admin's blog

This is why people pirate

Sat, 2012-09-29 08:48 by admin

Kyle Wagner

Read the complete article at GIZMODO

Do you know why people hate movie studios? Why, increasingly, they're driven to download content illegally, even though they're perfectly willing to pay for it? Because of crap like this:

How Apple and Amazon security flaws led to my epic hacking

Wed, 2012-08-08 16:21 by admin

By Mat Honan

Read the complete article in Wired

In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.

28c3: Print me if you dare (video)

Sun, 2012-01-01 00:28 by admin

Stop SOPA Now

Sat, 2011-12-31 13:03 by admin

28c3: How governments have tried to block Tor (video)

Fri, 2011-12-30 22:05 by admin

Google’s disk failure experience

Wed, 2011-12-21 22:06 by admin

by Robin Harris

Read an overview at StorageMojo

Google released a fascinating research paper titled "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population" (PDF) at this years File and Storage Technologies (FAST ’07) conference. Google collected data on a population of 100,000 disk drives, analyzed it, and wrote it up for our delectation.

Hacked!

Tue, 2011-10-18 17:25 by admin

By James Fallows

Read the complete article at the Atlantic

On April 13 of this year, a Wednesday, my wife got up later than usual and didn’t check her e‑mail until around 8:30 a.m. The previous night, she had put her computer to “sleep,” rather than shutting it down. When she opened it that morning to the Gmail account that had been her main communications center for more than six years, it seemed to be responding very slowly and jerkily. She hadn’t fully restarted the computer in several days, and thought that was the problem. So she closed all programs, rebooted the machine, and went off to make coffee and have some breakfast.

Gamers solve problem that riddled scientists for 15 years

Sat, 2011-09-24 17:08 by admin

Foldit molecules – Click to enlarge.

By Tessel Renzenbrinkon
Posted in: science
Tags: crowdsourcing, Foldit, gaming, protein structure prediction, science

Read the complete article

Players of the online game Foldit produced accurate models of an enzyme. For over a decade scientists had been trying to determine the structure of the retroviral enzyme as it unlocks important information about battling the AIDS virus.

Small ISPs use "malicious" DNS servers to watch Web searches, earn cash

Sun, 2011-08-07 08:58 by admin

By Nate Anderson

Nearly 2 percent of all US Internet users suffer from "malicious" domain name system (DNS) servers that don't properly turn website names like google.com into the IP addresses computers need to communicate on the 'Net. And, to make matters worse, the problem isn't caused by hackers or malware, but by the local ISPs people pay for access to the Internet.

Read the complete article at arstechnica.com

How digital detectives deciphered Stuxnet

Wed, 2011-07-13 20:13 by admin

Satellite image of the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant in Iran taken in 2002 when it was still under construction. The image shows two cascade halls, in the upper right corner, as they were being built deep underground. The hall on the left, Hall A, is the only one currently operational and is the building where centrifuges believed to have been damaged by Stuxnet in 2009 were installed. (Photo: DigitalGlobe and Institute for Science and International Security)
Satellite image of the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant in Iran

How Digital Detectives Deciphered Stuxnet, the Most Menacing Malware in History

From: WIRED - THREAT LEVEL
PRIVACY, CRIME, AND SECURITY ONLINE

By Klm Zetter  July 11, 2011  |  7:00 am  |  Categories: Stuxnet

Read the complete article

It was January 2010, and investigators with the International Atomic Energy Agency had just completed an inspection at the uranium enrichment plant outside Natanz in central Iran, when they realized that something was off within the cascade rooms where thousands of centrifuges were enriching uranium.