My on-the-ball buddy has once again passed on some very interesting information; this time it’s about the possibility of an absolutely colossal tidal wave that would effect the entire eastern coast of North America, parts of South America, and northern Europe. I haven’t done any research on whether or not this guy’s a nut, but it unfortunately sounds quite plausible. Check this out:

Edit: I did the research; the study that produced this report was evidently funded by none other than an insurance agency specializing in natural disasters. I suggest you enjoy the text below as you would any other kind of sensationalist, pseudo-scientific garbage that is not supported by most in the field.

—snip—

11 August 2004 Unstoppable Gee-Gees By Gwynne Dyer

The western flank of Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma in the Canaries is going to slide into the Atlantic one of these days: a diagonal fracture has already separated it from the main body of the volcano, and only friction still keeps it attached. “When it goes, it will likely collapse in about 90 seconds,” said Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Grieg Hazard Research Centre at University College London. And when it goes, probably during an eruption, the splash will create a mega-tsunami that races across the Atlantic and drowns the facing coastlines.

Fortunately the nearest coast to the Canary Islands, where the waves will be around 300 feet (100 metres) high when they hit, is lightly populated Western Sahara. Few people living in the coastal plains of Morocco, south-western Spain and Portugal will survive either, but the waves will drop in height as they travel. The coasts of southern Ireland and south-western England will also take a beating, but by then the wave height will be down to about 30 feet (10 metres).

The real carnage will be on the western side of the Atlantic, from Newfoundland all the way down the east coast of Canada and the United States to Cuba, Hispaniola, the Lesser Antilles and north-eastern Brazil. With a clear run across the Atlantic, the wall of water will still be between 60 and 150 feet (20 and 50 metres) high when it hits the eastern seaboard of North America, and it will keep coming for ten to fifteen minutes.

Worst hit will be harbours and estuaries that funnel the waves inland: goodbye Halifax, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, DC. Miami and Havana go under almost entirely, as do low-lying islands like the Bahamas and Barbados. Likely death toll, if there is no mass evacuation beforehand? A hundred million people, give or take fifty million.

The last time the volcano erupted, in 1949, its whole western side slid 13 feet (4 metres) down towards the sea, and even now it is still slipping very slowly downwards. Given the scale of the catastrophe if the next eruption sends this mountain crashing into the water, Dr. McGuire is angry that there is so little monitoring equipment on La Palma to give advance warning: “The US government must be aware of the La Palma threat. They should certainly be worried, and so should the island states in the Caribbean that will really bear the brunt of a collapse.”

“They’re not taking it seriously,” McGuire concluded. “Governments change every four or five years and generally they’re not interested in these things.” It was a classic scene, revisited in every natural disaster movie: crusading scientist calls feckless governments to account, squalid politicos ignore the call. The science journalists couldn’t wait to get their pieces into print.

But hold on a minute. Haven’t we heard about this threat before? What’s new this time? Nothing, except that there hasn’t been a stampede to cover La Palma with seismometers. Now, why do you think that is?

Suppose that the governments whose coastlines are at risk, from Morocco to the US, did get a warning that Cumbre Vieja was waking up again. What would they do with the warning? Evacuate one or two hundred million people from the low-lying lands indefinitely?

They don’t know if there is really going to be an eruption (seismology is not that precise), or how big it will be, or whether this will be the one that actually shakes the side of the mountain loose. It could happen in the next eruption, but it might not happen for a thousand years.

No national leader wants to evacuate the entire coast for an indefinite period of time, causing an economic and refugee crisis on the scale of a world war, for what might be a false alarm. But nobody wants to ignore a warning, and perhaps be responsible for tens of millions of deaths. From a political standpoint, it’s better not to have the warning at all.

Natural disasters that can affect the whole planet are known to scientists as “global geophysical events” — gee-gees, for short — and they come in two kinds: ones you might be able to do something useful about, and ones you can’t. When governments are faced with the first kind, they can respond quite sensibly.

Since we first realised two decades ago that asteroids and comets smashing into the earth have caused a number of mass extinctions, a US government project has identified and started to track 3,000 “near-earth objects” whose orbits make them potentially dangerous. In another generation, we may even be able to divert ones that are on a collision course — and if there’s one gee-gee that you would want to prevent above all others, that’s the one. But there’s no similar remedy on the horizon for volcanos or earthquakes, or the tsunamis they might cause. On this one, we just have to keep our fingers crossed.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

Just saw a very interesting tidbit of info on my buddy’s blog about Microsoft’s new WSH shell. It’s very interesting in that it not only gives you the ability to do regular *nix stuff like process lists and such from it, but it also allows you to pipe into Microsoft apps like Excel.

Very cool stuff.

Just found this quote from my buddy’s blog and I thought I’d share:

“The nipple is the ONLY intuitive interface. After that, it’s all learned.”

I recently came across the coolest email address to use when signing up for something that requires one.

fire@will.com

You’re welcome.

A milestone has been reached – 3Mb down, 384Kb up. The future is bright.

I posted a comment on /. yesterday and ended up with first post. It had a bit of humor and a bit of genuine commentary in it (despite being only 24 bits in length) and ended up with a score of 5. No big deal.

The interesting part is that despite the fact that it was the first post in the thread, some mouthbreather decided to mod it redundant.

/. – it never ceases to amaze.

Well, the worst case scenario has come to pass – WoW is totally sick and I am buying it on the first day. I’m looking at getting the collectors edition even; I might as well since Bllizzard games have constituted like 80% of my gaming time overe the years. It’s worth it even thought I’ll probably stop playing the game constantly within a month.

The lure of infosec is too strong to deny for more than that amount of time, but right now my thoughts are occupied with launch day and spending Wednesday – Sunday gaming my ass off.

Well, after reading Linus’s comments on interpreted languages and discussing the matter with Ken some, I have come to the somewhat solid conclusion that I should discontinue my pursuit of additional Python knowledge.

Linus’s point was that if a given progam was fairly small, he’d write it using Bash, and that if the program required any true size or power he’d move to C. He thus didn’t see any need for the interpreted languages such as Perl and Python.

My idea has always been that I could use Python to accomplish all my small scripts as well as the larger, full-fledged apps. But it seems now like this is a path guided by my desire to learn Python, not a path based on logic. In reality, I can do 99% of my everyday stuff using Bash, and if I can, I probably should. Taking the extra steps to use Python and ensure that Python is on the box in question is arguably not the best route.

There are a few things I want to do as far as programming goes that I want to do in Python, but those are pretty far down on my project list right now, and even then it’s only like one or two apps. The vast majority of everything else I can do with Bash.

So, what are your thoughts? Should people doing predominatly small scripting tasks even venture down the road of interpreted languages, or is it a waste of time given the fact that Bash is available? Drop me a line and let me know your thoughts.

1. Keeping papers from flying away.
2. Throwing at people who like ISA Server.
3. Convincing people to try and/or go back to Linux.

(My thoughts from this thread at dslreports)

Here’s an analogy for the Windows users trying to fight malware. Imagine that you live in a place where everyone’s houses are built out of straw, and there is a wave of arson sweeping the town. Now imagine that some people, after having their houses burnt down a few times, decided to build their house out of stone instead of straw.

Here’s a conversation between an owner of a stone house and one of the regular townfolk who is looking to protect their straw house:

– Stone Hey, neighbor, the ruffians are coming through again, you may want to rebuild your house with stone instead of straw. The fire sticks they throw won’t even burn my house at all. All I have to do is replace a stone or two every few months and things are solid.

Stone: Nah, man….sorry. I am heading to my daughter’s soccer game. Good luck with your security.

–

This to me highlights the difference between the average user protecting their systems using Windows vs. them using Linux or OS X. Ask yourself one question:

Do you want to spend your time protecting your computer, or using it?

I’m in the use category. People have too much on their plates to spend time stacking layer upon layer in front of Windows so that they can protect themselves from flawed design.

Can Windows be secured? Sure it can – without a doubt. I ran it for years without a single incident – but that was because I was having fun protecting it (as many here do). This is people working on their tools. I don’t want to fix tools. I want to use them. In my view, a computer should be transparent and unimportant. What we do with them is what matters. The more time we spend fixing and defending our tools the less time we spend getting anything done with them.

So to all of you out there who are getting slightly tired of the rat race, consider going with an OS that will let you work with it rather than require you to babysit it constantly. Consider OS X. Consider Linux. Just like building a stone house there’ll be a learning curve, but it’ll be worth it.