Sunday, November 11, 2007

xkcd takes life. Seriously.

xkcd is an inspiration to us all...


A couple of days later, I stumble across this:

Inspired by XKCD: MBR Love Note

Just a note: if you plan to mess with that, do keep a copy of your MBR (you might actually want to copy a bit more than 512 in this case, go for safe MB, then you can restore how much is needed from that).


dd if=/dev/yourdisk of=mymbr bs=512 count=1


You can later restore that to disk

dd if=mymbr of=/dev/yourdisk bs=512 count=1



-----> Cool :D

Note: In response to the comment by Criveti Mihai, the binary for the MBR sector actually is in the zip file at src/love/love/mbr.bin .. except if you were to install it via DD, you would need to install a message on sector 3 as well.

Friday, November 09, 2007

The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Music

After giving away the "source code" to his music (garageband/logic* or raw formats), and making it available via torrents, Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) and Saul Williams are giving away their album as an 83MB zip file containing the entire record as 192Kbps DRM-free LAME encoded MP3s along with a PDF booklet.

"The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!" is a joint Trent Reznor / Saul Williams feature. If you feel like supporting the artist, feel free to donate 5$, and get the higher quality version in either mp3 or flac format:

  • 320Kbps MP3 (very high quality, larger file size - approx 128MB)
  • FLAC lossless (exact CD quality but unplayable in iTunes and Windows Media Player - approx 395MB)

All files are 100% DRM Free.


"Personally, I would like people to support artists," Reznor said. "After all, we as artists dedicate our lives to producing the best music we can. It's been a painful process for me personally (to see the changes in the music industry). But should I be angry at the audience that wants to hear music so much, an audience that is so passionate about hearing it they go online to get it two weeks before the music debuts? No, I want them to be that way."

It's good to see artists are finally supporting music and not RIAA or DRM or the industry cronies.

Did I mention NIN has their own official youtube feed?
http://www.youtube.com/ninofficial

Music too expensive? "You know what that means - steal it! steal it, steal some more, give it to your friends and keep on stealing. Bet I didn't make any friends by saying that" - Trent Reznor

Neat little follow-up:

Gene Simmons (KISS bass "axe" player) blames college kids for ruining music biz:

"Every little college kid, every freshly-scrubbed little kid's face should have been sued off the face of the earth. They should have taken their houses and cars and nipped it right there in the beginning."

Oh yeah, blast those teens with their Humvees and villas who steal music from the poor little artists!

Demonoid BitTorrent site taken down by record industry

www.demonoid.cc http://www.demonoid.com


The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding.


The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) has managed to take Demonoid down, just a few weeks they forced them to block Canadian traffic.

Al Qaeda declares Cyber Jihad on the West

/bin/laden to attack the blogosphere starting Sunday, Nov. 11th.


In a special Internet announcement in Arabic, picked up DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources, Osama bin Laden’s followers announced Monday, Oct. 29, the launching of Electronic Jihad. On Sunday, Nov. 11, al Qaeda’s electronic experts will start attacking Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate and Shiite Web sites. On Day One, they will test their skills against 15 targeted sites expand the operation from day to day thereafter until hundreds of thousands of Islamist hackers are in action against untold numbers of anti-Muslim sites.


Source:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/al_qaeda_hacker_1.html

First Forensic Forum defaced

The "First Forensic Forum" an open forum for digital forensic practitioners and security professionals has been defaced. Good thing they have no shortage of forensics and security professionals to evaluate the situation and track down the vulnerabilities that were exploited :-).

"S4udi-S3curity-T3rror" wrote: "The F3 For Security Hacked. What's Happened In The world. Thay Are No Security Or What"




It goes to show you this sort of thing can happen even to the best in the field (security professionals).

They were using Zeus webserver at the time.
http://support.zeus.com/zws/media/docs/4.3/RELEASE_NOTES

Which, oddly enough, seems to have a pretty clean security track record. So it might have been human error (permissions and that sort of thing) or badly written applications. Some of the errors on the website seem to indicate a badly written PHP application.


Warning: main() [function.include]: Failed opening '/content/StartupHostPlus/f/3/f3.org.uk/web/protector_core/modules/protector/include/precheck.inc.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php') in /content/StartupHostPlus/f/3/f3.org.uk/web/mainfile.php on line 104


And again, he has been keeping himself pretty busy lately:

Results 1 - 10 of about 13 for "S4udi-S3curity-T3rror was here"

S4udi-S3curity-T3rror. Was Here. ====================================================== !!!!! The Global Trust Security Hacked. :\ What Happen In The world ...
www.globaltrustsecurity.us/

S4udi-s3curity-T3rror was here
This Site Was Hacked. By. S4udi-S3curity-T3rror | NorTh Hacker. Don't Scare Just Rename The Index :). =========================================== ...
host.alcaldiadesuareztolima.gov.co/

S4udi-s3curity-T3rror was here
HACKED. Big Error By. S4udi-S3curity-T3rror. --------------------------------------------------. TrusT_Me If You Know The Trust. S4curity@HotMail.Com ...
hamtic.antique.gov.ph/sa.php

You get the picture. From "otdotex.com/s4udi.htm" or "www.scribblers.net/s4udi.php" he seems to change the index.

sudo dd if=~/loveletter of=/dev/rwd0c

xkcd ftw!



In love with a BOFH :-).

Open Source at Microsoft, working on ATK

At the 1 year anniversary of the Microsoft/Novell "Collaboration Agreement" press release they have anounced that Microsoft and Novell plan to support GNOME ATK - Accessability Toolkit to create a cross-platform accessibility model that links together the existing Windows and Linux frameworks used to build assistive technology products that enable people with disabilities to interact with computers.

It would be interesting if they were to use Mono as the development platform.

It's good to know that Novell, Sun and even Microsoft pitch in to create a unified accessibility model.

It is interesting to see Open Source at Microsoft, and even Silverlight for Linux. It would be for the best if they'd play nice and collaborate for the greater good.

Security through fear

Taking Pictures from a Train can get you in serious trouble in the USA.

Thursday, November 08, 2007

DTrace: ported to FreeBSD, MacOS X, QNX

DTrace is being ported to QNX Neutrino! After seeing DTrace ported to FreeBSD, MacOS X Leopard, and hearing hints about NetBSD ports, I still find the QNX port surprising.

Terminus - best monospaced bitmap font ever

Terminus Font is designed for long (8 and more hours per day) work with computers.