I am a hacker and you are afraid and that makes you more dangerous than I ever could be.
Fuck you, Rob Enderle
Topic: Miscellaneous
10:29 am EDT, Jul 6, 2009
A very credible "End of the U.S." doomsday scenario tied to the public cloud was outlined that I believe warrants further thought. [snip] Be aware: In the following discussion, I'm talking about something that is in the future -- not a risk that currently exists -- but one we still need to plan for.
In other words: Hello, my name is Rob Enderle, and I'd like to use 10 poorly researched and factually erroneous paragraphs to engage in wanton fearing mongering. Did I mention I also offer consulting and advising services for large corporations to cope with exactly the fear I've mongered? No? Well I do! I guess that makes me a whore too.
Shame on you Dark Reading. Shame on you for letting such a piece run. This is nothing but speculation and sensationalism.
No less ridiculous is the main point of the article, which seems to imply that terrorists will someday decide that disrupting people's Lands' End purchases will be more attractive than killing them.
federal judge on Thursday overturned guilty verdicts against Lori Drew, issuing a directed acquittal on three misdemeanor charges.
Drew, 50, was accused of participating in a cyberbullying scheme against 13-year-old Megan Meier who later committed suicide. The case against Drew hinged on the government’s novel argument that violating MySpace’s terms of service was the legal equivalent of computer hacking. But U.S. District Judge George Wu found the premise troubling.
“It basically leaves it up to a website owner to determine what is a crime,” said Wu on Thursday, echoing what critics of the case have been saying for months. “And therefore it criminalizes what would be a breach of contract.”
There was a lot of discussion on Memestreams about this case. I'm pleased that Drew was acquitted. This criminal trial was pure theater and political posturing by the US Attorney's office. It should have never been prosecuted.
That being said, I hope Drew and her family are destroyed in a wrongful death suit. Civil court is the only place this entire sad affair should play out.
I wish more of these prints were available for sale, or at least in a large format image for printing. I love this style of art.
The final image especially reminds me of Todd McFarlane's artwork in Pearl Jam's Do The Evolution Video (which contains one of my favorite guitar riffs of all time).
Schneier on Security: Security, Group Size, and the Human Brain
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:18 pm EDT, Jul 1, 2009
The smallest, three to five, is a "clique": the number of people from whom you would seek help in times of severe emotional distress. The twelve to 20 group is the "sympathy group": people with which you have special ties. After that, 30 to 50 is the typical size of hunter-gatherer overnight camps, generally drawn from the same pool of 150 people. No matter what size company you work for, there are only about 150 people you consider to be "co-workers." (In small companies, Alice and Bob handle accounting. In larger companies, it's the accounting department -- and maybe you know someone there personally.) The 500-person group is the "megaband," and the 1,500-person group is the "tribe." Fifteen hundred is roughly the number of faces we can put names to, and the typical size of a hunter-gatherer society.
Interesting look at group dynamics. Explains why I feel most of "the company" are soulless whores whose job is to tell me "no." ;-)
The main goal of Content Security Policy is to prevent malicious code from being injected into a website and executed within the context of that site.
This could be huge. At the fullest implementation the only JavaScript that will be allowed to execute is external JavaScript files that are specifically white listed by the server. Good bye attribute injection, javascript URIs, and plain SCRIPT tags. No dynamic code execution either! no eval(), no setTimeout() or setInterval() with a string of code. Goodbye obfuscated JavaScript problem. Thanks to native JSON parsing functions, we don't need you anymore.
Some excellent innovation coming out of these Browser wars...
Who Needs Clip Art? OffiSync 2.0 Integrates Google Image Search Into Microsoft Office
Topic: Miscellaneous
10:46 pm EDT, Jun 29, 2009
The biggest addition to the plugin is integrated text and image search. While Office comes with a directory of clip art, it leaves something to leave desired — I almost always find myself just going straight to Google Image search. Now, using OffiSync, you can search Google Images directly from within Office. The plugin supports advanced searches, like sorting by color, size, and usage rights. Once you’ve found an image you like, simply hit ‘Insert’ and the picture will appear wherever your text cursor was. There’s also an integrated browser: just navigate to the page you’d like to quote, highlight the text, and hit Insert.
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
csima wrote: No but you would say 'Heavens to betsy!' and 'Oh! Lordy'
Acidus wrote:
"We saw what was coming out with HTML 5 and these browsers, and the question was how far can we push this?" says Hoffman, who manages HP's Web security research group. "We started digging in and said, 'Oh my goodness, this might actually be possible.'
I would never say "oh my goodness" ;-)
"Matt and I know, it's not just us presenting something and saying, 'Look how cool this is,' " Hoffman says. "The cool stuff is not going to come from us, it's going to come from everybody taking the idea and running with it."
