One of the great things about the web is the relative ease with which one can set up a new service. In social bookmarking alone with have Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Fark, Mister-Wong, Newsvine, Reddit, Technorati, Slashdot, and StumbleUpon, to name a few. That’s great for competition, and that’s great for users, but it’s not so [...]

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If you’re looking to attack a pirate ship, forget cutlasses and cannon balls. Go full speed ahead with an MP3 sonic blast. At least that’s the latest method being used in sea warfare, as highlighted last week when a sonic blast was used to scare away Somali pirates from attacking a chemical tanker close to [...]

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Melbourne restaurateur Peter Leary has used Facebook to track down bill dodgers in his up-market establishment, Seagrass.
The drama unfolded last week when a group of five young diners, after drinking at the bar, requested a table at the Southbank restaurant.
Over dinner, they worked their way expertly through the menu, ordered and drank fine wines and, [...]

Filed under: lulz, privacy, pwned | No Comments »

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Google cryptographer and all-round security expert Ben Laurie’s been blogging some great security thinking lately. Today he’s got a really fascinating, thoughtful piece about the problems of passwords…
So, where does this leave us? Users must have passwords, so why fight it? Why not admit that its where we have to be and make it a [...]

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Just the other day, a client called upon me to perform a hardware and software inventory on all of the computers on his network. There weren’t that many machines to inventory, but we needed to gather quite a bit of information about each one quickly. The client was a Microsoft shop and so [...]

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Here’s a clip from Virginia Heffernan’s New York Times profile of Virgil Griffith, the creator of Wikiscanner, whom Pesco and I had the pleasure of meeting a few weeks ago at the Webby Connect conference. BTW, when we met, there were no hot girls clinging to him. But that was at lunchtime, surrounded by sandwiches, [...]

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The Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) is a small program Microsoft pushes out to computers on Patch Tuesday to clean out a list of malware. On this month’s Patch Tuesday, Microsoft added scans for a malware file that masks itself as security software, and it found plenty of copies.
Win32/FakeSecSen has gone by various names, including [...]

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Another story from printer-land of 20 years ago: this time about a seemingly impossible bug.
While working on the LPS-20 PostScript software, a bug was filed that said roughly,

Print the attached file. The LPS-20 will jam. You’ll have to open the printer to remove the scrunched up paper.

We were no strangers to jammed printers, [...]

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Interesting to see how automotive manufacturers are affiliated with each other…

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There are a lot of good things to be said about TV and movie studios opening up to the idea of streaming content. Almost any popular TV show is freely available for streaming, without any fear of copyright enforcement. Legal sites such as Hulu.com also provide a great avenue for streaming video entertainment as well. [...]

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I get it… I get it. We’ve turned anti-humanist thanks to our short attention spans. Thanks a lot, Dilbert.

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Verizon Wireless has fired employees connected to a breach of records from a cell phone used by President-elect Barack Obama this year, a Verizon source said Friday.
The source would not say how many people were terminated but said “we now consider this matter closed.”
Verizon reported the breach Thursday, and Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs said the [...]

Filed under: politics, privacy, pwned, verizon | No Comments »

I like (read: love) Linux netbooks. I like them a lot. They’re lightweight, they’re solid performers, they’re cheap, and it looks like they’re soon going to be cheaper than ever.
According to Mike Elgan, starting on Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving, you’ll see new, solid brand-name netbooks going for as little as $199. We’re already [...]

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The world’s love affair with touchscreen smartphones continues as RIM and Verizon Wireless unleash the first touch-sensitive BlackBerry. But can this buttonless smartphone push out e-mail as fast as its counterparts? We spent 24 hours with the device to find out.
The hardware
Weighing in at 5-1/2 oz., the Storm is one of the chunkiest smartphones we’ve [...]

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