Blue Chi’s

The title of this post was inspired by 43 Folder’s episode on Media Diet, which I do take occasionally. However, this post is not about having a proper media diet, it’s about all the media I’m consuming simultaneously at this moment.

I have completed about the third of Stephen King’s Cell. It is the first proper book I read by King, a post about it at Engadget earlier this year got me interested in it. The cell is not a science fiction book, but a story about how we shall act when civilization falls. I enjoy reading contemporary novels more than anything else, Cell is nice thriller that I’m very much enjoying at the moment.

In Cold Blood is a book that I never was able to get in to, I purchased it after watching the movie Capote which told the story of how the book was written. I really do not like the fact that the book is divided into huge chapters as I find them very tiring to read. I failed my second attempt at reading this book, I stopped reading it when I got Cell. I do not know if I’ll get back to it once I am done with the other one.

I’ve read quite a bit of HTML & XHTML – The Definitive Guide, but it does not look like I’ll be able to finish it anytime soon. I do not know if I will finish it ever. I am a great fan of Oreilly’s Definitive Guide series, but the topic of this one is very dull. I got it learn XHTML, and it looks like I’ll just skip into the relevant chapters and leave the rest as I do know what I need to know about HTML already.

A very talented artist that probably nobody ever heard of is the Danish ‘Maria’. In 2003, she released in the US a single titled “I Give, You Take” and one beautifully crated soul album titled ‘My Soul’. Sadly, Maria never made it big and completely disappeared after the failure of her album. I downloaded this album in 2003 and really loved it. I had to purchase it when I randomly found it at a shop here in Muscat earlier this month.

I am currently playing Final Fantasy XII on the PS2 and really enjoying every bit of it. I no longer have the time to play every single RPG that comes out, so this is my annual dose of old school Japanese gamplay goodness. FFXII has got it all perfect, the storyline, the characters, the gameplay, the music, and obviously the art and graphics. I am at the final stage in the game, might finish it soon.

I am quite pissed about the fact that I cannot find a couple of DS games that I craving for, Final Fantasy III and Castlevania Portrait of Ruin, it looks like I’ll be ordering these online soon. I hate you stupid game shops of Oman.

Studio 1 is the title of the return album for the UK girlband All Saints – a band that had, in their golder years, sold thousands of records for singles such as Never Ever, Under The Bridge, Back Coffee, and Pure Shores. I really did not know what to expect of their new work, and though I thought that the first single ‘Rock Steady’ was quite a catchy track, it was not really memorable. The same goes for the album. I can listen to the album in one go and enjoy it, and then when it finishes not remember the names of more than two songs. Studio 1 is fun and poppy, but it is nowhere close to a classic. Interestingly, a couple of tracks (One and On, One Me and U) seemed to mimic the work of the producer William Orbit. My favourite track on the album is Fundamental – a very well written, sung, and produced love song.

1. Rock Steady
2. Chick Fit
3. On And On
4. Scar
5. Not Eazy
6. Hell No
7. One Me And U
8. Headlock
9. Too Nasty
10. In It To Win It
11. Flashback
12. Fundamental

2.5/5

The Sultan’s School held an alumni gathering last night, the event that had not ran for quite sometime is supposed to start once again on a yearly basis, but sadly not a great number of people seem to be interested in attending it anymore.

Only four guys (including myself) and five girls bothered to show up from my class. I am not so good with field statistics, but it looked like only a 100 people or so attended the event, a small number for the graduates of a school that was established in the 70s. None of the non-Arab teachers that taught me are with the school anymore, and only five of the Arab ones attended. It was really nice talking to the few people that came last night, but still, it is a shame on all of you Sultan’s School graduates that heard about this event and did not come!!!

I attempted accessing Blogger Beta this morning (Dec 14th, 9am) and I was shocked to see a “blocked by Omantel” message. The main website page for Blogger.com is still accessible, but people that have already migrated to the new beta will not be able to make any use of that and this means that bloggers will not be able to post anything new on their blogs. Profiles of people that have already moved to the new beta are not accessible either. The last time I used the website was last night. (Dec 13th, 10pm).

I can still update my blog through the post-by-email feature, a service which can only be activated through the currently blocked dash-board.

Today is the first day of the weekend so there isn’t much that we can do, we might need to complain to the TRA, I do not know if they would be of any actual help though.

Dec 15th, Update: Blogger Beta has now been unblocked. I hope that it was just blocked by mistake.

Today’s session was again on the subject of the online investigation of child porn crimes. The session was not technically focused the way the first day was, this one instead discussed the criminal process of child molestation, its psychology, proactive measures taken by the police, decoys, interrogating suspects for evidence and descriptions of previous cases and their results.

The historical development and the psychological aspects of the child pornography industry were very interesting. Before the advent of the Internet, child porn was only existent in the US through magazines personally shared between people with such preference that have brought those magazines with them from European countries with less restrictive regulation. The Internet made it possible to have child porn readily accessible from all around the world and contributed in normalising this conduct as child molesters could see and communicate with others with the same sexual preference. It is worth mentioning that not only distributing child porn is illegal in the US, but merely having or accessing child porn on the web is also illegal in the US.

The majority of the session today was spent on the investigations of child molestation cases, techniques used by molesters to victimise children, the different types of child molesters, statistics and examples on patterns and efforts made by the molesters in the process, methods used by the police to set up traps to convict suspects, techniques used for data collection, and other stuff as well.

Many of the examples described today were extremely disturbing, but the session as a whole was very interesting. Yet still I couldn’t help it but feel that I was just wasting my time, I did not learn anything significant that I could relate to. I am glad that the whole session on child pornography is now over, I had really heard enough porn terms and keywords that could last me a lifetime. The rest of the workshop shall cover money laundering over the Internet, funding terrorism, a technical guide on the Internet and computers, and public/private partnerships and cooperation.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am attending a workshop on Cybercrime this week. The event is organised by the American Bar Association (ABA) in association with the Ministry of Justice in Oman. The background of the attendants was very diverse, the group of 40 included judges, people from the Public Prosecution, the Ministry of Legal Affairs (Us!), the Royal Office, OmanTel, the Telecommunication Regulation Authority, and some other people that I did not recognise. The speakers were members of various American State Police divisions and the US Secret Services.

The event started slow, we had a general introduction on the global perspective of cybercrime and the impact of Internet on our daily lives, the web explosion upon the creation of the first Internet browser, the opportunities opened by web enabled technologies on consumers and businesses worldwide. The massive amount of spam received by American Internet users and the substantial increase in percentage of porn spam over the years. The fact that the US is the biggest consumer of child porn and that it is the biggest fighter of it as well. The solution taken by some countries to block and filter all child porn websites and that it is fine temporarily, but will prove ineffective on a long term.

The main subject of the session for day one was a description of the technical aspects of electronic investigation, it was delivered by Rich Brown from the New Jersey State Police. The session described in detail the process used to extract information from the Internet regarding the source of a website, its owner and the information regarding the service provider. The largest chunk of the session covered the use of whois services to retrieve IP and ISP details, using DNS search services and traceroute services to track down the location of an IP address. Dissection of a standard HTML page was also tapped upon, accessing the HTML source code, using the page metadata, disabling JavaScript for better access of the page contents. Examples were displayed for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. (Though clearly all the screenshots were taken using Firefox.) Email investigation was also covered, accessing the full header and acquiring the fully qualified domain name to track the source of a message. The session also covered the procedure at which evidence should be collected from a suspect’s location of operation, tools and programs used to extract data from hard drives without altering their content and other specific of how evidence should be packed, etc.

The session also described the method at which P2P and BitTorrent applications work and the difficulties BitTorrent introduced at various aspects of the investigation as a person could contribute to
the distribution of an illegal file without having the full file himself.

The session was clearly directed for those interested in the process of investigation and the police process in taking action, it had almost no legal point to make, though it did attempt to explain the various Internet technologies presented, their function, and who does what while the service is provided which was helpful to many of those that would rule in internet related cases and would contribute to the drafting of e-legislation. I thought that the session was too technical for those that had no background on how the Internet works and at the same time was too basic for those that already knew what a whois service is. The whole event was about the investigation of criminals of child pornography, the speaker did not seem to realise that there is no distinction in Oman between adult and child pornography as they are all prohibited to the same extent. I think that he had no idea that the only ISP provider here is partially owned by government, and that almost only government websites are actually
hosted ‘in’ the country.

A major problem that we faced was the fact that he gave the opportunity to people to ask random questions all through out the lecture, not only that they did not wait to hear the whole thing before asking questions which they might’ve heard the answer for if they just let him finish off, but because of those questions, we did not have time to finish the whole subject and ended up skipping a great part of the content we were supposed to cover.

That is not to say that the session was not interesting, but I still cannot deny the fact that I personally did not learn much as everything I heard was things I already knew or had a very good idea about. The food was really good as well, so that’s a great plus for them for sure!

Looking forward to day two.