This qualifies as news in my book.   My previous experiences with Comcast have fallen somewhere between “hell on earth” and “actual hell”.

Comcast has a monopoly on Internet services in my complex.  We are unable get DSL through Verizon or anyone else, as far as I know.  That leaves me paying 60 dollars a month to Comcast for a service that doesn’t seem worth quite that much.  And like all cable companies, the next lower tier is a 30% saving for 30% of the bandwidth.  Not very useful.

On a whim I decided to call them and ask to be placed on a promotion to cut my monthly bill down.  The customer service representative went beyond my request and cut nearly 20 dollars of my bill each month with no strings attached.  No promotion. No expiration.  Just the same service I had for less.

I know. It’s shocking.

So, I submit this as a success tale.  If you feel like you’re not getting a good value from Comcast, it may be worth calling them and asking them for a way to lower your bill. You just might find somebody willing to work with you.

The cup now emptied, the black potion took its course.  New life and vigor coursed through my veins.  With renewed strength I watched my post. Yet this condition did not last–nay it could not.  For dwelling in this same potion lived a spirit. And now he torments me on my left and on my right.  My heart beats fast, but my vitality surely fades.  I hear a sound, but it is naught.  I see a vision, but it is surely a mirage.  And so I sit, captive to the demon I released when once I drank the cup of trembling.

- Me, circa finishing a cup of coffee

A few days ago I decided to cease and desist pursuing an MBA at this time.  Today I wrote DLP Advising to make this official. I simply sent them an e-mail with the subject “Withdrawl” and this ditty by Ada Cambridge:

Good-bye!–’t'is like a churchyard bell–Good-bye! 
    Poor weeping eyes! Poor head, bowed down with woe! 
    Kiss me again, dear love, before you go. 
Ah me, how fast the precious moments fly! 
            Good-bye! Good-bye!

We are like mourners when they stand and cry 
    At open grave in wintry wind and rain. 
    Yes, it is death. But you shall rise again, 
Your sun return to this benighted sky. 
            Good-bye! Good-bye!

The great physician, Time, shall pacify 
    This parting anguish with another friend, 
    Your heart is broken now, but it will mend. 
Though it is death, yet still you will not die. 
            Good-bye! Good-bye!

Dear heart! Dear eyes! Dear tongue, that cannot lie! 
    Your love is true, your grief is deep and sore. 
    But love with pass–then you will grieve no more. 
New love will come. Your tears will soon be dry. 
            Good-bye! Good-bye!

I hope they understand what I’m trying to say.

As promised, here is the audio from my moment of fame on the radio back in 2004.

Online Tonight w/ David Lawrence (and myself) from clifgriffin on Vimeo.

I have also updated my original post about the “virus” with the original article I wrote on it back when it happened.

Note: I’m perfectly aware that what I wrote was not actually a virus. Virus definitions define it various ways ranging from a trojan to “potentially unwanted software”. In the purest sense it wasn’t a virus, trojan, worm, or any other derivative–which is fine by me. It wasn’t my intention to write a virus in the first place.

Every so often and a few of my close friends love to casually mention that I “wrote a virus”. This is usually in front of a cute girl or a large group of people who I don’t know very well.

This invariably leaves me in the position of either a) letting the remarks stand umodified, or b) qualifying the story with the facts. I usually choose b. A story like this might not be the key to a ladies heart (or anyone else’s for that matter), but I guess I get points for being unique.

It’s been a long time since these things happened so a lot of the details are hazy. I don’t think about it often and when I do think about it, it seems like it happened in another lifetime. Because of all of this, I’m going to write all of the details down to assist my memory, and possibly entertain you with the antics of a 19 year old with too much time and too little social life.

The Background
Almost five years ago (gosh, has it really been that long?) I had few responsibilities and more free time. That’s the nice way of saying I spent a lot of my time in my room, on my computer. Much of this free time was spent on self invented projects, useful and useless. A few of the things I worked on around this time include:

• Extenshun – A program to interface with bulletin boards and allow people to track their posts.
• I hosted a website called DebateGrounds.com which encouraged people to discuss politics, religion, and science. It had a decent commnunity with some good discussions.
• I helped write a couple of chapters in a published technology book.
• I hosted a collaborative blog called blogzine back before blogs were mainstream (I have since lost the domain–don’t ever let a domain lapse, ever)
• I designed websites for local businesses and musicians.
• I was the main system administrator for a small, now failed, venture capitalist company.
• Etc.

I was a bit of a loser, but I don’t significantly regret it because these years have signicantly contributed to my success in college and my career.

During this time, I became “friends” with someone I only knew as Justin. We both frequented the FlashKit forums and had a common interest in being obnoxious. Justin lived in Chicago. He had a girlfriend named Megan. He also liked to stir up trouble and seemed to always be online.

Justin’s permanence online helped me with a lot of projects, in truth. His technical prowess was much greater than my own. If I had an idea, he could often help me implement it in about 10% of the time. He was a huge fan of all things open source and snobbishly preferred BSD flavors of *nix over anything Linux.

The idea for the virus started very primitive. We decided we wanted to put something on file share networks (Gnutella at the time) that would chastise people for pirating software. I viewed it as a social experiment. The pay off for us was simple: after it chastised them, it would tell us how long they had read the message. Simple application, simple goal.

I wrote the first version myself in .NET. We codenamed it “Walk The Plank”. (You know, pirates…the whole gig.) It took me around 30 minutes and we quickly put it on Gnutella with some fake names. Such as:

• Microsoft Office 2000 Crack.exe
• Britney Spears – Hit Me One More Time.mp3.exe
• Etc, etc, etc. (We had about 500 names we released it under)

We got a few downloads but very few logged executions. We determined this was due to .NET being a new technology (version 1.1 at the time) and almost no one having the framework installed. (In other words, no one could open our program without downloading a 20 MB file from Microsoft.)

We realized that to make this really work, we were going to have to write in C or C++ and do it right. I started working on a version in C. (Did I mention I hate writing in C?) I got the basic functionality working, but we realized at this point, we wanted more.

You see, there is this time in the life of software that usually coincides with the completion of its first version. You suddenly have a thousand ideas for additional features. Often times you have to completly rewrite your application to be satisfied. This second version of WTP (Walk the Plank) was functional, but we thought of number of ways to make it more ingenious.

1. We wanted to specifically track the progress of the application across the Internet. (The various connected interwebs, if you will)
2. We wanted to know exactly what they had been trying to download. (i.e., Britney Spears of a software crack)
3. We wanted the data we collected to be publicly accessible.
4. Lest someone hijack our work and we get blamed for it, we wanted it to delete itself if it was modified.

I should pause to mention: We had no intention of becoming famous at this time. None whatsoever. This was a little experiment for our own satisfaction. The fact that people trying to participate in illegal activities were the brunt of this joke made it all the better.

Accomplishing those goals required a lot of technical back flips that, had I been working by myself, I would have never finished. The program was designed like this:

Embedded in the software was an ID number. When a user would execute the program and click the button, a number of things would happen:

1. It would contact our website and report the amount of time the message was viewed and what their ID number was.
2. Our server would report back a new, unique ID number.
3. We wrote out a separate executable to the temporary directory and executed it. This executable would modify the original program and replace the old ID number with the new one.
4. If the program size was different than expected, it would delete the original executable.

Relatively simple on the surface, difficult in its implementation. (It’s hard to write a binary that contains another binary that will delete your original binary if the size is wrong because you have no good idea of what the final size will be until you’re done. The size of the original binary changes everytime you update the embedded binary to reflect the size of the container…it’s a merry-go-round.) We called this new version Operation Dust Bunny or (ODB) as it became known:

This final version of Operation Dust Bunny is nearly identical in appearance to the first version.

We released Operation Dust Bunny onto several networks, the primary one being Gnutella (you may remember it as Grokster, Kazaa, etc…). Same 500 names. I enlisted a friend to help distribute for a total of 3 people sharing 500 small files.

The number of downloads grew exponentially. Not only were people stupid enough to download it, they were also stupid enough not to delete it. We setup a website that showed how many hours of pirate’s time we had wasted, and a comprehensive list of all executions. You could click on someone’s ID and find out who they had gotten it from, all the way back to the first download. We also listed their complete IP address and country of origin. We made an unfortunate decision to host this site on my own computer on my cable connection. It was nearly permanently inaccessible after the story broke and I don’t have a copy of it today. (Not even archive.org has it. )

After about 12,000 individual users were logged as executing the program with over 85 hours of execution time, we realized it was much bigger than originally anticipated. We decided to add to this feat by trying to get noticed.

We first published information about it on our blog (blogzine) and posted it on a few bulletin boards. (See below for the original article as we posted it.) One of the bulletin boards we posted at was DSLReports.com. They soon picked up the story officially. All of this attracted the attention of Kevin Poulsen at SecurityFocus. He called my cellphone number while I was running the cash register at my parents service station. I was totally unprepared. I managed to stay conscious during his impromptu phone interview. A few hours later he published the story with the title “Anti-piracy vigilantes track file sharers.” Their story alone resulted in a myriad of attention that I was neither ready for nor sure I wanted.

Having been published, we submitted the story to Slashdot, the biggest most viewed technology news site. They picked up the story and that’s when the “fit” really hit the “shan”.

At this time, I had only my common sense to tell me I wasn’t going to get in trouble. I knew that the program was not a true trojan as SecurityFocus had suggested. I knew that it had caused no damage, physically or monetarily. My attitude became somewhat fatalistic. “Why stop now?” I thought.

The night after Slashdot picked up the story, we sent some instant messages on AIM to a technologically oriented talk show host, David Lawrence, who hosted a program in California, Online Tonight With David Lawrence. I had some friends help me send him some messages pretending to be interested listeners.

I can’t really describe how cool it was to hear the first words of a syndicated radio program ring something like this “Alright, alright we will be talking about this DustBunny virus…” But this ended up being the least exciting part of the evening. Within a few minutes of the show going on the air, I was emailed by the program director asking if I would agree to be on the air.

This put me in a difficult position. I had already achieved much more fame at this point than I really wanted. I was enjoying it, but I was also crapping my pants. The thought of being on the radio had never crossed my mind. Even more complicated, I hadn’t told my parents about any of this. The only thing I knew for sure is that there was no way in heck I could say no. So I said yes.

He had me on the show for about an hour. I sounded like cliched 19 year old nerd who who found himself suddenly in the limelight would: not that good. I will update this post soon with the audio of this program. (if my ego can handle it!) UPDATE: You can listen here.

The fallout of all of this was minor. People soon forgot about the story. I was never approached by lawyers or more than verbally maligned. The coolest things that resulted were the following:

• 9 different antivirus companies included Dust Bunny in their definitions under various aliases. Trojan.Win32.DusBunn being the most common. McAfee was most correct in their analysis, calling it “potentially unwanted”.
• Someone filled up my voicemail with dead air.
• I got a threat letter with a–I kid you not–pirate sticker. “It’s your choice, Clifton. You can be with us or against us. You decide…”
• A lot of news organizations picked up the story. Tons of technology sites linked to it. Even more bulletin boards.

It was overall a positive experience. My parents eventually found out, and while they were concerned that I had acted so foolishly, they mostly found the story to be entertaining and enjoyed passing the links to news sites around to friends.

I’m not sure if I have the source code for any of this, but if I do, I will post it online as an open source project. I probably do not have the source code for the embedded binary or the online backend.

Thanks for reading. I hope it was somewhat entertaining.

Original article, complete with hyperbole:

Shanna reminded me of something I have been thinking for a long time now.

Nearly everyone, devoutly Christian or quasi-Christian, lists Mere Christianity in their list of favorite books. The casual observer might not think this odd, but as someone who is reasonably intelligent and has actually delved into the pages of this master piece, I’m very skeptical.

Mere Christianity, henceforth refered to as MC, is a collection of transcripts in book form. It is not light reading and cannot be consumed casually.  C.S. Lewis has a way of packing meaning, direct and indirect, into each sentence such that each page must nearly be read twice to keep up with his reasoning.

I fully admit that I have yet to finish MC.  I intend to someday, but it is not a trivial task. It requires reflection and a healthy amount of critical thinking.

Bearing all of this in mind, my hypothesis is this: 9 out of 10 people who say Mere Christianity is their favorite book have not read it, or at the very least have not finished it.

As the respective Republican and Democratic primary races began this year, I found myself more closely aligned with Ron Paul than any other candidate.

His no nonsense, libertarian views resonated with me and I was willing to tolerate his “peace” message. (Also known as “Get out of Iraq now.”)

I was able to tolerate it based on several factors:

1. I essentially agree with him on the ill effects our foreign policy has had in the past. It is quite likely that Al Qaeda did not attack us “because of our freedom”.
2. I also essentially agree that invading Iraq was a mistake.

While his foreign policy seemed overly simplistic and isolationist, I kept listening.  I even donated twice to his campaign fund.  I assumed that there was more depth to it. I assumed that his plan was more complex than “Step 1. Leave.   Step 2. See step 1.”

Unfortunately, I was incorrect.

Ron Paul gets a lot right. He gets the role of government right. He gets personal responsiblity right.  He gets the constitution.

However, simply leaving Iraq would be a bigger crime at this point than our unwarranted invasion.  Often times when you create a problem, the responsiblity to fix it becomes rightfully yours.  It might be easier to simply reverse direction, but it isn’t the moral thing to do.  (The Bay of Pigs comes to mind.)

All of this considered, I began to distance myself from his campaign.

The other thing I realized in all of this is that the stereotypes about Ron Paul supporters are that way…because Ron Paul supporters are that way. They claim not to be a radical fringe movement, even as they use the word “neo-con” as if it is a universally accepted term.

Don’t get me wrong: It is inspiring to see people dedicated to a cause and excercising their right of political expression, but I can’t committ to this movement.

I have many friends who are still avid fans. I encourage them to continue their support. Ron Paul is a good man and an above average politician.  I will not be voting for him in the primaries though, as it stands.

Who am I going to support?

I’m not sure. Indeed all Republican candidates are dissappointing this year.  I’ll keep you posted.

Thoughtfully,
Clifton

Well, as I posted last time, I had come across a great deal at Best Buy on Logitech diNovo Edge keyboards. Originally sold for 200 each (and still sold for 160 on Amazon.com), many people across the nation were finding them as cheap as 39.99 due to BestBuy discontinuing the product in their stores.

I bought two of these at the Lynchburg store. (They believed me about the eMachine keyboard mixup thankfully.) I was able to secure them for 39.99 with my photo copied receipt I got from a guy on SlickDeals. (I didn’t even print it out…I showed it to her on my PDA.)

Having accomplished this on my lunch break, I quickly listed one of the keyboards on Amazon.com for 100 dollars. Within 45 minutes it sold. Making $60 on your lunch break without even trying, makes one want to make more money without trying. Over the course of work Monday I called several BestBuys in Virginia and North Carolina and managed to locate 3 of them at the Charlottesville store.

I sent out an email looking for friends who might want to tag along on a road trip to Charlottesville. Shanna volunteered.

As my car has a bad water pump and pump more coolant on the ground than through my radiator, I thought it prudent to pay her 20 bucks and use her car. This turned out to be a very bad mistake.

About 5 minutes outside of Lynchburg and 5 minutes after we had purchased 20 dollars of gas, her car officially died. The engine siezed. The transmission bled all over the ground. It was not a pretty picture. And let me tell you…it felt good to know that I was responsible!

Needless to say, I did not make it to Charlottesville that night.

However, I did successfully make the journey the next night. I purchased two keyboards and used my receipt from my last purchase to get them to mark it down from 139.99 (the price they were selling them at) to 39.99. (The manager on duty did a double take when she saw what she was approving, but went ahead and approved it anyway. I was pretty nervous they were going to deny me the courtesy price match.)

It turns out my car stays perfectly cooled at highway speeds. I did not have to put more water in in Charlottesville.

(Shanna, if you are reading this: I’m sorry. Also, I want my gas back.)

After doing some research online today, I learned that Best Buy is selling Logitech diNovo Edge keyboards for 60 dollars or less. Considering the retail price for one of these bad boys is $200, I decided it would be smart for me to purchase one.

I picked up the first box on the rack of 3 that they had left. It felt a little bulky and normally I would have picked through the available inventory and selected the best “feeling” box, but with a helpful employee standing over my shoulder I just grabbed the first one and headed towards the register.

As I waited to pay at the register, I wiped dust off of the cover and thought in the back of my mind “I wish I could have selected a better box.” The front of the box seemed to bulge a bit. “Whatever” I told myself. “It doesn’t matter what the box looks like.”

Upon arriving at home, I looked on eBay and was happy to see the same keyboard I purchased selling for a minimum of 40 over what I paid.  I started making plans to buy the other 2 and sell them for a profit.

Eyeing the box again, I decided I wanted to play with my new toy. I removed the stickers that secured the top of the box. Slipping off the top, what do you think I found?

Well if you guessed a Logitech diNovo Edge “Most Advanced Keyboard in the World” you are wrong. What I found instead of a stupid piece of crap PS2 eMachine keyboard that had been stuffed in the box.

Best Buy of course closed at the very moment I made this discovery.

Basically, someone bought one of these keyboards, put their keyboard in the box and returned it as unopened. And some idiot at Best Buy fell for it.

I only hope I don’t have any troubles remedying this mistake tomorrow morning.

Also, if any of you reading this decide to go buy the remaining keyboards I will hunt you down and stab you.

In the words of Forrest Gump, “That’s all I have to say about that.”

Anyone who knows me reasonably well knows that I have been working tirelessly and expensively on a media center for my entertainment center. (That sounds a little redundant.) This media center, for those who are not enthusiasts, will act like a Tivo, mp3 player, radio, dvd player/recorder, etc. It’s a jack in the box of entertainment fun!

As I’ve put more and more time and money into this project, I’ve found myself putting a lot of importance into its success. And this is partly natural…I doubt any of you would want to spend hundreds of dollars on a project and have it not work like it should.

Well two weeks ago, the media center had some serious file corruption. I had to reinstall Vista. At the time, I was very depressed about it. It seemed like everything was going wrong in the world. Now if you think that is silly, you are correct.

I fixed this problem with about 5 hours of effort, and the world was once again my oyster.

During this time, I kind of felt like there was a possibility that God was trying to tell me something…that maybe I was spending too much time with ye ol’ media center and too little time with Him. Unfortunately, with my media center fixed this was no longer my concern. I didn’t think about it again. I simply started planning its implementation and spending more money.

The pinnacle of all this spending and enthusiasm happened last Sunday. The media center was ready to go. I had mounted my 42″ flat screen HDTV on the wall the day before. And I had spent at least 4 hours installing a giant antenna 30 feet off the ground out back so that we could receive free, over the air, HD football that night.

I set it all up; it was working perfectly.

And then, through the most unlikely chain of events, I decided to demonstrate its use to my roommate. This turned out to be the divinely appointed time at which I would learn my lesson once and for all about putting too much importance on a toy.  It was this very moment that my media center not only crashed, but refused to start. Why? The motherboard (If you don’t know what that is, it’s fine. Just keep reading.) had fried itself.

I immediately slipped into depression. It ruined the whole day. It ruined my night. It ruined Monday. (Which isn’t hard, because after all…it’s Monday.)

However, God did take the opportunity to show me why this had happened. In talking with two of my friends about this issue, I heard things like “Man, God must be punshing you.” or “Maybe God is trying to tell you that you are placing too much importance on your media center.”

Adding this to my internal suspicions, the picture was very clear.

Presently, my media center is still broken. I’ve learned to accept it. I will be trying to get the motherboard replaced by the manufacturer soon, but no longer am I going to allow it to be the most important part of my happiness.

Anything can be an idol. Let that be a lesson to you.

Cordially,
Clifton