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Archive for December, 2008
Steganography made simple
As programmers, our code should be readable, not cryptic; but sometimes it’s fun to surprise, obfuscate or conceal. Wikipedia says: Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no-one apart from the sender and intended recipient even realizes there is a hidden message. By contrast, cryptography obscures the [...]
The future of Compiz
...from the Freedesktop.org Compiz maillist. Where are we going? It's time to start thinking ahead and really figure out how to make Compiz survive, specially in lieu of Dennis' suggestion. The reality is that there has been the equivalent of no progress since the merge. We've basically only been in maintenance mode. The reason for [...]
Why Am I Not Surprised That This is a Government Website?
I guess the processors that do your benefits calculations have to go home to spend time with their families and sleep some time. Ohh, and if you are retiring after 2018, the answer is 0. That should be easy enough to program.
Long waits for some Netflix Blu-ray customers
If you're a Netflix customer who's paying an extra $1 a month to rent movies on Blu-ray, you might have noticed that the discs aren't being delivered as quickly as DVDs. Josh Lowensohn, from CNET News, was complaining that he's had Futurama: Bender's Game, in his queue for over a month. The flick Wall-E has been in the queue since November 18. [...]
25C3: Hackers completely break SSL using 200 PS3s
A team of security researchers and academics has broken a core piece of internet technology. They made their work public at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin today. The team was able to create a rogue certificate authority and use it to issue valid SSL certificates for any site they want. The user would have no indication that their [...]
Windows Vista screwed RAM manufacturers… but you can profit
In anticipation of Vista's new hardware requirements—a truckload of RAM—major RAM suppliers like Hynix and Samsung basically doubled their production. Vista's anemic sales and the economy hosed them, but it's good for you. Every maker has a huge oversupply of RAM—Hynix has raised capacity by 159 percent, Inotera by 112 percent, Elpida by [...]
Musicians against music torture
Musicians and human rights group Reprieve launched a "silent protest" against the use of music for torture and interrogation. For example, the playlists at places like Guantanamo Bay and other US military prisons/bases has included such hot platters as Deicide's "Fuck Your God" and the theme song from Barney The Purple Dinosaur. Musicians like [...]
Clown strip-searched before children’s charity flight
David Vaughan, aka PC Konk the clown, was made to strip down to his underwear at Birmingham Airport, England when his costume set off the metal detectors. He was booked to do an in-air charity show for disadvantaged children. Apparently, PC Konk was good humored about it. A piece of metal on his costume set off the security alarm, prompting [...]
Top 500 Worst Passwords
From the moment people started using passwords, it didn’t take long to realize how many people picked the very same passwords over and over. Even the way people misspell words is consistent. In fact, people are so predictable that most hackers make use of lists of common passwords just like these. To give you some insight into how predictable [...]
Consumer advocacy group demands Google stop keeping data against users’ will
One of the most controversial topics online is privacy. On the one hand there are the advertisers and content providers (and those who do both) like Google. They say that keeping user statistics is essential to offering more effective advertising, which in turn is key to generating more revenue and being able to provide users with more [...]
xkcd-style WEP cracking in real life
My love for xkcd comics has influenced me to write this modified autoconfig "cracking" tool that cracks Wifi WEP password from your neighbors, exactly the way shown in xkcd comic number 416... Here is the tool in action... (more...)
The Federal Reserve Abolition Act
Ron Paul introduced HR 2755: Federal Reserve Abolition Act. There were no co-sponsors, no further action was taken, and the legislation was referred to the House Committee on Financial Services and effectively pigeonholed and ignored. It’s a bold and needed measure to “abolish the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the [...]
Euler’s Identity is said to be the most beautiful theorem in mathematics
Gauss is reported to have commented that if this formula was not immediately apparent to a student on being told it, the student would never be a first-class mathematician. "It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth." - Benjamin [...]
Time to Reboot America
Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. I think a lot of our problems center around the fact that we worship our leaders and look to them for solutions just like the author did at the end. Hong Kong is full of people who find their own way and typically do so [...]
Before you put any money in those little red kettles, make sure you aren’t opposed to the positions of The Salvation Army
The Salvation Army has a reputation of helping out the needy and until today I had no idea they were so... stringent. I have been putting coins in those buckets since I was very little but I think those days are done. My friend's protestant church seems to live closer to christian ideals and makes the disparity between organizations like The [...]
50 Things We Know Now That We Didn’t Know This Time Last Year
Well, well, well. Wasn't 2008 a newsy little year? Believe it or not, events happened that had nothing to do with the presidential election, fuel prices, or Michael Phelps. Not that you'd have an easy time sifting through all the media debris to find the information that actually meant something. With so many distractions, you probably [...]
Linux Kernel 2.6.28 Released
Below is a message posted by Linus. As usual, Kernel Newbies has the changelog. Date Wed, 24 Dec 2008 15:52:49 -0800 (PST) From Linus Torvalds Subject Happy v2.6.28 It doesn't really matter what day it is, or what holiday (if any) you're celebrating, because even if you sit at home, alone in your dank basement, without any holidays or [...]
Linux in 2009: Recession vs. GNU
Pundits and business executives alike are predicting gloomy economic times for 2009. But when the talk turns to free and open source software (FOSS), suddenly the mood brightens. Whether their concern is the business opportunities in open source or the promotion of free software idealism, experts see FOSS as starting from a strong base and [...]
Fennec hits Alpha 2 with speed improvements
Mozilla's Firefox-like browser for mobile devices, Fennec is out with a second alpha release you can try on your desktop. This alpha mostly improves upon the speed, smoothness, and usability of Fennec's existing features, but the newest thing to try out are two recommended extensions that can be installed. URL Fixer attempts to auto-fix common [...]
Researchers Point Out XSS Flaws On American Express Website
American Express has been wrestling for more than a week with cross-site scripting vulnerabilities that could jeopardize the personal information of its customers, according to security researchers. Researchers have been reporting vulnerabilities on the Amex site since April, when the first of several cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws was [...]
