I didn't make this world, I only live in it.
extraordinary love once escaped negativity
Took a book out of my shelf and opened it at no particular page. I glanced at:
"Welcome, Jane" he greeted me. "I'm Bob True."
"Hi," I said. "Omnes mundum facimus."
"That's all right. I don't need the magic phrase. But as long as we're on the subject, have you worked it out yet?"
I had, finally. "It's a comeback," I told him. "To that thing people say when they don't want to be blamed for a bad situation: 'I didn't make the world, I only live in it.'"
[Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff]
Why Mainstream Media is Dying
Erstellt am: 10. 11. 2009 - 12:42 Uhr
Today's Webtip: Why Mainstream Media is Dying
The Fake Steve Jobs takes on the New York Times. Now with a cunning twist!
This is all just so much fun. The Fake Steve Jobs is someone I am sure you have heard of. It was a rather entertaining parody of the Real Steve Jobs providing the author a platform to skewer all sorts of wonderful things.
Bloggers and Mainstream journalists alike were anxious to uncover who was behind the blog, with more than a few secretly hoping it was the mighty Mr. Bill himself.
It wasn't.
It was Dan Lyons. A Forbes editor and tech journalist. One of those journalists who took up arms against the online upstarts and wrangled a Forbes cover story titled "Attack of the Blogs". It's opener was a full on battle cry, one that we are still hearing today:
Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.
He also covered the whole SCO fiasco, and ended up being completely and utterly wrong. Something he documents quite well on his personal blog and wrote about in a follow up article on Forbes.
I particularly liked this one:
After Fake Steve was outed, Dan announced he would be continuing to blog under his own name. The most recent post on that site is from May 2009.
Fake Steve on the other hand is still going strong, and has allowed his author to make a pretty complete turnaround. In a post on Sunday he took on the mainstream media with a provocatively titled post, Why the Mainstream Media is Dying. Dan can do invective well, and he uses the story of Zynga, and it's coverage at TechCrunch and the NYT to illustrate just why "Quality Journalism" frequently isn't.
You see, while TechCrunch had been busy exposing questionable practices at Zynga, documenting the CEO of Zynga explaining the advantages of being scummy and just generally raising a ruckus, the New York Times were busy putting together an article about the Facebook gaming business, including Zynga, and making it all sound like quite the wonderful thing.
Dan (or was it really supposed to be Fake Steve this time?) let loose. The post is extremely entertaining, and doubly amazing considering it came from someone who had been on the other side of the fence in 2005.
Unfortunately he missed one important detail.
Being the upstanding kind of guy that he is Steve (or was it Dan this time, it seemed more like Dan than Steve) posted a correction.
It too was entertaining.
Whatever you do, don't skip the comments. Unlike many broader, mainstream media sites, comments on focused blogs can actually provide a high quality addition to the posted content, and frequently do quite a bit toward rounding out and expanding the story.
via fm4.orf.at
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First iPhone worm discovered - ikee changes wallpaper to Rick Astley photo
First iPhone worm discovered - ikee changes wallpaper to Rick Astley photo
Apple iPhone owners in Australia have reported that their smartphones have been infected by a worm that has changed their wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop crooner Rick Astley.The worm, which could have spread to other countries although we have no confirmed reports outside Australia, is capable of breaking into jailbroken iPhones if their owners have not changed the default password after installing SSH. Once in place, the worm appears to attempt to find other iPhones on the mobile phone network that are similarly vulnerable, and installs itself again
On each installation, the worm - written by a hacker calling themselves "ikex" - changes the lock background wallpaper to an image of Rick Astley with the message:
ikee is never going to give you up
What's clear is that if you have jailbroken your iPhone or iPod Touch, and installed SSH, then you must always change your root user password to something different than the default, "alpine". In fact, it would be a good idea if you didn't use a dictionary word at all.
The worm will not affect users who have not jailbroken their iPhones or who have not installed SSH.
SophosLabs is analysing the worm's code, which suggests that at least four variants have been written so far. One of the attributes of the latest variant (labelled the "D" version) is that it tries to hide its presence by using a filepath suggestive of the Cydia application.
The source code is littered with comments from the author suggesting the worm has been written as an experiment. One of the comments berates affected users for not following instructions when installing SSH, because if they had changed the default password the worm would not have been able to infect them.
Presently it appears that the worm does nothing more malicious than spread and change the infected user's lock screen wallpaper. However, that doesn't mean that attacks like this can be considered harmless.
Accessing someone else's computing device and changing their data without permission is an offence in many countries - and just as with graffiti there is a cost involved in cleaning-up affected iPhones.
Other inquisitive hackers may also be tempted to experiment once they read about the world's first iPhone worm. Furthermore, a more malicious hacker could take the code written by ikee and adapt it to have a more sinister payload.
iPhone users may rush into jailbreaking their iPhones in order to add functionality that Apple may have denied to them, but if they do so carelessly they may also risk their iPhone becoming the target of a hacker.
My prediction is that we may see more attacks like this in the future. Indeed, only last week we saw hacked iPhones in the Netherlands being held hostage for 5 Euros.
Who wrote the ikee iPhone worm?
The source code of the worm says at its start:
/ "ikee virus" by ikex
/ Revision: 10 (Variant D)A quick trawl of the Whirlpool forum where users are reporting that their iPhones are unexpectedly displaying an image of Rick Astley, reveals a user calling themselves "ike_x".
According to ike_x's user profile on the Whirlpool forum his nearest city is Sydney, Australia . Further searching on the internet reveals other pages seemingly related to ike_x of Wollongong, New South Wales, using the name "Ash" or "Ashley Towns". For instance, here is a MySpace page and this appears to be Ash/ikex on Twitter.
The worm's author appears to have realised that people might be interested to learn why he wrote the worm, and posted this explanation inside the code:
Why?: Boredom, because i found it so stupid the fact that on my initial scan of my 3G optus range i found 27 hosts running SSH daemons, i could access 26 of them with root:alpine. Doesn't anyone RTFM anymore?
There is a certain irony in the notion that a hacker who says he was trying to expose sloppy security by the owners of jailbroken iPhones has done such a bad job of covering his own tracks..
Source of image of affected iPhone: Batman from the Whirlpool forums.
This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Apple, Malware, Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. --> Posted on November 8th, 2009 by Graham Cluley, Sophos
Filed under: Apple, Malware, Mobile
via sophos.com
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10 Objects That Changed the Future
Science on the Ballot
London's Science Museum chose 10 objects from its vast collection that "changed the future" and asked the public to vote for its favorite. Pictured: One of the 10 nominations, the steam engine, is displayed at the museum on November 4, 2009.
Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
nov 04, 2009
The Model T Ford
Stephenson's Rocket
This early steam engine locomotive, built in England in the mid-19th century, is often cited as the first "modern" locomotive, and was the model or inspiration for steam-powered vehicles for the next 100 years.
Electric Telegraph
Steam Engine: Another View
For most science historians, the steam engine was the single most significant driver of change in the 19th-century, as it basically enabled and supercharged the entire Industrial Revolution.
V2 Rocket
First developed by nazi Germany scientists to fire rockets at London during WWII, the V2 is the precursor to all Space Age rocket technology.
Apollo 10 Capsule
In July 1969, the Apollo 11 lunar module landed on the moon, and Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became the first humans to set foot on the lunar surface. But just a few months earlier, astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan flew Apollo 10 through a dry run of the mission, without landing on the moon. This is the capsule that got them safely back to Earth.
DNA Double Helix
The more we learn about our own DNA, the more astonishing, thrilling, and humbling our own journey as a species becomes.
Stephenson's Rocket, Another View
19th Century X-Ray Machine
Without X-rays, first discovered and put to medical use in the late 19th century, modern medicine would not exist. Or rather, it would exist, but it would be far bloodier and more painful, as doctors would spend an awful lot more time cutting people open to try and find out what ailed them.
Pilot ACE Computer, 1950
One of the first computers built in the UK, in the 1950s, and for a while the fastest computer in the world, the Pilot ACE was the brainchild of the great British mathematician and computer scientist, Alan Turing.
Penicillin
Derived from fungi, penicillin is actually a group of antibiotics that has, for around 70 years, been used to treat and even cure various diseases that, prior to its discovery, were invariably fatal.
via life.com
Filed under //
Impressions
LIFE
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