It's been an interesting weekend, to be sure.. Lyssa and I have been in the market for a couple of things lately, namely a bookcase or media shelf of some kind that we can migrate our DVD collection to, and ring binders that we can move our CD collections into while we rip and encode everything. So, to that end, we spent Saturday driving around searching for stuff along those lines. In two days, we didn't find any bookcases anywhere we looked (well, that's not entirely true, I did find one bookcase, a floor model at OfficeMax, but the construction …
The hacker spirit perseveres in all things, especially when it comes to squeezing every last compute cycle out of one's hardware. OC Team Italy set a new world record recently by overclocking a Pentium-4 processor core to 8.0GHz. The CPU they used in their grand experiment is a model 631, and runs natively at 3.0GHz. Their secret sauce to keep the unit from going Chernobyl? Liquid nitrogen.
On one hand, this horrifies the sysadmin in me. On the other.. rock the hell on. A round of beer's on me if I ever meet you guys face to face …
More from the front lines of the DVD content protection war - slyck.com has posted an interview with Muslix64, who cracked the copy protection of both HD DVD and Blu-Ray within a couple of weeks of work as an act of 'fair use enforcement'. When you consider the fact that you can't watch either of these kinds of DVD on anything but an HDCP High-Definition monitor (which very few people have), you have to wonder if you really have fair use of the DVDs you purchase anyway... the interview also goes on to explain how AACS works, and that by …
If you turn on the Xscreensaver module called Sonar while you're running a packet monitoring application (such as TCPdump), people are less likely to think you're doing anything shady, because "Only hacker tools don't have GUIs." Always hack your shell's personal configuration file (~/.bash_profile, for example) to change your shellprompt if you use GNU screen. That way you can tell what shells you've left open are single-access shells and which shells are multiplexed through a single connection with screen. It can get confusing sometimes. Because a shell run inside a GNU screen metaterminal sets an environment variable called $WINDOW, you …
