"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." -- Marshall McLuhan, 1969
YouTube - NBC Dateline Reporter flees Defcon 15
Topic: Computer Security
8:13 pm EDT, Aug 4, 2007
NBC Reporter with hidden camera in purse hoping to catch conference attendees committing to crimes (according to Defcon staff) flees Defcon 15 after being outed.
OMG FUCKING LOOOOOOLLLLL!!!!
For more information on this awesome totally ethical NBC program, see this.
I think DT handled that well. The role reversal that took place when the conference attendees were following her to her car was hilarious. "We just want to ask a few questions!"
If you attempted to use the system most of today, you saw a message from Decius explaining that the system was broke...
Immediately after my earlier post explaining the situation with the OIDs Rattle and I leapt into action with a major overhaul of the database schema and software. Oh how this brought back memories of being an admin. Totally unexpected computer work when you're supposed to have the day off and you have to get it done before you can do anything else. Waiting on development systems to reload while sitting on a speaker phone.... that disconnected manner of teleconferences that span hours while work is getting done.... Random breaks to grab coffee, or dinner, without hanging up the phone... Your eyes getting heavy as you strain your ears to make out the details of the television news which the party on the other end of the line is using for background noise...
We got it done. About 200 lines of new code written and 650 modified. Rattle even managed to work a fix in for the redirection on login and some problems with creating a new account, and I cleaned up some annoyances with the circle interface.
MemeStreams is back. Thank you for your patience, and please let us know if you notice anything strange about the way the site works (or doesn't work) over the next few days.
Things should be back to working normally, and in some places a little better than normal.
Everyone will need to log into the system again. If there are any problems with login, let us know. Since we were trying to push this fix out as soon as possible, it's entirely possible bugs have been missed.
Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. art.cat.ap.jpg
His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means the patient has less than four hours to live.
"He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," Dr. David Dosa said in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
"Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one," said Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor of medicine at Brown University.
After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He'd sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.
Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. "This is not a cat that's friendly to people," he said.
Yes, I have made an lolcat photo based on Oscar... Photo is from Reuters.
Japan Quake Causes Nuke Plant Leak, Fire - Forbes.com
Topic: Biology
12:08 pm 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.
The Apple iPhone’s Safari web browser has a special feature that allows the user to dial any phone number displayed on a web page simply by tapping the number. SPI Labs has discovered that this feature can be exploited by attackers to perform various attacks, including:
* Redirecting phone calls placed by the user to different phone numbers of the attacker’s choosing * Tracking phone calls placed by the user * Manipulating the phone to place a call without the user accepting the confirmation dialog * Placing the phone into an infinite loop of attempting calls, through which the only escape is to turn off the phone * Preventing the phone from dialing
The resolve of our great website is being tested. But make no mistake, we will show the world that we will pass the test.
Rattle and I are deleting a lot of spam from MemeStreams. A lot. Sometimes, as you may have seen, there are accounts that get created that we have trouble deciding whether or not to delete. We're doing too much of this, and the spammers are cutting the line too closely. Its time to raise the bar.
As you may know, links that get posted to MemeStreams by people with low reputations have nofollow tags that tell search engines not to add any value to those links. I discovered this evening that there was a location where links would not receive a nofollow tag. I patched it. I've also created a new script that will add all low reputation users to robots.txt. Search engines should not index them at all.
Hopefully this will reduce the attractiveness of this site as a place to post spam.
A fascinating IEEE Spectrum article on the incident in which lawful intercept facilities were hacked to permit the secret tapping of the mobile phones of a large number of Greek government officials, including the Prime Minister:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/5280
Hat tip: Steve Bellovin.
Perry -- Perry E. Metzger perry@piermont.com
This is worth reading. An operation leverages the "lawful intercept" features of telephone switches, combined with rootkit malware specifically designed for the switches, and a collection of corrupt employees for some very unlawful intercepts. One, possibly two deaths. One of the most sophisticated computer intrusions I have ever heard of. Most likely a state intelligence organization. Americans widely suspected.
