September 2007 List of the Month

SEPT. 2007 LIST OF THE MONTH

This month’s List of the Month is about gratitude, by the end. But it starts with computer programming, in particular the Internet browser Firefox.
Doubtless you have read in the newspapers about vulnerabilities discovered in Microsoft products, which had the potential to be hacked and to permit the unauthorized use of personal information. What you have read is, to use the perennial proverbial cliché, the tip of the iceberg.
What follows is a highly selected list of vulnerabilities discovered in Mozilla products (Mozilla originated Firefox). The introduction to the full list stated that “This is not meant as an exhaustive list of all security-related bugs. To find technical discussions of security-related bugs, visit Bugzilla. This page lists security vulnerabilities with direct impact on users. All of these vulnerabilities have been fixed prior to the most recent release.”
If you think you know English, prepare to learn otherwise now. Take a deep breath, start reading, and when you can’t stand it any more, skip to the end.
Some vulnerabilities:
--MFSA 2007-17 XUL Popup Spoofing.
Used to mean: kids trying to scare each other while trick-or-treating on Halloween.
--MFSA 2007-14 Path Abuse in Cookies.
Used to mean: getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar.
--FSA 2007-13 Persistent Autocomplete Denial of Service.
Used to mean: dialing the wrong number.
--MFSA 2007-12 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.8.0.12/1.8.1.4).
Used to mean: “I sure was drunk, wasn’t I?”
--MFSA 2007-11 FTP PASV port-scanning.
Used to mean: going to the dock to see someone off on a cruise.
--MFSA 2007-09 Privilege escalation by setting img.src to javascript: URI.
Used to mean: why the top executives got better coffee and the best parking spaces.
--MFSA 2007-07 Embedded nulls in location.hostname confuse same-domain checks.
Used to mean: the shop confused your check with one written by someone else with a similar name.
--MFSA 2007-03 Information disclosure through cache collisions.
Used to mean: when you get in an auto accident, you have go exchange addresses and phone numbers.
--MFSA 2007-02 Improvements to help protect against Cross-Site Scripting attacks.
Used to mean: the teacher caught on that other people in your class were passing nasty notes about you.
--MFSA 2006-76 XSS using outer window's Function object.
Used to mean: the guy next door is building an addition that will block your view.
--MFSA 2006-75 RSS Feed-preview referrer leak.
Used to mean: you forgot that your family would smell their surprise dinner and guess what it was.
--MFSA 2006-73 Mozilla SVG Processing Remote Code Execution.
Used to mean: in sandlot kid football, the play the pushy loudmouth quarterback called which nobody understood, but the defense forgot to cover one of the ends so it worked anyway.
--MFSA 2006-71 LiveConnect crash finalizing JS objects.
Used to mean: there are no atheists in foxholes.
--MFSA 2006-67 Running Script can be recompiled.
Used to mean: “Just put it on my tab.”
--MFSA 2006-59 Concurrency-related vulnerability.
Used to mean: if you don’t think your wife will guess that you’re cheating on her, think again.
--MFSA 2006-56 chrome: scheme loading remote content.
Used to mean: the way politicians always make it sound better than it is.
--MFSA 2006-39 "View Image" local resource linking.
Used to mean: kibbitzing.
--MFSA 2006-31 EvalInSandbox escape (Proxy Autoconfig, Greasemonkey).
Used to mean: blaming it on your little brother.
--MFSA 2006-01 JavaScript garbage-collection hazards.
Used to mean: “The trash collectors banged up our wastecan again this morning.”
--MFSA 2006-13 Downloading executables with "Save Image As..."
Used to mean: The President trying to make himself look better by firing subordinates.
--MFSA 2006-22 CSS Letter-Spacing Heap Overflow Vulnerability.
Used to mean: “You need to clean your desk.”
--MFSA 2006-05 Localstore.rdf XML injection through XULDocument.persist().
Used to mean: The rich out-of-state people who bought the general store don’t care how much money it loses.
--MFSA 2005-53 Standalone applications can run arbitrary code through the browser.
Used to mean: “You better repair that fence, because if the heifers get out they’re going to eat my flowers.”
--MFSA 2005-47 Code execution via "Set as Wallpaper."
Used to mean: “If you sign up for our credit card, we’ll put a scenic design of your choice on it.”
--MFSA 2005-43 "Wrapped" javascript: urls bypass security checks.
Used to mean: “While the cops were in the donut shop, burglars were robbing a store.”
--MFSA 2005-40 Missing Install object instance checks.
Used to mean: asking your wife where you put something.

And so on. Two general points here:
1. Aren’t you glad there are people who really know about these things, so your computer operates day and day and mostly does what it’s supposed to?
2. Aren’t you glad our school system has a fully funded program for the gifted and talented, so that the advanced computer work of the future will be done in this country rather than overseas?

Muggings, thuggings and buggings can be sent to [email protected].

The Lost Little League Field

THE LOST LITTLE LEAGUE FIELD

Once upon a village, there was the most beautiful Little League field in the world. I know, because I played on it. Not long ago, I went looking for it, to see if anything was left, and found more than I had hoped.
I had stopped at Brandon’s downtown grocery store to pick up the local papers and check on what was happening in the town where I grew up. Coming out of the store, in the early evening, I realized two things: this was the time when we played baseball at the downtown field, and this time in town I had enough slack in my schedule to go on a long-awaited journey. Instead of driving away in my car, I drove out back of the store, looking for what might be left of that idyllic field.
The store now occupies most of the area that been the infield and outfield. By chance or coincidence, the ledges in the hill formed a curve that perfectly fitted a Little League outfield, as if nature intended for us to play baseball. But the store’s developers had blasted away the front slopes of the ledges, to have room for the building.
Home plate was toward the Congregational Church, which played hymns in its carillon during the early evening, adding to the beauty of the site. On this classic of small town life, in the glow of the near-sunset hours, my team won the pennant, and got to go to Fenway Park and see the Red Sox, which meant seeing the great Ted Williams.
Not that I had anything to do with that victory. In those days, there were no T-ball and Mighty Mites leagues, where boys and girls together find support and encouragement and build self-esteem along with their skills. In 1956, you started as a shrimp. The only way you ever got on that first year was by getting walked, which happened with some frequency because your strike zone was such a small target—but then you got thrown out trying to complete the marathon run to second base. The second year, you got a few legitimate hits, when you knocked your grounders between infielders. By the final year, you were one of the players the coaches made sure to distribute equally among the teams so the games would be good contests. School could be very frustrating, but seeing your growth on the baseball diamond, you learned something important about not giving up, and you had proof of accomplishment that no one could take away from you.
In my case, I batted the way my father taught me, choking up on the bat and swinging level to meet the ball and hitting line drives. In my last year, I was deadly: I didn’t wait for the ball to be in the strike zone, if I could reach it I could hit it, usually aiming it to the position where they had put the shrimp. When there were two outs by the time I got up, I shifted my hands down to the end of the bat and swung for distance, and hit more home runs than anyone else. Later, I looked on television to see if there were any players who batted as my father had recommended. I found two: one named Ty, and the other named Pete.
I wasn’t a very popular kid—both my parents were teachers, The Enemy, and I liked books, which many thought unutterably strange—but in baseball, I found an equalizer. By then, though, we were playing on the former high school field, which is now the site of the Nexus electronics plant.
But that field behind the American Legion house (torn down to create the Marketplace, which is now Brooks/Rite-Aid) meant a lot to me—though that first year, it was mostly a place to admire the prowess of Phil Marks and Eddie Bird, who traded the positions of pitcher and catcher and led us to the league championship. Later, on the Otter Valley basketball court, they led a team that beat Rutland by surprising them with slow-down play; Marks, who shot endless baskets at a home hoop, was a superb center, and Bird was one of the school’s all-time great guards. Ted Williams? Even as a shrimp, I could tell he was an immortal. He did not swing at the ball, he stood still and waited while the unknowing ball came wandering along and murdered it.
For the kids who weren’t playing, the field offered another diversion: swinging on the grapevines. Brandon, though you wouldn’t guess it just driving through, has a very, very peculiar geography. After the big falls in the Neshobe, the one just downstream from the Route 7 bridge, the river over eons carved a big ravine; as a result, Pearl Street and Conant Square and the area that was once the Little League Field all have steep banks, and sometimes require precipitous descents to reach the riverine bottomland. On those immense grapevines, you could swing out over the edge, bellowing like Tarzan.
Getting out of my car in the grocery store’s back lot, I could see that the scrub brush bordering the old field had, in the short 50 years it took me to become an oldster, grown up to a forest. Much of the smaller growth had died, shaded out and deprived of moisture by the larger root systems of the trees. I could see dead trunks on the ground that could have been vines.
As in the past, Brandonites of whatever ages had worn paths, for which I was grateful. Some had left beer cans and someone had dumped a bag of garbage, now strewn about; for these, I was saddened. But I kept going, closer and closer to the edge of the ravine and the edge of the graveyard.
And there they were: not swinging free, but paired with trees. “Paired” is the word: in each case, the stronger vine had won out over others. These twisted wooden cables were not only large, they were HUGE, ascending to where their leaves were invisible behind those of the trees. One was about four inches in diameter. Like the kids whose characters I admired in graded school and met later, they had changed, but were still admirable.
Coming out of the patch at its eastern end, on another path, I was delighted to find that a new generation of grapevines had conquered the chain link fence that the behavior of today's kids had demanded to protect the historic tombstones. This year, with abundant rain early on, this wild vineyard had produced the biggest fox grapes I’ve ever seen. Fox grapes? That one goes back to the time when Aesop’s fables were part of everyone’s education. In the story of the fox and the grapes, a fox sees a cluster of grapes in a tree and decides to leap up and grab them. He tries again and again, but can’t leap high enough. “Oh well,” he says as he walks off, “those grapes probably would have been sour anyway.” The same story accounts for the phrase “sour grapes.”
Earlier in my life, when I was doing more foraging, I discovered that you can make good grape juice from fox grapes, even though they do have a mouth-puckering effect when eaten whole. Gather them, wash them (look at the water that results and ask if you would ever drink water that looked like that, if you doubt the wisdom of adding an extra step here), then crush them and bring them to a boil, adding water or sweetener as necessary to get good juice. Then pour the results through a piece of cloth—an old bedsheet will do—and the mouthpuckering part will remain on the other side of the filter. Canned, this juice was the best thing I’ve ever had to drink to cope with a cold, full of antioxidants and easily available glucose that helps to warm the body, which aids the immune process.
Grapevines—the first settlers in Ohio found a giant grapevine when they arrived, according to artist-history writer Eric Sloane. It was 12 feet across at the base, and its ramblers extended a hundred feet away. After the farmers cleared the vines and cut the monster at its root, they held a dance on the stump.
Wouldn’t it have been amazing if they had put a wall around that vine and left it for future generations?
They didn’t, but Brandon still has some magnificent vines, where the magnificent Little League field used to be.

Comments will be fielded at [email protected]

GLORIOUS VERMONT ROCKS

GLORIOUS VERMONT ROCKS

A visitor to Vermont, driving along during the spring during the days before much pavement, saw a farmer out in one of his fields, using a team of oxen and a stone boat to carry rocks to where the edge of the field was marked by a stone wall. He stopped and watched for a while, then called out, “Where did all these rocks come from?”
“Glacier brought ‘em,” yelled back the farmer.
“Where’d the glacier go?”
“I think it went back to get more rocks.”
In a geological sense, this is only partly true. Ice a mile or two thick does a pretty good job of grinding mountaintops into rocks and carrying them along to be deposited later as gravel, but other forces thrust those parts of the earth’s congealed crust upward to be ground down. Vermont has had quite a history, in its time, of continental collisions, and I’m not talking about Continental soldiers in the Revolutionary War clashing with British, Hessians and Iroquois. What is now Africa banged against what is now North Africa twice, and the Connecticut River, as I understand it, at one time was at the collision point.
Look at geological maps of what’s underneath America, and you will see colored zones denoting different types of bedrock. The Vermont map has them packed together like pages in a big scrapbook, looked at on end. This particolored piece of cartography is one indication of how colorful the geological history has been; another is an abundance of pretty rocks.
I became aware of this in the mid-1970’s, when my wife and I took a Cambridge, Massachusetts poet up to Johnson, Vermont to see Hayden Carruth, who was then living with his family at Crow’s Nest. While the Important Poet talked about Important Literary Things with Carruth, this young poet headed outdoors with Johnson’s son, so he could show me the path he and friends had cut to take hellacious bike rides through the forest (“So you have to duck,” he explained, pointing to one big limb). I wonder sometimes what he’s doing now.
A brook ran through the woods, and in that brook were remarkable rocks. Not long before, I had invented a form of folk art sculpture by putting some interesting rocks into a pint jar, filling it with water, and putting on the lid. Rock jars do what rain and polarizing sunglasses do for the appearance of many things: they change the light in a way that brings out colors. Looking at these Johnson, Vermont mixtures of quartz, granite, and more sedimentary materials, I realized these would be prime rock jar material, and set about gathering a canful—before going back to Crow’s Nest and talking a bit with Carruth, who would make a good Vermont Poet Laureate were it not that an upstate New York college decided to give him shelter from the storms and he went west.
Fast-forward to today, and both my wife and I are big fans of cute Vermont rocks. No journey to northern Vermont is complete without bringing back at least one.
Recently, I had personal business to do in the Burlington area, and went on up to Fairfax when it was done, because I knew there were good rocks near the covered bridge there. This time, I was on a mission: the last cat had died, and I wanted memorial stones for the grave that holds her and her half-sister, both from the same amazing four-color mother (orange, black, white and patches of gray tabby) and two great rival fathers, Granite (who was agile enough to run headfirst down a tree and leap sideways to break his fall) and Black Beauty (to fight with whom Granite was in such a hurry to get down the tree).
It’s impossible right now to describe with any adequacy how close to me these two female cats were. The people who say furry-purries have no affection for people are dead wrong. As long as they are raised with other kittens (TWO KITTENS ARE EASIER THAN ONE!) and know they are cats rather than people, their relationships with people are clear and uncomplicated and, with time, rich.
For years, Mohawk and Lyle (my son, now 27, originated those names) didn’t have an indoor catbox, because they never used one: they knew my schedule, I knew their schedule, and they went outdoors. To the end of her life, Lyle, the last cat, wanted first thing in the morning to go to her cat condo, jump on top, then have a nose-nuzz, then a pet-and-purr with me—before seeking any food.
But my wife and I agreed that at our age and in our circumstances, Lyle would be the last. We would make them a good memorial rock garden and remember them with love, but, as a Mark Twain character put it, “Overreachin’ don’t pay.”
So if you have any pretty rocks you don’t want any more, mail them to….
Not really. Vermont has plenty to go around. The Slate Belt has interesting pieces in waste rock piles, Lake Champlain has places along the shoreline that are worth prowling, some marble quarries have places where other minerals have joined the calcium carbonate, and if you want to see the ultimate, go to the Burlington Gem & Mineral Show, that area having the only active mineral collectors’ club in the state that I know.
And never forget: there’s no rock like a pet rock.

Stonings, moanings and digital phonings can be sent to [email protected]

SLINGS AND ARROWS

SLINGS AND ARROWS

For the 12th year, the Chimney Point State Historic Site in Addison will host the Northeast Annual Open Atlatl Championship competition (Sept. 14-16), and ace atlatl titleist Robert Berg will lead a workshop at which participants will make their own atlatls and fletch three field darts. As part of Vermont Archaeology Month, people will engage in a Stone Age activity next to the huge iron bridge over Lake Champlain.
So, what’s an atlatl, something from Mad Magazine? No, that’s the axolotl, a lizard of the high mountain lakes in Mexico, found in the territory the Nahuatl once ruled, hence the –tl ending. An atlatl, also from the Nahuatl, is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a device for throwing a spear or dart that consists of a rod or board with a projection (as a hook) at the rear end to hold the weapon in place until released.”
In other words, the atlatl is a way of throwing a sharp-pointed, spearlike object as if your arm were longer, giving you more range. It takes practice to master the sweeping motion needed to send the projectile accurately, but in its day this was a formidable hunting implement.
One of my fascinations has been the way similar extensions of human strength were developed all over the world during the earliest ages of human society, in so many different ways. South American had the bolo, three weights on three ropes connected at the middle so that when thrown whirling at an ostrich’s legs, it would tangle them up. American tribes sometimes used the rabbit stick, a simple length of wood thrown parallel with and just above the ground, so that its faster outer whirling part would knock out a small animal looking over the grass. The spear used the mass and momentum of its heavy length to drive home the relatively crude stone points of the Neolithic. Some jungle tribes used the blow tube, after they learned how poisonous some things around them were, meaning that a small wound from a small dart could be made fatal. Various snares and possibly devices similar to the Malaysian Gate (ask a Vietnam veteran) took on added force from the controlled release of bent vegetation. The Middle East had the sling, swung in a circle to throw a rock with increased speed and terrific effect, as gigantic Goliath discovered when confronting the Hebrew shepherd boy David. The bow and arrow were so effective that the invention diffused widely, or occurred independently in many places. Top prize ought to go to Australia’s aboriginals, whose boomerangs, aerodynamically shaped rabbit sticks, would circle back to the thrower if they missed their target—thus utilizing the basic principle behind flight long before people could ever take off from the ground themselves.
So began our long history of warfare, with war against other animals.
To complete the prehistoric picture, one more invention needs to be recognized: rope. Maybe the idea came from women’s invention of thread, as a way of putting together garments and shelters. Maybe observation of vines and their twisted and twisting growth habits gave someone the idea. Maybe unkempt hair, which tends to clump naturally into coils like the Rastafarians’ “dreadlocks.” In any case, people were soon twisting flexible materials into better and better cordage, which had all sorts of uses (the bow, a musical instrument as well as a weapon, depended on such an invention).
It was rope that enabled one group of people to make captives of some other group, rather than having to kill them. It was the kind of rope known as a whip that make such captives slaves. And “civilization,” like it or not, was born of enslavements, just as our modern civilization began with the arrival of machinery.

Brickbats, bolts and blunderbussings can be sent to [email protected].

WELLAND HORN, QUIETLY IMPORTANT

WELLAND HORN, QUIETLY IMPORTANT

One of Brandon’s finest men passed on recently, an event briefly noted on the obituary pages. But Welland Horn deserved more attention than that, because he did things that will matter to the future of the town especially and will matter to Vermont as a whole.
It was Welland who, in the 1950’s, learned that the state transportation agency was dynamiting an early 19th century iron-making blast furnace in Forest Dale to get rock fill for a small Route 73 bypass. He owned that furnace, so he went immediately to the site and put a stop to an act of official vandalism that today would be considered a major desecration of Vermont’s heritage. The Forest Dale blast furnace, now shored up at state expense, anchors a state Division for Historic Preservation plan to have the 10-acre collection of cellarhole holes and industrial remains become the primary site for documenting the lesser-known early 19th century Vermont manufacturing era. In the meantime, anyone can see the blast furnace and picnic on the grounds by following the Neshobe River westward from where it crosses Route 53 in Forest Dale (in other words, go up the small streets until you come to the gateway, which is marked). Trout fishing is pretty good along there, too, I can tell you from personal experience, especially in the fall when the big brown trout cruise upstream in search of gravel in which to spawn. It’s your historic and fishing site as much as anyone else’s because Welland donated it to the State. Obviously a man who didn’t hold grudges.
He also donated a site that is equally interesting, the location of which is common knowledge in Brandon, but which I won’t give here because the State is keeping it under wraps. (I doubt that anyone who has gotten this far with Out and About is the kind who would go pothunting or specimen-raiding.) At one point there was a mine 700 feet deep there, where a paint company had found kaolin—an extremely fine clay that made a good filler in paint. (Today’s equivalent would be OMYA’s finely ground marble, which chemically is the stable compound calcium carbonate.)
The same site produced ochre, the coloring agent in the paint. One definition of ochre gives two meanings: 1. “An earthy pigment containing ferric oxide, typically with clay, varying from light yellow to brown or red;” 2. “A pale brownish yellow color.” A house in Forest Dale painted the latter color with Brandon ochre now is under renovation, and probably the new owners consider the historic trove of ochre-painted clapboards an unsightly mess, to be sent to the transfer station or covered with “Vinyl is Final.” I’ll make the same Crazy Ed Barna Idea suggestion I made for the historic timbers taken from the renovation of the Sanderson Covered Bridge (cheerfully disregarded—the construction company burned them to avoid having to pay disposal costs): have a sculptor incorporate some of them into a public artwork commemorating the Paintworks era. Note the “ferric oxide” in the definition, which is iron oxide, or rust—again the presence of iron, which played such a role in the first decades of Brandon and helped build many of its finest houses.
But there’s more: the site has a deposit of lignite, a soft, brownish type of coal (carbon that didn’t get as much pressure as the black kinds). In that coal are fossils, some of them so rare that they constitute the world’s only evidence of some species of prehistoric plants. My mother, a high school science teacher, used to take field trips there, and I went along on one of them, so I can testify personally that the lignite is a wonder worthy of state preservation and interpretation.
But there’s more: Welland also gave Brandon the land on which the Senior Center now stands—a building that has hosted public meetings and a crafts school as well as numerous functions for elders. Previous eras used the land for a Boys and Girls Club (a local club, not an affiliate of the national organization like the one now in Rutland) and for a Fish and Game Club. There’s enough land for other public buildings, should the need arise.
Horn also had a distinguished record as a Freemason, and the Masons were there at his funeral, performing their unique rites in his honor. A lot of misconception have surrounded this not-so-secret society through the years, but the points to remember are that it brings men together in a charitable cause and enhances their moral development without reference to their political or religious beliefs. These days, the schools have discovered that service education has benefits of many kinds, not the least of which is bringing people together across previously imagined divides. Were he young today, I have no doubt that Welland would have devised some of the most ingenious and worthwhile projects, for himself, and his school friends, and especially for those in school who were not his friends.
When you hear the words “common ground”—the sermons and the pleas that we need to find more of it if we are ever to find peace—think of Welland Horn, who left three pieces of actual common ground. Welland, rest peacefully in the same perpetuity as your gifts.

Additions, emendations and recriminations can be sent to [email protected]