands.

Apple wasn't the only OS maker to have their products hacked, though. Windows 7's much celebrated memory protections were cracked.

Dutch hacker Peter Vreugdenhil infiltrated a fully patched Windows 7 64-bit machine by bypassing the ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) and DEP (Data Execution Prevention) memory protections. With the protections down Vreugdenhil used Internet Explorer 8 exploits to hijack the machine.

Vreugdenhil is also a proponent of fuzzing to discover exploits. He describes, "I started with a bypass for ALSR which gave me the base address for one of the modules loaded into IE. I used that knowledge to do the DEP bypass. I specifically looking through my fuzzing logs for a bug like this because I could use it to do the ASLR bypass."

IE team members were on hand to witness the feat. They said that they are working with conference organizers to determine the nature of the vulnerability and make a patch to protect against it.

http://www.dailytech.com/Researchers+Show+...rticle17973.htm

Talk Deeply, Be Happy?

Talk Deeply, Be Happy?
By RONI CARYN RABIN

Deep conversations made people happier than small talk, one study found.
Would you be happier if you spent more time discussing the state of the world and the meaning of life — and less time talking about the weather?

It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.

“We found this so interesting, because it could have gone the other way — it could have been, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ — as long as you surf on the shallow level of life you’re happy, and if you go into the existential depths you’ll be unhappy,” Dr. Mehl said.

But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.

“By engaging in meaningful conversations, we manage to impose meaning on an otherwise pretty chaotic world,” Dr. Mehl said. “And interpersonally, as you find this meaning, you bond with your interactive partner, and we know that interpersonal connection and integration is a core fundamental foundation of happiness.”

Dr. Mehl’s study was small and doesn’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship between the kind of conversations one has and one’s happiness. But that’s the planned next step, when he will ask people to increase the number of substantive conversations they have each day and cut back on small talk, and vice versa.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, involved 79 college students — 32 men and 47 women — who agreed to wear an electronically activated recorder with a microphone on their lapel that recorded 30-second snippets of conversation every 12.5 minutes for four days, creating what Dr. Mehl called “an acoustic diary of their day.”

Researchers then went through the tapes and classified the conversation snippets as either small talk about the weather or having watched a TV show, and more substantive talk about current affairs, philosophy, the difference between Baptists and Catholics or the role of education. A conversation about a TV show wasn’t always considered small talk; it could be categorized as substantive if the speakers analyzed the characters and their motivations, for example.

Many conversations were more practical and did not fit in either category, including questions about homework or who was taking out the trash, for example, Dr. Mehl said. Over all, about a third of all conversation was ranked as substantive, and about a fifth consisted of small talk.

But the happiest person in the study, based on self-reports about satisfaction with life and other happiness measures as well as reports from people who knew the subject, had twice as many substantive conversations, and only one-third of the amount of small talk as the unhappiest, Dr. Mehl said. Almost every other conversation the happiest person had — 45.9 percent of the day’s conversations — were substantive, while only 21.8 percent of the unhappiest person’s conversations were substantive.

Small talk made up only 10 percent of the happiest person’s conversations, while it made up almost three times as much –- or 28.3 percent –- of the unhappiest person’s conversations.

Next, Dr. Mehl wants to see if people can actually make themselves happier by having more substantive conversations.

“It’s not that easy, like taking a pill once a day,” Dr. Mehl said. “But this has always intrigued me. Can we make people happier by asking them, for the next five days, to have one extra substantive conversation every day?”
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I know i feel better when i am able to have substantive conversations with my wife, family and friends on the net or the phone. I could care less and honestly find it annoying when others have no clue as to what is going on around them but are happy to prattle on about sports figures, entertainment, scandals, whos cheating on who, etc. etc. I just do not see the value in gossip whether it concerns the folks i know or those who are famous.

Thats my .02.

Y'all have a great day.