New attack can flatten XP firewall :: Hack In The Box :: Keeping Knowledge Free
Hackers have published code that could let an attacker disable the Windows Firewall on certain Windows XP machines. The code, which was posted on the Internet early Sunday morning, could be used to disable the Windows Firewall on a fully patched Windows XP PC that was running Windows’ Internet Connection Service (ICS). This service allows Windows users to essentially turn their PC into a router and share their Internet connection with other computers on the local area network (LAN.) It is typically used by home and small-business users. The attacker could send a malicious data packet to another PC using ICS that would cause the service to terminate. Because this service is connected to the Windows firewall, this packet would also cause the firewall to stop working, said Tyler Reguly, a research engineer at nCircle Network Security Inc., who has blogged about the issue.
Snapalope Hunting Association of America
Dear friends. It is with great pleasure that I welcome you all to the official website of the Snapalope Hunting Association of America. Since its humble beginnings S.H.A.A. has grown in size and now boasts thousands of members, all of whom enjoy quality hunting on the some 250,000 acres of pristine store habitat across the United States. Our aim is, and always has been, to provide members with the necessary skills and information for successful snapalope hunting, while ensuring that this marvelous creature will continue to be enjoyed by future generations. So please enjoy our website and happy hunting.
…so it is time for me to whip out my gift certificate to thinkgeek.com and my giftcard to office depot and do a little shopping. Hooray for birthday 
Vista Home Basic: of lemons and lemonade
Back in 1998 there was one consumer Windows OS release tier, just like in 1995. Come 2001, there were two: Home and Professional. In 2007, there will be four: Home Basic, Home Premium, Ultimate, and Business (I’ve left out Enterprise since it is a volume licensing product). Of the four editions, Home Basic is decidedly feature light. It will lack the bells and whistles of the fancier consumer tiers, which means no Media Center functionality and no Aero Glass, among other things.
Is it a fundamentally flawed product? Acer is talking openly about what many OEMs are privately expressing frustration over: the weak value proposition offered by Windows Vista Home Basic. The many-headed hydra that is Vista has at least one gimp head, according to complaints.
If you ask Jim Wong, senior corporate VP at Acer, Microsoft has crippled Home Basic so thoroughly that it is essentially just an excuse to wring more money out of OEMs. Wong told PC Pro that “Premium is the real Vista,” drilling home his view that Home Basic is a lemon that consumers will shun entirely. The real problem, Wong says, is that “[OEMs] have to pay more [for Home Premium] but users are not going to pay more.” This, he says, will result in a 1-2 percent increase in the cost of manufacturing a new PC, and Wong insists that the OEMs will have to eat that cost rather than pass it on to consumers. He did not elaborate why this cost cannot be passed on to consumers.
LOL, sucks for those guys.
Brad Pitt Seeks Trespassing Charges Against E! | Brad Pitt : People.com
Reps for Brad Pitt are seeking trespassing charges against E! Networks after a producer and cameraman allegedly walked onto the actor’s property in the Hollywood Hills last week.
“Yes, we have filed trespassing charges against E! and are exploring our legal options against both the crew that actually trespassed and the network itself,” his rep tells PEOPLE.
A Los Angeles police spokesperson says the incident, first reported by TMZ.com, is still under investigation.
The cable network, meanwhile, is denying any intentional wrongdoing. “E! Networks is investigating allegations that a producer and cameraman who were filming locations for a program about Brad Pitt went onto property last week that is reportedly owned by Mr. Pitt,” according to a statement from the cable channel.
PowerPC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PowerPC is a RISC microprocessor architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. Originally intended for personal computers, PowerPC CPUs have since become popular embedded and high-performance processors as well. PowerPC was the cornerstone of AIM’s PReP and Common Hardware Reference Platform initiatives in the 1990s, but the architecture found the most success in the personal computer market in Apple’s Macintosh lines from 1994–2006.
PowerPC is largely based on IBM’s earlier POWER architecture, and retains a high level of compatibility with it; the architectures have remained close enough that the same programs and operating systems will run on both if some care is taken in preparation; newer chips in the POWER series implement the full PowerPC instruction set.
Pirates of Silicon Valley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) is an unauthorized made-for-television docudrama written and directed by Martyn Burke. Based upon the book, Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer, by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, this film documents the rise of the home computer/personal computer through the rivalry between Apple Computer (Apple II and the Apple Macintosh) and Microsoft (DOS, IBM PC, and Windows).
The central story of the film begins in the early 1970s and ends in 1985 when Steve Jobs resigned from Apple Computer. The film is also structured by a set of “book ends”: it begins and ends with Jobs’ return to Apple in 1997.
AIM alliance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The AIM alliance was an alliance formed in 1991[citation needed] between Apple Computer, IBM and Motorola to create a new computing standard based on the PowerPC architecture. The stated goal of the alliance was to challenge the dominant Wintel computing platform with a new computer design and a next-generation operating system. It was thought that the CISC processors from Intel were an evolutionary dead-end in microprocessor design, and that since RISC was the future, the next few years were a period of great opportunity.
The CPU was the PowerPC, a single-chip version of IBM’s POWER1 CPU. Both IBM and Motorola would manufacture PowerPC chips for this new platform. The computer architecture base was called PReP (for PowerPC Reference Platform), and later named CHRP (for Common Hardware Reference Platform). PReP was in fact a barely-modified version of IBM’s existing RS/6000 platform, changed only to support the new bus style of the PowerPC.
Apple Computer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For a variety of reasons, ranging from its philosophy of comprehensive aesthetic design to its countercultural, even indie roots as a company that differentiates itself from the rest of the industry by “thinking different,” Apple has cultivated a customer base, referred to as the Cult of Mac, that is unusually devoted to the company and its brand.
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Alzheimer’s alert over anaesthetics - health - 28 October 2006 - New Scientist
Giving elderly patients certain general anaesthetics could increase their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and other memory and attention problems.
The suggestion arises from recent test tube and animal experiments. They also indicate that anaesthetists need to log more carefully the combinations and doses of the anaesthetics they give to patients, to allow the risks to be properly assessed.
The link between surgery and cognitive problems was first noted during the 1950s, but it was never clear whether post-operative cognitive dysfunction (POCD) was the result of the surgery itself or the anaesthetics, says Pravat Mandal of the University of Pittsburgh Medical School in Pennsylvania. It has been suggested that heart bypass surgery in particular could make the protective blood-brain barrier leaky, allowing immune tissue or unwanted debris into the brain.
Brand new substance created from water - fundamentals - 27 October 2006 - New Scientist
If you think we know all there is to know about water, think again. Scientists claim they have created a totally new alloy of hydrogen and oxygen molecules by splitting water.
It takes high-energy X-rays and an extremely high pressure, but the end result is a solid mixture of H2 and 02 that has never been identified before, they say. The discovery could change our understanding of the complex chemistry of water.
The new alloy is “a highly energetic material”, says Wendy Mao at Los Alamos National Laboratory, US, who led the research. “It may help us find a way of storing energy.”
Mao’s team subjected water to a pressure 170,000 times greater than atmospheric pressure at sea level. Then they bombarded it with X-rays, causing the water molecules to split and reform into a previously unknown crystalline solid made of H2 molecules and 02 molecules.
BetaNews | MS Office Validation Now Mandatory
Want to use the extra features within Office? Be prepared to verify that your copy of the productivity suite is genuine. While the so-called Office Genuine Advantage has been around since April, Microsoft did not make it mandatory until Friday. Starting today, using Office Online templates would require the validation, and the ability to download updates would also require verification beginning in January.
The move signals a tougher stance from Microsoft, which recently has begun to crack down on casual piracy of its products by customers. Those who have acquired pirated software without their knowledge, but agree to assist Microsoft in identifying where they obtained it from, would qualify for a legitimate copy of the software. Those who do not agree to help would have to pay the full fee to obtain new software.
Slashdot | BitTorrent Site Admin Sent To Prison
“The 23 year old Grant Stanley has been sentenced to five months in prison, followed by five months of home detention, and a $3000 fine for his role in the private BitTorrent tracker Elitetorrents. This ruling is the first BitTorrent related conviction in the US. Stanley pleaded guilty earlier this year to ‘conspiracy to commit copyright infringement’ and ‘criminal copyright infringement.’ He is one of the three defendants in the Elitetorrents operation better known as ‘Operation D-Elite.’”
Acer: Vista Home Basic is a lemon | The Register
Microsoft is effectively smuggling through a price hike for Windows Vista - by making the entry-level version so poor that no-one will want to use it. So says Jim Wong, senior veep at Acer, the world’s number four PC maker, who told UK hack Jon Honeyball: “The new [Vista] experience you hear of, if you get Basic, you won’t feel it at all. There’s no [Aero] graphics, no Media Center, no remote control.”
Wong notes that the Premium Version of Vista is 10 per cent more expensive than XP Home. This will increase PC build costs by 1-2 per cent, which the PC makers will have to soak up, he says.
Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgy Eft” released
Canonical announced today the release of Ubuntu 6.10, codenamed Edgy Eft. Released every six months to reflect the release cycle of the GNOME desktop environment, the increasingly popular distribution provides a relatively cohesive desktop Linux experience with reliable free updates and recent versions of commonly used open source applications. The latest version features GNOME 2.16, XOrg 7.1 with built-in support for accelerated indirect GLX AIGLX, and the 2.6.17 kernel.
Ubuntu 6.10, which includes the freshly released Firefox 2.0, sports the new Tangerine theme, designed to improve visual integration of the browser by making it better conform to Ubuntus style. Other visual improvements are featured as well, including a new USplash startup screen that will provide better support for a wider range of resolutions. In addition to Firefox 2.0, Ubuntu 6.10 also includes OpenOffice 2.0.4, Gaim 2.0 beta 3.1, and recent versions of many other common applications.
Not looking forward to this…definitely my hardest class…probably ever. I’m not even sure how the test will be, but I’m really scared…and the worst part is that I had to work from 4-11:30 yesterday, effectively zeroing out my study time, so now I have to “cram”. (and no, I couldn’t have studied more earlier because all my other classes have been giving midterms too.) This sucks.
Faulty IP address data leads to Shaq attack on innocent family (updated)
Anyone who follows the slate of lawsuits against music fans is cognizant of the crucial role that IP addresses play in attempts to cow suspected file sharers. But as we have seen time and time again, IP addresses are not consistently reliable means of identifying users. Law enforcement officials and a family in Gretna, Virginia and learned that lesson the hard way after their home was searched by a law enforcement team that included Miami Heat center Shaquille O’Neal, according to a law enforcement official.
The spectre of an angry, uniform-wearing Shaq, let alone an entire team of deputies and federal marshalls would be enough to turn one’s knees to jelly. That’s the sight apparently witnessed by farmer A.J. Nuckols, his schoolteacher wife, and three children last month when their home was raided and their computers, DVD, video tapes, and other belongings were confiscated after they were connected to an IP address reportedly used to access child pornography on the Internet.
It turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. Nine days after the raid, an investigator told Nuckols that “the wrong IP address had been identified” and that he and his family would not be charged in the investigation. It’s great that the Nuckols family is off the hook, but they now have to live with the stigma of having been the targets of a raid by law enforcement.
SGI sues ATI
The Western District of Wisconsin doesn’t see many high-tech lawsuits, but it got a high-profile one yesterday as SGI filed suit against ATI, alleging patent infringement (natch). SGI, which has research and manufacturing facilities in Chippewa Falls, wants a judge to decree that ATI willfully infringed an SGI patent. They also want triple damages.
The suit concerns patent no. 6,650,327, which details a “display system having floating point rasterization and floating point framebuffering.” It was filed back in 1998, but not granted until 2003.
SGI claims that its patent covers technology in ATI’s Radeon line of graphics cards. It also says that ATI was notified of this, but never responded, and continued to sell the cards.
Wired News: Battle of the New Atheism
…Dawkins rejected all these claims, but the last one — that science could never disprove God — provoked him to sarcasm. “There’s an infinite number of things that we can’t disprove,” he said. “You might say that because science can explain just about everything but not quite, it’s wrong to say therefore we don’t need God. It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don’t need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden. There’s an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. If there’s not the slightest reason to believe in any of those things, why bother? The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is. It is not up to us to disprove it.”
Science, after all, is an empirical endeavor that traffics in probabilities. The probability of God, Dawkins says, while not zero, is vanishingly small. He is confident that no Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. Why should the notion of some deity that we inherited from the Bronze Age get more respectful treatment?
Invention: Microwave-oven gun - tech - 23 October 2006 - New Scientist Tech
You can do a lot of damage with a directed beam of microwave energy. It can destroy electronics by inducing high voltages in chips and wires (just as metal objects spark if left in a microwave oven). Such a beam could also burn a person’s skin, or even detonate improvised explosive devices by exciting unstable chemicals.
A megawatt magnetron is normally needed to make the beam, though, and these are big and expensive beasts that need water cooling.
However, two inventors from Albuquerque, New Mexico in the US, reckon there is cheaper way to get the power. Simply gather together a stack of magnetrons ripped out of consumer microwave ovens, and lock their output together so that they combine into one coherent beam. What is more, they say, the trick can be done mechanically.
Bodyhack
Hmm…this is kind of strange, eh?
I’m not a fan of amputation photos and when I first ran across this story I sort of shuddered and hid from my computer screen before tacitly deciding that the good readers of Bodyhack could do without a post of, well, a hacked up body. But enough people forwarded me this link that I realize it is my solemn duty to confer it onto you.
The back-story to the photos is a little thin, but apparently a man in Valencia, Spain somehow lost his arm in a drainage ditch before showing up to his local hospital with the freshly severed limb. The doctors responded by stitching it back to his stump, but soon realized that the sewer water was going to spread infection. They would have to relocate the arm to another part of his body to keep it viable while they cleared away infected areas with antibiotics. With the family’s consent, they moved it to his groin where it could easily hook in to his blood supply.
So Dr. Borst has sent out a couple of messages about the uploading of slides into the public domain and distrubution of class content. After the first message, all material related to cmps415 has been removed from free access, and now requires a username and password. After the second email, I have also made it such that all CMPS classes now require such username and password. I am not sure whether the emails pertain to me and/or others, but I do not intend to infringe on copyright or do anything like that. If you happen to be someone from my class and would like access to my notes stuff, please email me, I will give you access, because you are allowed access according to Dr. Borst. Thanks.
Felt like doing a search for Mark McKelvy last night and I wasn’t even in the top result, it was some other photographer also named Mark McKelvy. It even suggested that I misspelled my name, and that Mark McKelvy was not spelled with vy but with vey. Google doesn’t know that this is Mark’s Spot, and a page for randomness. All in all, this post is just trying to get Mark’s Spot a higher ranking in Google, so that next time I search for Mark McKelvy, I will perhaps see my page or a page related to Mark’s Spot or a page for randomness. Who knows, right?
Roller Coaster Tycoon Slaughter - The Last Boss
Anyone who has purchased a Roller Coaster Tycoon game has made a demonically evil or outright broken roller coaster on purpose before, just to see dozens of carnival casualties, but this video has to be the one that defines them all. Watch as an amusement park is constructed of only one small walkway that methodically aligns itself with the dead end of the uncompleted roller coaster killing machine. He politely waits for the amusement park to fill up, giving them all free balloons, and then . . . kills every single person.
PCNames Domain Search
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Ivan Panin’s - Bible Numerics
The authenticity of the Holy Bible has been attacked at regular intervals by atheists and theologians alike but none have explained away the mathematical seal beneath its surface.
It would seem the divine hand has moved to prevent counterfeiting in the pages of the Bible in a similar manner to the line that runs through paper money. Bible numerics appears to be God’s watermark of authenticity.
Vital research on this numeric seal was completed by a native of the world’s most reknowned atheistic nation, Russia. Ivan Panin was born in Russia on December 12, 1855. As a young man he was an active nihilist and participated in plots against the Czar and his government. He was a mathematical genius who died a Harvard scholar and a citizen of the United States in 1942.
Bush chides father for election remarks - CNN.com
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — President Bush gently admonished his father for saying he hates to think what life would be like for his son if the Democrats win control of Congress in the November 7 election.
It was the latest sign of possible strain in the relationship between the two men.
“He shouldn’t be speculating like this, because — he should have called me ahead of time and I’d tell him they’re not going to (win),” a smiling Bush told ABC “This Week” in an interview broadcast Sunday.
It follows the recent release of a book, “State of Denial,” by journalist Bob Woodward, that says the 82-year-old former president was “anguished” over how the Iraq war has played out, although he has dismissed that account.
Earlier this month, the elder Bush was reported to have told a Republican fundraiser in a Philadelphia suburb that “if we have some of these wild Democrats in charge of these (congressional) committees, it will be a ghastly thing for our country.”
He was also quoted as saying, “I would hate to think … what my son’s life would be like” if their Republican Party lost its majorities.
The two men have rarely appeared together in public in recent years. But they praised each other at the October 7 christening of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, named the USS George H.W. Bush, after the 41st president.
AtomFilms - Star Wars Gangsta Rap
Audience Award Winner, Star Wars Fan Film Awards!
Elite members of the cast of Star Wars prove that they are all natural-born homey g’s.
