Mr. Gygax, thank you for everything. You've given thousands, if not millions of people over the years hours without number of fun and taught many how to imagine. My heartfelt condolences go out to his family and friends.
It seems as if malware evolves just as fast as biological diseases anymore. Earlier this year, it was made public that batches of flu vaccine were probably ineffective against this year's upper respiratory plague that I've complained about more than enough lately (my apologies to house Laurelinde, though - Lyssa and I will bring over something tasty soon for you). Around the same time, a new strain of rootkit called Mebroot hit the Net that infects the Master Boot Record of boxen it's installed into. It compromises the machine below the level of the operating system because executable code referenced by …
After a long and unfortunately tiring week, I limped my way home after work to be greeted by Lyssa and Laurelinde, who had been kind enough to put dinner together. Lyssa's been on a jerk chicken kick lately, not that I'm complaining, it's one of her best dishes, and often just what I need after dealing with.. well.. work. Afterward we packed up the leftovers and set about gathering clothing and laundry, for we'd be vacationing (sort of) at Laurelinde's place for the weekend.
You see, there's something that you need to know about the apartment complex that Lyssa and …
Has anyone recieved spam in their Google Mail accounts from 'William Griffin' that comes in the form of an invitation to an event (in the Google Calendar sense)? If so, have you found that it's inserted itself into your Google Calendar (if you have one) even though you haven't accepted or declined it, but deleted it instead?
I received such spam earlier today, read through it, and rather than click "yes/no/maybe" deleted the invitation. Just a few minutes ago, I discovered that it had inserted itself into my public Google Calendar because it sent a text message to …
It has long been a piece of grassroots wisdom that when the power to your computer goes dead, you're up a certain creek without a means of propulsion: Whatever you were doing at the time had gone to the great bit bucket in the sky, and unless you'd just saved your work you could kiss your next couple of hours goodbye while reconstructing everything. However, from a technical standpoint this isn't actually true. Modern-day DRAM can actually hold usable data for a finite but non-zero period of time after the main power's been cut off. This has actually been known …
Last Friday seemed to be the day of the ice storm that wasn't really. That morning, sure, the cars were coated with ice (as I discovered at the same instant that I found I had no gloves with me) and the roads were wet, but in truth they really weren't as bad as everyone made them out to be. I had little difficulty making it in to work that day, and even less trouble returning home that evening. For this reason, I find it quite strange that so many offices in NOVA were understaffed that day, but then again what …
A major problem faced by data forensics professionals and law enforcement was how to confiscate computer systems without running the risk of damaging or losing access to information. It's all well and good if you seize a machine running full-disk encryption while it's online because, by definition, the disk is being transparently decrypted so that the machine can operate. Once you power it down, however, all bets are off because the machine won't boot back up without someone supplying a passphrase to the disk encryption system, and no one with anything shady in mind is going to give up their …
Earlier this week the information security community collectively slapped its forehead as computer magazine C't published the results of its security analysis of the the Easy Nova Data Box PRO-25UE RFID, an external hard drive that was advertised as transparently encrypting stored data at the drive level using the AES cryptosystem and a 128-bit key (an algorithm and keysize which the NSA has blessed as worthy of encrypting information carrying a security classification of SECRET or lower, incidentally). A key fob containing an RFID chip is used to unlock the drive and provide access to the encrypted data. Because all …
I haven't been writing about the beginning of the presidential campaign season because I've been busy with other things, but I thought that this should be spread around a bit more widely... Barack Obama's security detail ordered on-duty police officers at a rally in Dallas, Texas to stop searching attendees for weapons as they filed in.
You read that correctly, the were told to stop looking for weapons. D.W. Lawrence, Deputy Police Chief of Dallas went on the record as saying that the order 'apparently' came down from the US Secret Service because they wanted to "speed up the …