Walking the Thresholds 10 photographs.
Thanks to Jade in New York, I've got a few photographs from Walking the Thresholds 10 in Pennsylvania.
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Storms ravage NOVA: power loss and major property damage
It's probably hit your local news by now, but I'll push on with this article, anyway. A series of violent thunderstorms ripped through northern Virginia yesterday afternoon and went on well into the night, wrseaking havoc as they went. Lyssa tells me that the power went out in our neighborhood around 1500 EST5EDT yesterday, around the time that she and Jason were on their way to the optomitrist's office to get her eyes checked. They tell me that it took them better than an hour to make a three hour drive from route 7 to our road. For my part …
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Microbot dance recital at Duke University.
The field of nanotechnology just took a hop, a skip, and a jump past a xenon atom stick figure and mechanical gears microns in diameter. No, researchers at Duke University didn't take up country line dancing, they created microscopic robots microns in size and caused them to dance across a one square millimeter floor. The microbots are shaped more like spatulae with guide rods attached to them than people, but they capable of interacting with each other as well as shimmying across the miniscule dance surface, propelled by oscillations in an electrical field... which happened to have the same rhythm …
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Boot loaders and securing dual-booting portable systems.
UPDATE - 20170327 - Truecrypt was disconnected in 2014.ev when Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP. DO NOT USE IT. This blog post must be considered historical in nature.
If you've been following the news media for the past year or so, stores have been cropping up with frightening regularity about travelers who are detained at the border while customs agents demand the login credentials for their notebook computers so that they can be examined for gods-know-what kind of information. From time to time, the hard drives of computers are actually imaged for later analysis. As if that weren't enough, the United …
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The week, not just the weekend in review.
A couple of weeks ago, one of the trailers that was shown before the movie Iron Man was for a theatrical showing of the live-action movie based upon a popular manga and anime series called Death Note. As Lyssa and I are both fans of the series (she of the manga, I of the live-action movies), we made it a priority to hit the one night only showing at Tyson's Corner AMC last week. Mika was kind enough to score tickets for us early (she had to, because they were almost sold out by the time we got into line …
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Charles Fort would be proud.
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RTD steps down; fen sigh in relief.
Fans of the famous BBC television series Doctor Who - in particular, the newly rebooted version which began in 2005 - probably ask themselves from time to time what executive producer Robert T. Davies is on, and whether or not being caught carrying any is a felony. Sure, he started the series up again and it's still going strong after four years, but every once in a while he comes up with a real stinkburger. The Christmas Invasion. Love and Monsters. Some of the stuff that happened in Last of the Time Lords. Overuse of the Daleks in each season. Some people …
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Gerry Kasparov meets the Flying Rhenquist!
Oh, holy shit - not safe for work... at a public presentation by Garry Kasparov in the Russian Confederation a couple of days ago, somebody buzzed the crowd with a remotely controlled flying dildo.
No, I'm not kidding. If you click on the link, you can clearly see a radio controlled helicopter shaped like a large penis flying over the crowd for about half a minute, until it was struck out of the air by a security officer. There is a screenshot from the video as well as a copy of the video itself, in which you can clearly see the …
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B0rked into a brick.
As if it wouldn't be interesting enough at EuSecWest this week, another hardware attack has been discovered. This one is arguably nastier because it could conceivably cost the user quite a bit of money if someone hoses equipment by forcing a bad firmware flash. Rich Smith, who is the head of research into offensive technologies and threats at the HP Systems Security Lab (you know, they really could have come up with a more ominous name for their outfit) has developed a method in which an attacker can cause a permanent denial of service attack on a unit by finding …
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Just when you thought it was safe to route packets...
One of the most arcane yet commonly encountered pieces of equipment on the Net today are routers - devices (usually big, expensive devices) that look at the destination IP addresses of each packet they see and decide which port to throw them out of to help them on their way. Usually you don't see them up close because they tend to live in data centers or wiring closets (for smaller shops) in racks, safely locked away. While there are a couple of manufacturers out there who specialize in them, for people in the know the first thing they think of when …
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