For nearly twenty years in the United States a law called CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994) has been on the books. To summarize, CALEA set the federal requirement that telecommunications companies (phone companies, long distance companies, cellular carriers, and so forth) had to modify their infrastructures such that various forms of wiretapping of customers had to be possible upon presentation of a warrant. Contrary to popular belief, there are methods of surveillance other than recording a conversation. The simplest involves making a list of every phone number that a particular number calls, when the calls were …
In the halcyon days of the 80's, a fairly common trope of cyberpunk was people (usually background characters but occasionally a main character) wearing battlegoth makeup - funky facepaint that distinctively changes your appearance. Often it was described as a stylistic choice, not unlike what somemedia stars effect today though occasionally you see it at street level. Facial recognition systems are pretty primitive today but they're starting to be deployed by law enforcement and advertising agencies just the same to gather actionable information for later use. Right now eye tracking software is used to determine what keeps people's attention for …
While I’m sitting here hacking around, here’s the exact command that I needed to run to get the Arduino development kit to install properly on Windbringer:
It should be noted that I’m using Layman to manage my overlays, which is why I had to specify the environment variable on the command line.
I discovered that GCC v4.1.2 didn't support the Atmega328, which is what my Arduino Duemilanove is based upon, so I had to upgrade GCC to the latest stable release for Gentoo. To generate code for the Atmega328, you need v4.2.2 or …
One of the many buzzwords that you hear in the discipline of software engineering is metrics. They're supposed to be a measure of how effectively your coders are functioning based upon how many lines of code they write a day, how many bugs they make (for some value of 'bug'), how reusable their code is, how much money per line of code your project is burning through, or some other arcane measurement. The numbers are generated through techniques that appear to have more in common with gematria than with engineering and make managers salivate with glee (or rabies). The theory …
I just returned home a few minutes ago from celebrating the greater feast of someone whom I have admired greatly for a number of years.
Fjalar Ravia, better known to the hacker community as Fravia+, was a master of reverse engineering software. Not just for cracking the copy protection of games but reverse engineering for the purpose of figuring out how code works for the sake of doing so. He was also known for his skill at crafting search engine queries to uncover the damndest things in the deep web. Since 1995, he'd written an amazing number of tutorials on …
As computers go these days, it is not unusual for the amount of free RAM to reach a critical level at which no other processes will fit into what little unused memory is left. Modern operating systems will then start swapping pages of memory to disk to make room; the data can be read back in later if necessary. This is a procedure called swapping, and it can take several forms. Windows maintains a large hidden file somewhere on the drive (usually in the root directory of C:) which it uses for this purpose. Linux, UNIX, and UNIX-alikes most often …
As you have probably heard on the news a new beastie has been making its rounds on the Net, infiltrating Windows machines and awaiting the coming of the first of April - April Fool's Day. Unfortunately, like Y2k and the Michaelangelo virus, there is an incredible amount of misinformation out there making this worm out to be The End of the Net As We Know It - to hear some of the chatterbots talking heads, the milk in your fridge could curdle and your cat will marry your dog if your workstation gets infected. To be fair, nobody's sure of what Conflicker …
Attention all users of the Pivot weblog package! A remotely exploitable vulnerability was discovered in the /web/content/extensions/bbclone_tools/count.php file. This vulnerability can be used by an attacker to delete files from your web content directory, and if the register_globals PHP variable is set, it can be used to stage a remote file inclusion attack. One person (I'll blank their IP address) has already tried it on my website:
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I recieved as a Yule gift an OCZ NIA, a hardware device aimed at gamers which acts as one part EEG and one part biofeedback monitor. The idea behind it, in short, is that the user trains eirself using the included software to generate specific patterns of electrical activity in the brain and facial muscles that the drivers use to trigger certain system events. There's just one thing: there are no Linux drivers.
