(Courtesy of TerminateYourself.com)
This is an interesting bit of social engineering... murder, bloodshed, and Dennis Franz's bare ass on prime time television are fine and dandy, but parents need to beware of depictions of smoking tobacco in movies.
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While talking with Lori-Beth at Spellbound last weekend she brought up something that had been bumping around in the back of my head for a while, which was that northern Virginia and Washington, DC had some great club nights for older folks - Spellbound, Midnight, Umlaut, what have you - but nothing for the younger folks who aren't of legal age (regardless of whether or not they want to drink). These days, it's harder to sneak into clubs when you're still in high school because most every club really does check ID these days. Not that I'd know or anything...
Starting at …
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Last Monday night Lyssa and I took to the DC Beltway in the middle of rush hour, cast caution to the wind, and set course for the Meriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland to attend one of the rarest of events: the first Leonard Cohen concert in fifteen years. Yes, the man, the myth, the legend himself is on the road once again with a top notch band and a soulful voice and double entendes that'll turn your knees to jelly. From Cohen's rich as whisky basso voice to Javier Mas' talented hands dancing across most every stringed instrument known to …
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We lost Lucy tonight.
Lyssa and I spent a quiet evening in the living room watching Babylon-5 and just before bed I went into the library to check on her and say 'good night' as I usually did, and I found her stretched out on the bottom of her cage. Cold, stiff, and quite dead.
I half-wondered how long it would be, truth be told. Lucy had been slowing down, and she'd stopped running up and down the ramps of her cage to get food, instead preferring to stuff as much as she could into her cheek pouches in one …
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I've updated my .plan file yet again. As always, there is not-safe-for-work content, so use discretion if you click on that link.
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Taking one of Elliott's noisemaker classes at HacDC is a lot like practicing chaos magick: you're never sure what you're going to have to work with at any given time, you don't know what sort of result you're going to get until you're halfway through the process, a large part of your instructions will consist of "Let's try this and see what happens," and you're guaranteed lots of funny noises (often modulated with different kinds of light).
Scaring the neighbors is completely optional.
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A little more information on the recent compromise of the VPMP and subsequent ransom demand has hit the wires since Wikileaks.org broke the news almost two weeks ago. It was admitted that the VPMP's information security measures were not all they were cracked up to be, as if this would come as a surprise to anyone. The article mentions that a backup system did not appear to be in place, nor a properly configured firewall to control traffic from the public Net. Governor of Virginia Timothy Kaine tried to save face by playing up the countermeasures in place and …
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Does anyone else find it amusing that a cast metal and plastic drum is manufactured by a company called Touch the Earth? This is about as far away from their ideal as you can get without hopping a space shuttle.
Attention secret societies: you're really doing it wrong if your handbook wound up at Barnes and Noble.
Mist rising off the river near the Kennedy Center after a few days of rain.
A selection of four-resistor sound sequencers built on breadboards. Toward the end of the night we had a veritable symphony of beeps and boops sounding through HacDC
A …
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I just returned home a few minutes ago from celebrating the greater feast of someone whom I have admired greatly for a number of years.
Fjalar Ravia, better known to the hacker community as Fravia+, was a master of reverse engineering software. Not just for cracking the copy protection of games but reverse engineering for the purpose of figuring out how code works for the sake of doing so. He was also known for his skill at crafting search engine queries to uncover the damndest things in the deep web. Since 1995, he'd written an amazing number of tutorials on …
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Yesterday morning, word got out through the Internet Storm Center that the web server of the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program was compromised by an unknown attacker. The VPMP is tasked with recording all of the pharmaceutical prescriptions filled in the state of Virginia for the purpose of data mining to determine who may or may not be abusing prescription drugs, and probably who may or may not be selling their prescriptions on the street. Given that Virginia enacted some annoying laws a couple of years ago that require a photo ID to get hold of Sudafed and placed limits on …
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