My wife and ventured to southern Colorado for spring break. I’ve finally gotten around to throwing up the pictures from the trip. They’re heavy on Sandhill Cranes in flight. Why? Because literally tens of thousands of these birds migrate through the San Luis Valley and use it as a staging area on their way back north, and the birds are just about impossible to sneak up on when they’re in the fields feeding. So it’s much easier to take pictures as they fly by.

It was really a magical experience. Most cranes in the world are endangered. These ancient birds haven’t coped well to the changes people have brought. And while it wouldn’t take much too see Sandhill Cranes get in trouble, their populations are currently large and stable. Like all cranes, they’re quite vocal and frequently display towards one another by jumping in the air and flapping their wings. In short, they’re sexy.

Other highlights of the trip included a couple of Burrowing Owls sitting in the rain on the drive up to Colorado, my first Snowshoe Hare (I now understand why they’re in the same genus as our jackrabbits), and an amazing place named the Great Sand Dunes National Park.

I’ll leave you with a selected few pictures. (Click on them to see slightly larger versions in the gallery).

I know many people aren’t into technology, so I’ll make this brief. With overtones of both the mafia and livestock herding, MSNBC has an interesting post up about rival gangs that are fighting to control networks of hijacked computers.

The bot network industry is so profitable, and hijacked computers are so valuable, that rival gangs now fight over them. … Bot herders steal each other’s infected computers, fight off such raids, and often try to knock each other’s computers off-line.

What they’re doing of course is using these computers that they’ve managed to install rogue programs on for the purposes of sending spam and other nefarious activities. What I found so interesting about the article was the level of sophistication these criminals are reaching. They’re not just content to toast your computer through a virus like the good old days of 1999.

The war has escalated to a level where bot herders must jealously guard their hijacked computers. In October, a yet-to-be-named Russian gang released a program called SpamThru that infected machines worldwide and quickly amassed an army of zombies nearly 100,000 strong, capable of sending out 1 billion messages each day.

To protect the investment, the malicious program actually included a stolen copy of the Kaspersky antivirus program, modified to stop all attacks but its own. SpamThru installed the anti-virus program on all infected computers, removing all other viruses. It even sent an infection rate report to the program’s author. The stolen antivirus software continues to defend SpamThru bots from other attacks to this day.

It’s evil. But you’ve gotta admit that’s impressive. Taking a computer that obviously didn’t have anti-virus protection on it in the first place, and then adding anti-virus software to make sure your little parasitic program has a home all to itself.

The article goes on to describe how like any other business, they have to advertise, and that people suspect many attacks seen on the internet may actually be a demonstration to a potential buyer of the strength of a gang’s hijacked computers.

Interesting stuff if you’re even slightly interested in how we use technology and how it affects society and culture.