It seems that conflicting reports are making it difficult to determine if the Higgs-Boson has been found at last. The four experiments designed to find evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson and possibly solve the mystery of why baryonic matter has mass (an elementary and experimentally provable observation) are returning conflicting results. Two of the experiements in the United States have collected data suggesting that they may, in fact, have spotted the elusive and as-yet hypothetical particle. The other two... not so much.
The latest revelation by Wikileaks of what happens behind the scenes in the twenty-first century began publication on Monday. Called the GI Files (for Global Intelligence), it is said to be made up of approximately five million e-mail messages and associated documentation copied from the e-mail servers of Strategic Forecasting, Incorporated (Stratfor) by adherants of the Anonymous meme and passed on to Wikileaks some time last year. Due to the gargantuan volume of data Wikileaks has opted to release smaller quantities of information every day rather than overwhelm everyone with information. Predictably, spin control efforts on all sides started up …
Just a quick heads-up about the Project Byzantium development sprint this weekend:
The development sprint will not be at HacDC this month, but instead it will be held at the Thurgood Marshall Academy in Washington, DC because we'll be at Discotech again. DiscoTech will be held between 12:00pm and 4:00pm on Saturday. Come one, come all, stop by and see what new things are afoot in DC!
Well, another year has come and gone and it's time to look back once again across the calendar and see how things have changed for the Time Lord. This past year is likely one of the busiest of my whole life and shows few signs of slowing down or grinding to a halt. To put it simply I don't have the time or space on the database server to outline everything from 2011, but suffice it to say that the world is undergoing some profound changes outside of the control of the existing system, and in some small way I've …
All hell broke loose in Syria on 3 February 2012. The city of Homs was invaded by the Syrian military, which then opened fire. Over 400 people are confirmed dead, and I don't have an accurate count of the number of people who were injured anymore.
It came as something of a surprise to those of us following the defeat and subsequent cold storage of SOPA that, just a day later one of the largest file locker websites on the Net, megaupload.com was shut down by the FBI. Data centers in Virginia, Washington DC, New Zealand, and Hong Kong were raided by law enforcement and their cages in those centers were cleaned out. Every last server chugging away in those facilities was seized, and are in the queue for forensic analysis right now. Just a day after Megaupload went dark over a dozen others voluntarily …
During the non-skippable antipiracy warnings on a lot of DVDs and BluRay disks these days, the MPAA often has an MTV-style juxtaposed and jump-cut commercial that includes the admonition "You wouldn't download a car, would you?" which has spawned a response in the form of an image macro that seems to have gotten a few of us thinking. Earlier this week the notorious BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay posted on their blog that they had created a new category of files that can be shared via their website, Physibles, or files that can be used to create actual, tangible objects …
I don't ordinarily write much about work, mostly because it's not that interesting but also because it's a bad habit to get into, lest I let something critical slip and get in trouble. However, the last two days were sufficiently rough (and strange) that I feel that I have to write something about it, if only to give my fellow BOFHes something to go on if they find themselves in the same particular position I was. The past two days have been by far the strangest problem I've ever run into working in IT or information security.
For any topic you can imagine, there is a healthy and active blog by and for people who are or who are strongly interested in that topic. They will also have a Cafepress store which is slightly surreal.
