electricinca.com

Wow the return of Brian Atene! Good to see that he has a sense of humour about his 15 minutes of fame coming 20 years too late. I can only imagine what Full Metal Jacket would have been with him in it. LOL.

Labels: YouTube

Double Wires - Shite graphics but addictive gameplay. It's like we are back in the 80s again.

Frustrating when you seem to be doing so well and then you swing yourself up and fling yourself so hard that you end up going in an arc backwards off the top of the screen.

Labels: Games

Labels: YouTube

This has become ever more appropriate since when it was originally broadcast.

Labels: humour, YouTube

The BBC reports that a senior Microsoft executive has promised that its new operating system will be more secure than ever.

Jean-Philippe Courtois, president of Microsoft International, said that beefing-up security was one reason behind delays to Windows Vista.

I think Microsoft should be applauded for their relatively recent commitment to the subject of security in their products particularly given their laissez-faire attitude to it up until a few years ago. But Microsoft promised the same thing about their previous Operating System release and Windows XP proved to be their least secure system ever until they beefed up the security with the Service Pack 2.

The thing about software security though is that it's effectiveness can only be judged in retrospect because modern software is now so complicated particularly operating systems that the process used to create it inevitably introduces bugs and security holes.

So the Microsoft engineers may well have patched all the security flaws that had been exposed through previous releases and the testing of this release of Windows Vista, but there will no doubt be new holes that have been inadvertantly created that no one has even conceived of yet.

One such newly introduced security hole has been discovered by researcher Joanna Rutkowska and it's a biggie. She describes it a blue pill a reference to the movie The Matrix and would allow a malicious hacker to completely compromise a system and the user would have no indication at all that their syetm had been compromised.

Rutkowska's Vista kernel attack did not rely on any known bugs in Vista, which is still in beta testing. She stressed that her demonstration did not rely on any implementation bug nor any undocumented Windows Vista functionality. She characterized her approaches as "legal," using documented SDK features.

As she says it did not rely on any known bug within Windows Vista so who knows what other security problems might have been engineered into the operating system that haven't yet been uncovered by Microsoft's own testers or by third party researchers.

Labels: Computer security, Security

A trailer for Robert Rodriguez Quentin Tarantino's new baby Grind House



Looks like insane, violent and gory. I can't wait.

The bit for the fake trailer of Machete starring Danny Trejo as the eponymous character looked fucking awesome as well. I'd watch an entire feature film of it based on the seconds of footage I saw herein.

Labels: movies, YouTube

I think Bruce Schneier's right on the money when he calls this Opinion Monitoring Software Orwellian.

It's like the sort of thing you can imagine a nascent Ministry of Truth using to separate the goodthinkers from the crimethinkers.

It starts out well enough and sounds like a useful tool to track world opinion on the US and its government's policies and as result make the US a more responsible player on the world stage.

A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.

Such a “sentiment analysis” is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said.

But like any tool there is scope for misuse of the technology should the research into it actually bear fruit in this case.

Labels: books, Computer security, Security

Surprising but indeed effective advice there.

Found via BoingBoing.

Labels: humour

A concise history of the British safe and safe-cracking. [via]

I went through a period of my life as a kid wanting to grow up to be a safe cracker. I'm still pretty fascinated by the tales of the ongoing technological battle between safemakers and safebreakers that are presented on the site.