It's been six hours since I got back from Shmoocon, and I'm still readjusting to a low information density environment. Shmoocon is DC's premiere hacker con, held early every February by a security research outfit called the Shmoo Group, which seems to have an odd interest in moose (judging by the repeating moose motif all over the place, from the free stickers to the laser cut acrylic convention badges). I've wanted to go for a couple of years but various and sundry things kept me from attending, so when I finally was able to score a ticket I jumped at …
EDITED: Added Creative Commons license block. Other content remains the same.
Long ago, in the days of DOS and OS/2, deleting a file meant that it was gone for good. How file systems worked was a mystery to just about everybody, and so we were told to back up our data often lest a mistake or drive crash wipe out something important, leaving us up a certain body of water sans propulsion. Years passed, as they are wont to do, and someone discovered that data didn't really evaporate when it was deleted, it was just renamed in such a …
A couple of weeks ago, one of the trailers that was shown before the movie Iron Man was for a theatrical showing of the live-action movie based upon a popular manga and anime series called Death Note. As Lyssa and I are both fans of the series (she of the manga, I of the live-action movies), we made it a priority to hit the one night only showing at Tyson's Corner AMC last week. Mika was kind enough to score tickets for us early (she had to, because they were almost sold out by the time we got into line …
Following battlefield tales that Hezbollah had compromised the IDF communications network during operations in Lebanon last year, defense contractors have developed Meshnet, a hardware and software firewall appliance to protect the data networks of battlefield equipment, on the chance that someone would figure out how to infect them with malicious agents of some sort in the near future. Meshnet is supposedly based upon the Sidewinder Security Appliance from Secure Computing, but includes specialized hardware that deals with the network protocols and connection gear used in the control systems of tanks, armored personnel carriers, or what have you along with anti-spyware …
On my way to the office this morning I was sitting in the car thinking about nothing in particular, and in my pre-caffeinated state my thoughts wandered in the direction of why blogging engines like Pivot and Wordpress make me uneasy in weird, peripheral ways, and why I find them so difficult to use, insofar as writing text is concerned. The reason is that they imply a sense of immediacy upon the user writing where sometimes there shouldn't be one.
Let me start off by saying that I'm not trying to bash blogging in general or any one blogging engine …
In an earlier entry I pontificated about a number of things, among them not feeling very comfortable using a web browser for some weird-reason to write posts, as I much prefer a dedicated application of some kind.
Sure, it feels weird, but I'm one of those folks who uses the right tool for the right job - I don't use a screwdriver as a can opener, nor do I use a hammer to perform brain surgery (because I don't work helpdesk anymore). So, I've decided to try out a couple of dedicated applications to see if it makes a difference.
Here's an article just in from the "In other news, fire is hot and water is wet" department: A study shows that studies funded by companies tend to frame the products of those companies in a better light. A three step study of 111 dietetic studies of soda milk, and water was performed in such a way that the groups of researchers were ignorant of the conclusions of the others (the protocol is outlined in the article, it's pretty neat) to determine if the findings of the studies would be helpful or harmful to the bottom line of the organisation …
If you don't, you'll see error messages to the effect of "Unknown arg '--dport'" When writing Snort rules, there are a few things to keep in mind. First of all, rules come in two parts: the …
