We are currently preparing the big crowning event of Miss Landmine Angola 2008 in close collaboration with the Angolan government (CNIDAH) and supported by the European Union.The event will be taking place in Luanda, Angola on April 4th, 2008, the UN International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action.

Stay tuned!

The web voting for Miss Landmine Angola is open until April 3, 2008.

Well, that's certainly an effective way to make a statement. Reality is pretty damn surreal.

MISS LANDMINE

Dagmar posted up this summary of the situation with Dan Egerstad (Google Cache).

In a move almost staggeringly myopic, agents from Swedish National Crime and the Swedish Security Police raided Dan Egerstad on Monday of this week, rather clearly on the basis of his massive non-hack of the TOR routing service.

For those not catching on, Dan is the gentleman we all cheered a short while ago for having the ingenuity to set up and connect several new TOR (an anonymizing packet routing system) nodes and see if people were actually using the network with unencrypted protocols (which would basically be foolish in the extreme). It turns out that Dan's suspicions were right, and that not only were people using the network insecurely, lots of people, up to and including embassies and government and military offices were using the network unsafely--effectively sending emails and other sensitive traffic across the network completely in the clear where anyone who added their connectivity to the network could see it. This is very, very bad.

Let me make this clear... Anyone, myself included, can at any time, add their resources to and use the TOR network, simply by joining it and using it. (Non-technical explanation for simplicity) Participants in the network pass each other's traffic back and forth randomly through encrypted links, counting on the misdirection of a massive shell game to protect their privacy. Users are supposed to encrypt all their traffic as well as an additional step to keep the last site that handles the traffic before it goes back out to the Internet at large from being able to see what's being sent around. The encryption of the TOR network itself protects the contents up to that point, but no farther. For embassies and other installations that might have things going on where a breach of security could mean people die, incorrect use of the network almost guarantees that someone's likely to get hurt--possibly many, many someones. Dan figured that if anyone can do this, bad people were probably already doing it.

After doing his due diligence and trying to tell the people using the network unsafely the mistakes they were making (and getting nowhere), Dan took the more civic-minded approach of shouting it to the heavens by publishing samples and account information of the hapless fools on his website, and announcing the disturbing results of his completely legal and ethical research to security-oriented mailing lists in hopes that people would take notice and stop endangering themselves and others. The resulting splash should certainly penetrate far and ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Hacker arrested for... um... *not* hacking?

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) have successfully performed the world's first high-definition image taking of an Earth-rise* by the lunar explorer "KAGUYA" (SELENE,) which was injected into a lunar orbit at an altitude of about 100 km on October 18, 2007 (Japan Standard Time. Following times and dates are all JST.)

Don't miss the pictures and video.

Kaguya (Selene) Images of Earth-Rise Over the Moon | SpaceRef

Google on Monday released programming tools for its Android mobile-phone alliance for download, giving developers the ability to start writing software for phones due to start shipping in 2008 and $10 million in prizes to lure them.

The software development kit (SDK), an open-source package available for download for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X machines, shows that Java is indeed the programming language for software running on the Linux-based phones.

Accompanying the SDK is a raft of details that wasn't available when Google and its partners announced the Open Handset Alliance a week ago. The Android software includes the Google-created Dalvik virtual machine for running Java programs, a browser based on the WebKit engine, and support for many media and image file formats. (Note: I clarified that the browser is only based on the WebKit engine.)

And hardware abilities permitting, it also supports wireless communications using GSM mobile-phone technology, 3G, Edge, 802.11 Wi-Fi networks. Conspicuously missing from the list is the widely used CDMA mobile-phone technology developed by Qualcomm.

To jump-start the Android programming effort, Google is offering $10 million total in prizes, each ranging from $25,000 to $275,000, to programmers picked by a panel of judges.

Memestreams enabled phone for real world (live) social blogging?

Google releases Android programming tools

Gina Elise is on a quest to raise fund for hospitalized vets. She's doing it w/ a calendar. She was at blogworld and she's increadibly hot.

Go pick-up your jaw and buy a calendar.

If you check out the "In The Field" section of Gina's website, you will find timball.

Pin Up Calendars for Vets - Benefit Calendar for Veterans Hospitals

Imagine you're a soldier in Baghdad, don't speak Arabic and you must shout a command to a pack of angry-looking insurgents: "Drop your weapons!" You could fire warning shots, or take out a handheld computer and use a stylus to scroll through a list of preprogrammed phrases on a touchscreen and then flip the device around to show enemy combatants the command in Arabic. Not what you want to do in a hostile situation or combat zone.

MilTrans VRT tactical eyes-free, hand-free voice translator is a solution. The device is stand alone; MICH/ACH Integrated; or Integrated into Headset with Phased Array System and Speakers.

Applications include providing instructions during force protection, house/vehicle searches, combat patrol, civil aid missions, entry control duty, basic medical triage, ship boarding and prison control.

These are our booth neighbors at Blogworld Expo. They have over 4,500 of these units in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is what the wearable system looks like:

MilTrans - Voice Response Translator

The Industrial Memetics crew has settled in at our Blogworld Expo booth. If you are at the conference, be sure to come by and say 'hi' to us!

Industrial Memetics @ Blog World Expo

"Ajax Security is a remarkably rigorous and thorough examination of an underexplored subject. Every Ajax engineer needs to have the knowledge contained in this book - or be able to explain why they don't."
-- Jesse James Garrett, Father of Ajax

Billy is clearly happy about that quote.

Jesse James Garett: Buy Ajax Security Book

And while over 2/3 understand that Ajax applications have an increased attack surface, many of the comments showed that some people believe Ajax security is just about an increased attack surface.

Let me assure you, if Ajax Security was only about an increased attack surface two things would have happened:

1. Addison Wesley won't have asked me to write a 500 page book about it
2. Bryan and I would have finished a long time ago :-)

There are many issues surrounding Ajax Security and hopefully this piece will help people see the bigger Ajax Security picture.

A little peak into some of the many topics covered in Ajax Security, Billy Hoffman and Bryan Sullivan's book on all things Ajax.

Hopefully this little taste shows you that there is far far more to Ajax Security than some JavaScript eye candy and an increased attack surface. Developer, QA professional, and hacker alike will all find Ajax Security an enormously powerful resource to help design, build, test, and hack Ajax applications.

Ajax Security is more than an Increased Attack Surface

We posted a significant update to MemeStreams today. There are two primary aspects. The first is that posting is now much more free reigned. You can reply to your own posts. You can reply multiple times. You can post the same url to your blog multiple times. If you do the later, it will not result in the repeated promotion of that url on the main page.

The other aspect is anti-spam. New user registration is now open again. New users will not show up on the main page or in the "recent posters" section of the weblogs page. They are relegated to the "new users" section of the weblogs page until one of the admins blesses them, or someone who already has a good reputation recommends a link from them. So, those of you who can, please watch the new users for interesting people who you might want to bring into the fold.

This is a big update so please, as always, let us know if anything is not working properly.

Tom worked very hard to get this update done in time for Blogworld. Over the course of the next two days, we are all heading out to Vegas. It should be an interesting week.

MemeStreams Update