"I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
Graffiti Research Labs - Laser Painter
Topic: Arts
3:32 pm EST, Feb 22, 2007
I'd been avoided looking at this because electronic writing on buildings has been done before, but their setup is actually fairly cool. The folks at Graffiti Research Labs created a rig that facilitates painting with light on the side of a building. It uses a high lumens projector to project the light, a green laser pointer to do the writing, and a security/astrononmy camera to detect where the green laser was pointed. They have made all the code available under the GPL.
Wired: 27B Stroke 6- Billy Hoffman on Ajax Security at RSA
Topic: Computer Security
3:53 pm EST, Feb 8, 2007
The best conference presenters have a story to tell, and this morning, Billy Hoffman -- the lead researcher at Web application security company SPI Dynamics, had a great story to tell Wednesday morning at the RSA security conference about how all your favorite new Web 2.0 applications are a boon to criminals.
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) web service provides you with the ability to execute your applications in Amazon's computing environment.
To use Amazon EC2 you simply:
1. Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing all your software, including your operating system and associated configuration settings, applications, libraries, etc. Think of this as zipping up the contents of your hard drive. We provide all the necessary tools to create and package your AMI.
2. Upload this AMI to the Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) service. This gives us reliable, secure access to your AMI.
3. Register your AMI with Amazon EC2. This allows us to verify that your AMI has been uploaded correctly and to allocate a unique identifier for it.
4. Use this AMI ID and the Amazon EC2 web service APIs to run, monitor, and terminate as many instances of this AMI as required. Currently, we provide command line tools and Java libraries, and you may also directly access our SOAP or Query based APIs.
We're looking at moving MemeStreams into this. The biggest challenge is that if your instance shuts down for some reason you loose all of your data.
Isn't doing the same thing and expecting different results the definition of insanity?
Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences: In earlier operations, Iraqi and American forces cleared many neighborhoods of terrorists and insurgents, but when our forces moved on to other targets, the killers returned. This time, we'll have the force levels we need to hold the areas that have been cleared. In earlier operations, political and sectarian interference prevented Iraqi and American forces from going into neighborhoods that are home to those fueling the sectarian violence. This time, Iraqi and American forces will have a green light to enter those neighborhoods -- and Prime Minister Maliki has pledged that political or sectarian interference will not be tolerated.
If this was a problem before was the Republican Congress preventing you from increasing troop levels? If there has been political and sectarian interference, what does our decision making have to do with that? I have to wonder if the whole point of this is simply to be contrarian so that they can later argue that everything would be OK if they had been listened to. This ignores that fact that things would be much better if they hadn't been listened to in the first damn place.
The first peak in Apple's stock price (approx 1:45 EST, or 10:45 PST) was at the tail end of Steve Job's demoing the phone. He then goes on to talk about the busniess side (the price, exclusive with Cingular, etc) as well as the target 1% market share goal and the share price drops a little.
It's like watching a sing-a-song, only with lots of money!
Ladies and gentlemen, the Internet has left the building...
Topic: Technology
2:37 pm EST, Jan 4, 2007
RSnake is a fucking genius. Using a file:/// URL pointed at the manual PDF installed with Acrobat, you can execute JavaScript in the local zone. Oh yeah, local file access, program execution, completely uncrippled XmlHttpRequest.
Acidus wrote: There is a flaw in Abode’s Acrobat reader plugin which allows JavaScript to execute. This flaws means ever website that contains a PDF file has a de facto Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability.
Acidus does a good job of putting this latest PDF vuln in perspective.
This is why the Republican's lost the election. When the exit polls said corruption they weren't talking about Jack Abramoff. Anything else that anyone else says is pure spin.
A scuffle broke out Thursday between saffron-robed monks and anti-war demonstrators at peace rally in Sri Lankan capital.
About six or seven monks from a right-wing Buddhist faction had stormed the stage during a peace rally attended by about 1,000 people in the capital, Colombo, shouting pro-war slogans, an AP reporter at the scene said.
