RE: Researchers seek cash for software flaws - Yahoo! News
Topic: Miscellaneous
6:47 pm EDT, Jul 23, 2007
freakn wrote: Don't wanna give away vulns for free? Try auctioning to the newly formed market.
Try being the operative word. While WabiSabiLabi has gotten lots of press over the past few weeks, there are only 5 vulnerabilities there, four of which were there when I first heard about the site. Two have apparently been purchased. There has been a public effort to reverse engineer at least one of the bugs based soley on the title description. The problems are:
1. If you put something serious up for auction the security community would react immediately, and they may react by auditing instead of purchasing. A day of auditing costs less than $10,000.
2. You have to sell to the highest bidder, even if the highest bidder is Osama Bin Lauden. This takes all of the ethics out of the practice.
I think this has mostly just been an occaision for various people in the industry to express their views on more serious efforts such as those pursued by TippingPoint and iDefense. You can sell them bugs. WabiSabiLabi is not serious until its serious. In any event, I don't really think its possible to sustain one's self as a researcher on money made this way. If you find something, you might make some bucks off of it, but you aren't going to find enough on a regular basis to keep a roof over your head.
Billionaire denies building secret sex lair | | Guardian Unlimited Business
Topic: Miscellaneous
6:08 pm EDT, Jul 20, 2007
Dude this thing is amazing. Most guys I know couldn't hide a single copy of Playboy in their house without their wives finding out about it. This guy hid an entire underground night club complete with strippers and blow! This story has the most detailed descriptions...
Japan Quake Causes Nuke Plant Leak, Fire - Forbes.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
1:25 am EDT, Jul 17, 2007
The quake triggered a fire in an electrical transformer and also caused a leak of radioactive water at the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power plant, the world's largest in terms of electricity output....
About 315 gallons of water apparently spilled from a tank at one of the plant's seven reactors and entered a pipe that flushed it into the sea, said Jun Oshima, an executive at Tokyo Electric Power Co.
Save $200 in 2 minutes and have the worlds best writing pentransform a $3 pen into a $200 pen in just seconds. Mont Blanc pens are the worlds finest writing pens but they make specialized refills so you must buy their $200 pens to use their amazing ink...until now. This is the easiest hack/adaptation to give anyone the king's writing ink.
Yup, the refills are cheap, and most of the pen is, in fact, the refill.
Uzodinma Iweala - Stop Trying To 'Save' Africa - washingtonpost.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
5:16 pm EDT, Jul 15, 2007
Africans, real people though we may be, are used as props in the West's fantasy of itself.
An African speaks out at the dishonesty of self congradulatory liberal campaigns. (Its probably worth pointing out that the speaker, while presenting himself as a voice of Africa, was born in Washington DC and attended Harvard. Its not that I think he is wrong. Its that I think he is also assuming someone else's identity.)
The World’s Best Candy Bars? English, of Course - New York Times
Topic: Miscellaneous
12:28 am EDT, Jul 14, 2007
Bryn Dyment, a Web developer in the Bay Area who grew up in Canada, said he was shocked when his parents took him to a candy counter in the United States. He found out that not every child in the world was eating the same chocolate bars he was.
It wasn’t until he moved to the United States as an adult that he realized just how vast that divide is.
“You get in these religious arguments with people,” he said. “I haven’t met a Canadian who likes a Hershey bar, but Americans think you’re crazy when you say that, because they think everyone loves a Hershey bar.”
“Hershey’s tastes like ear wax...”
I agree whole heartedly. While I am in most respects an American one aspect of me which will always and forever be Canadian is my taste in chocolate. My two great disappointments upon moving to the United States at the age of nine were learning that your Cheerios are made with whole wheat, and learning that basically all of your candy bars suck. Nearly everywhere else in the world that I've travelled to, from France to Hong Kong, has English chocolate like Smarties and Aero Bars on the shelf. For a long time I'd thought the reason Smarties weren't available here was due to a trademark conflict with the rolled up sweettarts popular at halloween, but this doesn't explain the fact that no other English candy is available, or if, like Kitkat, it is available, the recipie has been screwed up. Something is deeply wrong with American taste buds.
I'm disappointed that this article, while finally putting the honest truth in print in the United States, fails to delve into the details of why. However, I have a hypothesis. I'm not sure when candy bars first became popular but there are only two possibilities:
1. They became popular before the revolutionary war, in which case Canada and the United States should have both inhereted the same taste in chocolate from England. 2. They became popular after the revolutionary war, in which case you'd think Canadians and Americans would have started eating chocolate manufactured in the same way, and that while English tastes might have diverged, Canadian tastes would have tracked American tastes and not English ones.
Neither occured. So, my hypothesis is that in the beginning, American and Canadian tastes in Chocolate tracked English tastes, and then this funny thing called World War II happened. During WWII Hershey got a contract with the US Army to distribute Hershey bars to American GIs. These bars were designed to have a high melting temperature so they could be handled by Army logistics easily, and be sour enough that soldiers wouldn't eat them when they weren't supposed to. Soldiers came back from the war with an endearing relationship to Hershey, and a taste for flavorless bars, and so now everyone in the country is eating the chocolate equivelent of MREs.
I have no idea if Canadian soldiers were issued chocolate during WWII, but as these flavorless candy bars were an American invention its likely that whatever they had, it was different.
This is a proposal from two distinguished lawyers to solve the Gitmo issue. Generally speaking I'm uncomfortable with it.
One of the reasons constantly given for the idea that terrorist suspects cannot be tried is that their defense lawyers may leak classified information and enable them to communicate with their free comrades. This is a reasonable objection, which has a reasonable solution:
The court would have a permanent staff of elite defense lawyers with special security clearances as part of its permanent staff.
Unfortunately, having easily solved the problem the administration claims to have, they delve into the real problem, which the administration hasn't admitted that they have; that they don't actually have any evidence against some of the people they are detaining:
Criminal prosecutions should still take place where they can. But they are not always feasible. Some alleged terrorists have not committed overt crimes and can be tried only on a conspiracy theory that comes close to criminalizing group membership.
A Congressionally sanctioned system of preventive detention, which would supplement the criminal process, is far from unprecedented.
These lawyers suggest that we simply embrace the idea of indefinitely detaining people against who we've no evidence, as long as we do it with a lot of formal process. Particularly disconcerting is the fact that they follow up with this bit of doublespeak:
And consistent with the values enshrined in the Constitution’s equal protection clause, Congress should insist that the same rules apply to citizen and non-citizen terrorist detainees.
Out of context, I agree. I can't stand the claim that reasonable due process is some sort of privilege of citizenship. Reasonable due process is the way your legal system has decided that it can make reasonable decisions. Without it, your decisions are by definition unreasonable.
However, in context, what this means is that citizens may be detained indefinitely without evidence of wrongdoing. How this is an improvement over indefinite detention without trial I'm not really sure.
Last weekend, Kent Couch settled down in his lawn chair with some snacks -- and a parachute. Attached to his lawn chair were 105 large helium balloons.
