This blog post best read while listening to this playlist.
I keep trying to figure out how to start this blog post. I've started, stopped, pondered, and taken a shower while thinking about it off and on ever since my last post went live back in February. Unfortunately, life in the twenty-first century is.. well, being life in the twenty-first century. The laundry list of things that have taken up most of my time is unfortunately way too long: Java and log4j have cost me more nights of sleep and almost-but-not-quite migraines in the last month or so than I …
When I was younger and had more time on my hands I used to LARP a couple of times a month with House of the Unknown at CMU. We never really did anything terribly elaborate - I was one of the few who dressed up because my character was sufficiently different from me, but a lot of folks just wore whatever they happened to have handywhich suited. I also used to go to anime conventions and cosplay a bit, though I never really put the kind of effort into any of my costumes that most folks do. I certainly never did …
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 …
The Washington Post ran an interesting article about the one-year anniversary of the release of the Storm Worm botnet agent about two weeks ago, possibly the most successful and virulent malware agent yet released on the Net. The Storm Worm beastie is unusual in that the botnet is a decentralized collective, i.e, all of the infections don't report into a single C&C channel but instead use a peer-to-peer networking protocol (a variant of the eDonkey protocol, specifically), so it can't be killed by taking down a single server. It is also interesting because updates are periodically released for …
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 …
The notorious Russian spammer Alexey Tolstokozhev was found shot to death in his apartment just outside of Moscow earlier this week. Apparently, someone took rather violent offense at all of the advertisements for Viagra that he was hammering out and shot him a number of times, including one head shot. Supposedly, Russian police forces think that this is the trademark of a hitman employed by Russian organized crime, who don't take kindly to people muscling in on their territory (or declining "polite requests" to become part of their territory). It is thought that Tolstokozhev was personally responsible for roughly 30 …
