NICT Daedalus Cyber-attack alert system #DigInfo (by Diginfonews)
Someone has been watching too much Ghost in the Shell. I’d say someone has been watching too much Hackers but this actually looks cooler than their visualizations and also you can never watch too
much of Hackers.
Very interesting - both technically as well as looking into the moral justifications the botnet operator provides. But equally interesting is the discussion on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960034. Especially the discussion on the Verified
by Visa (3D Secure) system and how the goal is basically to move liability onto the consumer and off of the merchant or credit card company.
2011 Jun 20, 2:09"Why did the hackers at Lulz Security ("LulzSec") invade Sony Pictures websites, take down cia.gov, and release 60,000+ e-mail addresses and passwords? For the lulz, of course—but what might look
lulzy to one person could certainly enrage another. In honor of its 1,000th tweet, the witty wankers of LulzSec released a manifesto of sorts, defending their actions to the angry Internets."internetsecurityprivacyhacktechnical
I've just got a new media center PC connected directly to my television with lots of HD space and so I'm ripping a bunch of my DVDs to the PC so I don't have to fuss with the physical media. I'm
ripping with DVD Rip, viewing the results in Windows 7's Windows Media Center after turning on the WMC DVD Library, and using a powershell script I wrote to copy over cover art and metadata.
My powershell script follows. To use it you must do the following:
Run Windows Media Center with the DVD in the drive and view the disc's metadata info.
Rip each DVD to its own subdirectory of a common directory.
The name of the subdirectory to which the DVD is ripped must have the same name as the DVD name in the metadata. An exception to this are characters that aren't allowed in Windows paths (e.g.
<, >, ?, *, etc)
Run the script and pass the path to the common directory containing the DVD rips as the first parameter.
Running WMC and viewing the DVD's metadata forces WMC to copy the metadata off the Internet and cache it locally. After playing with Fiddler and reading this blog post on WMC metadata I made the following script that copies metadata and cover art from the WMC cache to the corresponding
DVD rip directory.
2003 July: The first archived version of bing.com features "bing! is a small device (e.g., possibly even a small
Band-Aid(R)-like sticker!) that vibrates when a person's cell phone rings." I can't recall 2003 cell phones, were they big enough to require this device?
2004 August: Site for the same device is rewritten and looks much better, IMHO.
2006 June: The domain is now parked by easyDNS. I guess the "bing!" device didn't work out?
2006 November: Its now "BING*" and they won't say what they're working on ("we're still in stealth mode") but they are
hiring C#/.NET developers.
2007 January: And they're gone. Without even exiting stealth mode. Too bad, I liked their logo. Their domain is now for
sale...
2007 February: Looks like EasyMail buys the domain and offers a physical mailing service in Australia: "By simply clicking
a button on your computer, mail is beamed electronically to a bing post office. Your mail is automatically printed, folded, enveloped and dispatched into the Australia Post network the very same
day."
Present: Now its the new home for Live Search of course.
The new name reminds me of the show Friends. Also, I hope they get a new favicon - I don't enjoy the stretched 'b' nor its color scheme.
This past week I finished Anathem and despite the intimidating physical size of the book (difficult to take and read on the bus) I became very engrossed and was able to finish it in several orders of
magnitude less time than what I spent on the Baroque
Cycle. Whereas reading the Baroque Cycle you can imagine Neal Stephenson sifting through giant economic tomes (or at least that's where my mind went whenever the characters began to explain
macro-economics to one another), in Anathem you can see Neal Stephenson staying up late pouring over philosophy of mathematics. When not
exploring philosophy, Anathem has an appropriate amount of humor, love interests, nuclear bombs, etc. as you might hope from reading Snow Crash or Diamond Age. I thoroughly enjoyed Anathem.
On the topic of made up words: I get made up words for made up things, but there's already a name for cell-phone in English: its "cell-phone". The narrator notes that the book has been translated
into English so I guess I'll blame the fictional translator. Anyway, I wasn't bothered by the made up words nearly as much as some folk. Its a good thing I'm long
out of college because I can easily imagine confusing the names of actual concepts and people with those from the book, like Hemn space for Hamming distance. Towards the beginning, the description
of slines and the post-post-apocalyptic setting reminded me briefly of Idiocracy.
Recently, I've been reading everything of Charles Stross that I can, including about a month ago, The Jennifer Morgue from the surprisingly awesome amalgamation genre of spy thriller and Lovecraft
horror. Its the second in a series set in a universe in which magic exists as a form of mathematics and follows Bob Howard programmer/hacker, cube dweller, and begrudging spy who works for a
government agency tasked to suppress this knowledge and protect the world from its use. For a taste, try a short story from the series that's freely available on Tor's website, Down on the Farm.
Coincidentally, both Anathem and the Bob Howard series take an interest in the world of Platonic ideals. In the case of Anathem (without spoiling anything) the universe of Platonic ideals, under a
different name of course, is debated by the characters to be either just a concept or an actual separate universe and later becomes the underpinning of major events in the book. In the Bob Howard
series, magic is applied mathematics that through particular proofs or computations awakens/disturbs/provokes unnamed horrors in the universe of Platonic ideals to produce some desired effect in
Bob's universe.
I just installed vmcNetFlix which lets you watch your on demand NetFlix movies via your Vista Media Center or any Media Center
Extenders like the Xbox 360. It works well but fails poorly with some cryptic error messages and long timeouts. Be sure to get NetFlix on demand movies working in your browser before installing
this plugin. Once I did that everything worked very well.
To test it out I watched Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior in which Ting must travel from his country village to Bangkok where he works with his cousin in
the city to recover his village's stolen religious artifact. Its a mix of Perfect Strangers, Street Fighter and Pad-See Ew. Martial arts movies, like porn and video games, aren't required to have a
strong plot but Ong-Bak has a fine plot line and enjoyable Thai martial arts. I saw the Tiger Knee in there several times. An enjoyable movie that
reminded me of watching martial arts movies with my friends in high school.
2008 Apr 22, 4:33Reaction to Phrack's howto on GPS jammer. Sounds like the article wants to make it into a bigger issue than it is: "Information in the article that appears in the current issue of the online hacker
magazine Phrack potentially puts at risk GPS devices usegpsgps-jammingphrackgovernment
2008 Feb 15, 4:29FTA: "The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth."via:swannmanneal-stephenson
2007 Nov 9, 2:38Jon's leaving for Germany today which of course is sad. On Wednesday, Jon came over and we watched Hackers. There's a few things you probably wouldn't
notice without repeated viewings of the film:
Phantom Phreak is arrested and you never hear what happens to him. This is unlike Joey who is arrested but appears in the final hacking scene.
Marc Anthony appears in the movie as a secret service agent.
Everyone in the movie loves Coke.
Hackers is the greatest movie of all time: it represents the pinnacle of human artistic achievement.
In similar ex college roommate news, I'm going to California over the weekend for Angie and Kane's goodbye party. They're heading for Australia for like a year or something. Angie's got a
blog about her travels but rarely seems to update it. I'll get to see Carissa and Elijah there too, almost completing the ex college roommate
experience. To avoid confusion I should mention that unlike everyone else I know, Carissa and Elijah aren't leaving the country.personalnontechnical
I just installed vmcNetFlix which lets you watch your on demand NetFlix movies via your Vista Media Center or any Media Center
Extenders like the Xbox 360. It works well but fails poorly with some cryptic error messages and long timeouts. Be sure to get NetFlix on demand movies working in your browser before installing
this plugin. Once I did that everything worked very well.
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