1. My media - let me show you it!

    09 January 2008

    I've put a few more photo albums online from last year and this year:

    The wedding of Alexius and Marlise Pendragon - 15 December 2007 (slightly out of order due to the file naming conventions of the two cameras used).

    The Dresden Dolls - 27 December 2007, Washington, DC

    In case you missed them because they were buried at the end of a very long concert report, Information Society in concert - 5 January 2008, Philadelphia, PA

    Oh, and some long overdue updates to my .plan file (obDisclaimer: Possibly not safe for work.).

    I also finally debugged Pivot's URL rewriting scheme so …

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  2. Czech crackers facing trial for faked nuclear detonation.

    08 January 2008

    Last June, a group of crackers and art hackers in what used to be Czechoslovakia hacked a webcam feed to make it look like someone had detonated a nuclear device by scaling the tower that the webcam was mounted on and patching into the network link directly, which let them inject their altered images. Coincidentally at the same moment that the webcam feed was shown by the local news. They're facing a court trial and up to three years in jail for their prank, which scared not a few people silly. They say that they did it to call into …

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  3. Приветствия, камрад! Полностью ваш icecap прина

    08 January 2008

    Just a couple of days after the New Year started, researchers from the United States and Norway set out across Antarctica to move the South Pole - literally, because the red-and-white barber pole that marks the geographic southern pole of the planet had shifted because the ice sheet it's planted in constantly drifts toward the ocean. To their surprise and amazement, the team was greeted by something entirely unexpected: A large bust of Lenin left by Soviet researchers in 1958. Way back when, they built a small research station there and when they decamped the Russian scientists left the statue of …

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  4. Two heads-up posts from the infosec world that could hit close to home.

    08 January 2008

    First off, someone's created a trojan horse program that affects unlocked Apple iPhones. By definition, you can't install anything on an iPhone unless you crack it, so the impact of this is potentially smaller than it could be. At any rate, it pretends to be a patch for v1.1.3 of the iPhone firmware. It doesn't do anything until you try to uninstall it (because it doesn't look like it does anything), at which time it will take any copies of OpenSSH and Erica's Utilities with it when it goes. While the original website that offered this utility is …

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  5. EDITED: Concert report: Cesium-137, ThouShaltNot, and Information Society at the Trocadero in Philadelphia.

    06 January 2008

    (obligatory disclaimer: Many links reference my Amazon Associates account.)

    On Friday evening, our good friend Derek Pegritz drove down from Pennsylvania to visit Lyssa and I and stay with us for the weekend because we had another wacky and amazing adventure all lined up: A trip to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to see a concert at the Trocadero Center thrown by Dancing Ferret Productions. A veritable trifecta of awesome music would be played at this venerable Philly venue, Cesium-137, ThouShaltNot, and Information Society. This was to be a most unusual show in that it would be recorded for a future DVD release …

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  6. DRM: When you absolutely, positively need to get screwed because your home media system is too good.

    03 January 2008

    DRM: Digital Rights Management. A technology which uses strong crypto to control whether or not a particular computer is permitted to decrypt and play back a particular media file. The idea is that unless a given box has been outfitted with a particular certificate, it doesn't matter if the files are shared or not, only the system for which the certificates were issued could play them back, assuming that the company that provided the certificates didn't decide to revoke them or something.

    The 'or something' is the operative part of what screwed one Davis Freeberg not too long ago: An …

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  7. Ransomware: Pay us $35us or be forever locked out of your box!

    03 January 2008

    Ransomware, malware that forces the user of an infected machine to pay a sum of money to Someone Out There in exchange for regaining access to their data isn't exactly the most common thing going around but it seems to be catching on, and I can't think of a reason why it would slow down. Earlier strains found in the wild did things like finding and encrypting all Excel spreadsheets on a machine and demanding that the user wire money someplace in exchange for the utility that would decrypt them, but now the stakes are a bit higher on both …

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  8. Let's try this again from the top.

    01 January 2008

    Second try: I tried to post from Laurelinde's place but her wireless access point bounced me halfway through the process, so it never made it through.

    Happy New Year and welcome to the year 2008 of the common era!

    Laurelinde and Lyssa, both off yesterday, spent much of the day getting ready for the shindig at Laurelinde's place last night while I was at work. Unfortunately, I didn't get back to the apartment until nearly 1900 EST5EDT due to a last minute project that I had to see through to the end. I actually left the office around 1800 EST5EDT …

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