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By Root 507 0

crime? An ex-girlfriend of mine had a father who was a Port Authority officer. He was a good man, but he told me of times when he would have to drive around in his old beat up pickup truck that could not pass inspection and was not registered. When pulled over, he would simply flash his badge and be sent on his way. That there, my friends is what these plates do for government officials, but it happens before and without the police stop.

This is a little side note on the issue, but a friend of mine always says, "Never let intimidation or fear keep you from speaking the truth. Expose intimidation and banish fear! Exposure is sometimes the best form of accountability." To me, this is exactly the reason why this information has to get out there. Officers play a very important role in society and LEOs (Law Enforcement Officers) in general are a good thing. But as old farmer Brown used to say, one rotten apple can spoil the whole bushel, right? Those who were hired to "Serve and Protect" cannot be allowed to forget that little motto, even if it has disappeared from the side of most of their cruisers in the past few years. Those in office who were hired to serve and represent us seem to have forgotten that. They think we are here to serve them and their goals.

All of this information comes to me from someone who had a Somerset County plate back in the late 1980s, so it may be a bit outdated. He did, however, provide the information in December 2010, so I'm guessing that he would have added a little note about how things have changed if that was the case, since he keeps current contact with those in the government to this day.

I hope you enjoyed this little look into the workings of the New Jersey State Crime Allowance Organization. I'm sure it is similar to the CAO in your state or country as well.

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Fishing with Squid

by Suborbital - suboorbital@gmail.com (yep, two Ohs) | 1021 words

Squid ( www.squid-cache.org ) is an open-source proxy server that can be installed on any operating system. The configuration file is imposing, to say the least, but only because it contains basically the entire documentation for squid. Lines of default configuration file: 4984. Lines actually in use in my config file: 45. The squid instance described in this article was installed under the MacPorts package on OS X 10.6.something (although I have set it up under Windows XP, too).

I started out with the intention of blocking advertising on iPad applications. Normally, you could use something like the Firefox add-on "Ad Block Pro," but on an iPad, ads turn up all over the place, not just in web browsers (the Atomic Web Browser has ad blocking, but I was interested in things like ads in the BBC app). Fortunately, for a given wireless server, you can manually define a proxy, and so I duly set this to my MacBook, IP address 192.168.0.9, running squid on the default port, 3128. Squid was set up to allow proxying access to anything on the local (i.e., home) network, with the line

>> acl localnet src 192.168.0.0/16 # RFC1918 possible internal network

and, most importantly, to log the terms in GET requests, with the line

>> strip_query_terms off

As an example, the request http://www.google.com/search?q=2600 will be logged in its entirety, instead of just http://www.google.com/search? . POST requests are not handleable in the same way, but to examine the content of POST requests, you could probably redirect all traffic (at least temporarily) to a custom script whose only function was to enumerate POST request variables and their values. Secure requests (https requests, usually to port 443) are encrypted and also not available. On the whole, this is a good thing, as every request to apple.com was made via https, including some which look quite advertisement-seeking, such as

>> 1293720754.249 2663 192.168.0.10 TCP_MISS/200 1512 CONNECT iadsdk.apple.com:443 - DIRECT/216.236.237.207 -

(the fields here (the squid default) being the timestamp, time to serve, requesting IP (i.e., the iPad), cache result (i.e.,