ThisMyDisclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2009
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent anyone else's view in any way, including those of my employer.
© Copyright 2009
To me, there may not be anything more American than an outright vulgar display of power. In this video clip obtained through foxnews.com, NASA does a test firing of the Ares booster rocket that will be used to send astronauts into space, and eventually back to the moon.
NASA is developing new booster rockets, and new space capsules that are planned to replace the current space shuttle design that we have all seen for many years now. I don’t know what the new capsule will look like, or whether it will be reminiscent of the airplane style shuttle with the big red hydrogen tank and two booster rockets.
In the video below, NASA does a test firing in Promontory, Utah. The booster spits massive amounts of raw thrust for roughly 2 minutes. You can see dirt and dust being picked up from the thrust, even a few hundred feet in front of the rocket. I can’t even imagine how they mounted this rocket to the earth so it wouldn’t move. They must have a reinforced concrete slab that goes a mile down.
I hope they didn’t effect the rotation of the earth with this thing. I really don’t want to have to adjust daylight savings time again. Or then, maybe twice a year we should fire 20 of these bad boys all at once, adjusting the rotation of the earth by exactly one hour at 2:00am. It does make sense. There are about 750 billion clocks that need to be adjusted, but only 1 earth to readjust. I’ll let NASA do the math.
Click the icon 
to see full screen video without leaving my blog.
When you see this video, you might ask yourself, “How much did this outright vulgar display of power cost?” and you would be asking a good question. Good questions deserve answers. Some answers are probably classified. Either way, I don’t have that number for you. If you really care, go ahead and look it up and let me know, but I bet it’s a large number. Another good question is “Who paid for it?”. That one probably isn’t ‘top secret’ but I don’t have an answer for that either. Looking at my federal budget article I don’t see anything about 3.6 million foot pounds of thrust.
Some people are definitely asking the question lately, “With our current economy, should we really be spending money on this?”. The answer is yes. yes were should. As for space exploration, Rick Moranis put it best in the 1987 movie SpaceBalls when he said “We can’t stop. We’ve got to slow down first”. And he is right. We cant stop, but slowing down might not be a bad idea. Maybe they even have slowed down. Thats one of the things about “Top Secret”. It’s classified.
Do not attempt to adjust your monitor. The video is actually posted in fast forward. I appreciated it that way because I already know the movie. I’ve probably seen it a gazillion times. Watching the whole scene in just over a minute works for me. I know whats going to happen already and I still want to watch it again. It saves me time. Technology has actually increased the value of that particular movie.
A top operational official in charge of protecting civilian government computer networks has resigned, dealing another blow to the federal effort to enhance cybersecurity.
Original article here from The Washington Post
No, I’m not talking about the Bush administrations federal budget.
Early this morning both Twitter and Facebook were victims of Distributed Denial of Service attacks. (DDoS) The attack seems to have hit Twitter first, bringing the social network site to it’s knees. Shortly after Facebook also began experiencing intermittent issues, though it seems that the Facebook system handled the attack better than Twitter.
In theory, the attackers could have executed a buffer overflow attack by sending packets with 141 characters to the web servers. Ok.. that’s a lie, but if you know what it means then it’s probably pretty funny. At a minimum I amuse myself.
Personally, I don’t tweet. I am even bothered by the SMS protocols restrictions. For non tech speaking readers, that means I wish text messaging supported more than 160 characters. 140 is just absurd. Now the Extended SMS protocol does support up to 1000 characters *i think*, but for the most part, cellular carriers don’t use XMS (eXtended Message Service). Especially if your texting to a cell phone using another carrier.
I read one report about the twitter attack where a marketing executive in Manhattan complained that she couldn’t get to twitter, and didn’t know where to go to find answers because she gets all her news from twitter. wait.. you get ALL of your news in 140 characters or less? seriously? The average news report i read is about 2 pages long, but hey, whatever suits you.
Speaking of the inherent limitations of communicating in such short bursts. Did you know that Congressmen and Senators tweet with each other while in session? Yeah, so the people who are running our country are sharing their opinions with each other this way. I’ll say it one more time. 140 characters or less.
Below is an actual simulated tweet from the congress floor.
Ithink th $ 4 Kulnkerz iz huge sucess the $ alocated wuz sposd2 last 3 mnths and we ran out in 1week Oh wait the black guy iz taking again.
140 characters or less is fine for me because I don’t actually have anything important to say! This morning twitter was down when I was trying to tell everyone that I bought a pumpkin that looks just like my butt.
Ok, I’ll stop now. Please click my advertisers.
In recent news AT&T was under fire from the web site operators at 4chan. Over the weekend, AT&T began blocking traffic to www.4chan.org, do to what it called a DDoS attack being launched from 4chan servers. Today, 4chan argued that the AT&T was intentionally blocking the sites content from its subscribers.
I’m sure you have heard of AT&T, but if your not familiar with 4chan, then I don’t recommend visiting their site at www.4chan.org. Even if you just did go there, you won’t think it’s very interesting at first glance. From visiting the site, I would assume that they are based out of Japan. Traceroute tells me the server is being hosted in California by a company called xeex Communications.
During todays report, a false report of Randall Stephenson’s death showed up on a website affiliated with CNN. The website, at IReport.com is “a user-generated site” and that stories are not “edited, fact-checked or screened”. Basically, the site appears to serve as a bulletin board for real news. In this case, the report never made it into the national news, but in the past these pranksters have managed to get these stories through.
Read the whole article here.
A recent whitepaper has been release, and the techniques will be demonstrated at the 2009 Blackhat convention, laying out details for two techniques for keystroke logging, using very unconventional methods.
Typically, keystroke logging is done by means of software installed on the victims PC, or through a small piece of hardware attacked to the keyboards cable. In this case, access to the computer is not required at all. The first attack involves sniffing slight voltage changes from an AC electrical outlet up to 30 feet away from the victims computer. When a key is pressed on the keyboard, a string of binary code is sent to the computer through the USB or PS2 cable, for instance 1000101 or 110100100. Since there is no shielding on the ground cable attached to the keyboard, running into the computer and back to the ground wire in the buildings electrical wiring, the variations, or noise, generated can be picked up quite easily from a nearby outlet.
Scary huh? Well, not really, not to me at least. An easy way around this is to get yourself a nice wireless keyboard. Since the wireless keyboard uses infrared light, or bluetooth, there is no ground cable on the keyboard, and the signal cant be snooped on in the electrical cabling. Great success. Right?
Unfortunately, as an example, the bottom line with car security systems still holds true to this day. If an auto thief want your car, they are going to get it. You didn’t hear this from me, but did you know that a LoJack system can be rendered useless with a handful of fairly inexpensive neodymium magnets? Also, a few pieces of aluminum tubing will also do the trick. It’s called science and it works. Distortion and interference can cause the LoJack signal to be rendered useless. I’m not telling how to, or that you should do this, because inexperienced auto thief’s will do it wrong and you will probably be caught. Experienced auto thief’s already know this trick. As for me, I’m just familiar with the concept. That’s all.
Back to keystroke logging though. Lets say you have the wireless keyboard, or a laptop running on a battery. No connection to the ground wire in the AC system. In this case, the attacker can use a fairly inexpensive laser to measure vibrations on the laptop, keyboard, or even the table top where the keyboard is sitting. Now these vibrations aren’t going to be nearly as easy to decipher as the 1’s and 0’s being sent out through the electrical wire, so it will be good for preventing the casual hacker from logging your stokes.
It’s like they say. A lock on a door will only keep an honest person out of your room.
In the computer and network industry there are a handful giants that everyone has heard of, but there is one little known giant that many people may not have heard of. A little known company based out of Mountain View, California called Google. Just in case you are not familiar with Google, let me fill you in. You’re an idiot and I don’t know how you possibly found my site. Please put your computer into it’s original packaging and ship it back to the manufacturer.
In a recent news story, Google has announced their plans to increase their ever expanding reach by releasing a full fledged Operating System for home computers. I suppose that their marketing data on everyone in the civilized world, including their age, race, sex, interests, where they live, where they travel to, where they go on vacation, an index of their email, who they communicate with, what tv shows they watch, music interests, office documents, news interests and preference to boxers or briefs… well.. I guess that isn’t good enough for them. Now they want to seal the deal by dominating your life by gaining control over your home PC entirely.
Is anyone else a *little* bit concerned? I’m sure that Micro$oft is wetting their pants a little bit. Luckily, Google has the ability to make a piece offering by sending the Micro$oft executives new underwear that fit’s their particular preference.
The definition of a monopoly is when a single entity has significant control over a particular market, giving the entity a great latitude of control over the pricing and terms of the services and products offered in the given market. Now, technically this definition doesn’t really apply to Google. Instead, what Google is doing is trying to gain a significant level of control over the lives and habits of it’s individual users and customers.
I am not sure if there is a term for this level of domination, but this is another case in point for my “Google is evil” theory. Just in case you havn’t been following my blog regularly, let me restate the theory for you. “Google is evil”. That’s the theory.
People. We can’t let any one entity have this level of domination. Before technology, I don’t really see how this could have been possible but if there were a single company back in the 60’s with this level of big brotherhood, (aside from government) don’t you think there would have been public outcry? Today, especially with the power of technology and the ease of sharing information, where’s the public outcry?
Where is the fear for our privacy? Who is protecting you? oh… yeah, I forgot. Googles got your back. ok…
Sleep safe I guess. For today.
Just about every known cellular phone maker has agreed to implement a universal phone charger for new cellular handsets released in the EU. As I was reading through the article I was sitting on the edge of my seat with anticipation. I was saying to my self “Micro USB, come on Micro-USB!!” well guess what? Micro-USB for the win!
What is Micro-USB? Well it looks like this, and Motorola phones have used it for year, as have blackberrys and most consumer digital cameras. This means that in theory you wont really need a charger, provided you have a computer, because you can just use the micro-USB cable to charge your devices. (I have also been doing that for years).
Why is this relevant to you? Well… for most of my readers, it isn’t relevant because this story takes place in the EU, while we just so happen to live in America. The cell phone makers are using terms like “2012″ to describe the Americas involvement in this groundbreaking deal.
Now, a few weeks ago, they finally turned off the Analog Broadcast channels around the country. Last year Verizon purchased all of the analog broadcast frequencies that have now been decommissioned. Under pressure from Google, the FCC declared that the new airwaves must be used to offer an “open network” which will have no limitations on the manufacturer of the phone, or services running on it. Basically what this would mean is you could purchase any phone, from any manufacture, and get service through whoever you want.
To the non techies, this might sound convenient. To the true techies at heart, this sounds both FREAKING AWESOME, and a little bit scary at the same time. Freaking awesome because if all phones are on the same network, the limitations for how they can communicate are greatly reduced. Open development for new smart phones like the Iphone and the Android will be able to work collaboratively with applications on other types of phones, even phones with different cellular providers. Verizon will make money by “leasing out” time on their network to other providers. This does mean that the costs of your cellular phones should go down, and the cost of your cellular service will certainly go up. In short, the FCC told Verizon they have to “play nice with the competitors”, but that doesn’t mean Verizon wont charge them out the ass for it.
It’s great to have Verizon in charge of the new “Open Network” because currently Verizon’s technology is more proprietary and locked down than ANY other carrier. So, yeah… lets trust them to take the lead on this one.
At any rate, the real point of this article is that if the Cellular Manufactures can’t even get a standardized charger to the US by 2012, whats the likelihood that we will EVER see this open network thing? 2020? maybe…. If ever.
So a few weeks ago my XBOX 360 started locking up. It would make a horrible noise through the speakers (Sort of a mix between fingernails on a chalkboard and two semi trucks colliding on the freeway), and the screen would freeze and become kinda garbled. A few days ago, the XBOX stopped turning on altogether, and I started getting the three red lights on the front. I did get the Red Ring of Death (RRoD), or Ring of Light (RoL) on my system a few years ago and Micro$oft replaced it for free. It took them like 4 months, but at least it was free.
I found a tutorial online that claims it will fix the E74 error, or the 3 Red Lights error. Reading through it, the basic principal was that the heat sink was fixed to the CPU and the GPU to tightly, causing flex in the main board, resulting in an intermittent connection. The tutorial tells you to remove the heat sink, and replace the screws with 10mm machine screws to reduce the pressure on the board. I was skeptical.
After a trip to Home Depot, where i left empty handed because they didn’t have heat sink compound or the right screws, I went to a local hardware store that did have the screws, but they didn’t have the right washers (weird). Then to radio shack for the heat sink compound (silver paste of course), then *back* to home depot because they actually did have the washers that I need. Roughly 20 bucks in parts, I figured it was worth a shot.
Long story short, it didn’t work. I was rather satisfied to know that when I put the XBox back together, I did it correctly. At least it was still doing the same thing, and it didn’t burst into flames or something… great success. And like I said, going into it I was skeptical, but for 20 bucks, and 2 hours of my time, i figured why not. After all, I did get a good story out of it. And that’s all that really matters.
Has anyone else tried this? Have you gotten any success with it? To me, I can see that the fix *might* reduce the likelihood that you will get the red light errors, but *only* if you make the repairs before you get the error. The online manual seems to imply that it will fix it even afterwards… I dunno about that one.
I also found another site that claims you can fix a broken XBOX 360 by wrapping it in towels and turning it on for 15 minutes. I suppose the idea is that by overheating the system and melting the components, your machine will no longer give you the three red rings, because it will be completely blown. The guy in the video even says that he has no technical ability, and doesn’t understand why wrapping it in towels for 15 minutes would fix it. It sounds like a bad idea, but you know what? My XBOX is trashed, so I’ll try it and get back to ya.
*Update*
I referred to the rational descision making flow chart and decided that the risk involved in burning my house down, vs the stupidity of the story if I had to explain that my house burned down because I wrapped my XBOX in towels and tried to make smores… well… the numbers didn’t add up, so I didn’t do it.
That’s right. Remote code execution vulnerability for the human heart, and I’m not talking about the kind of vulnerability where some heartless bitch takes your heart, stomps all over it, and walks away with half of your money. Although that particular vulnerability is a tough one to patch as well.
A team of hackers, scientists and 45 year old virgins were able to successfully manipulate a common model of human pacemaker to deliver a potentially fatal shock to the pacemakee (pacemakee : one who has a pacemaker). The signal can be sent wirelessly to the pacemaker, interrupting the devices functionality after a two way communication handshake is completed between the hacker device and the pacemaker device.
Fear not though. “To our knowledge there has not been a single reported incident of such an event in more than 30 years of device telemetry use, which includes millions of implants worldwide,” states a pacemaker representative, adding that “newer implants with longer transmission ranges (… ) also had enhanced security”
In all fairness, sneaking up behind them and yelling “BOO!” might be more effective, though my research shows no definitive data on that theory.
There is officially a new category devoted to my “Google is Evil” series. I’ve been saying for years that Google is too powerful and that they will eventually be broken up. Everyone used to tell me I was crazy. People still do, but recently more people are starting to understand my “Google is Evil” philosophy.
I was recently advised to add a “Privacy Policy” to my site… for… uhhh… legal reasons n’ stuff? Also, I was told that when Google scans my site for archiving, they will give me better advertisements if they like my privacy policy. So i did….
What I didn’t know was that adding a privacy policy would mean that Google can start scanning my visitors cookies and serving advertisements based on their browsing history, rather than the content of my site. Great success. I think. Now I do realize that the privacy policy protects myself and Google by clearly stating what we* will and will not do with your information now that I have clearly stated that your personal information can and will be pillaged.
The irony is killing me inside. I love it. Below is an actual screen shot I took just a few minutes ago.
More Options ...
Categories
Tag Cloud
Blog RSS
Comments RSS
Void « Default
Life 
Earth 
Wind 
Water 
Fire Light 
Previous Entries
Last 50 Posts
Back