Author Archives: Robin

Iran going mad?

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There must be a plan, but when it involves

a) sacking 40 of your ambassadors
b) sacking 8 heads of your biggest banks
c) having your stock exchange plummet 25% in 4 weeks time
d) choosing two candidates to head your oil exports, who know nothing of the oil business whatsover, and having the first voted against and the second calling it quits just hours before the vote
e) following a religious leader as a politician who is more hard-line than Khameni
and
f) getting the Atomic Energy Agency to submit your nuclear power programme to the UN security council

either something’s going wrong, or it’s not such a good plan…

ID Fraud Lord Buckingham

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BBC and el Reg are running great stories about some guy who read Day of the Jackal and decided to find a dead baby, take his birth certificate, open a bank account, get a passport – and live as this baby for 23 years! Of course, he had to go and take a fictional title (Earl of Buckingham) which hadn’t been in use since 1700 or so.
After getting married, fathering two sons, getting a divorce, this IT consultant was finally caught in 2003 and arrested for travelling under false documentation.

The stories are here:
BBC
The Register

Now, the question they fail to answer is: how did they twig on him at all? I’ve read the Day of the Jackal and the way the method works means that the passport he was travelling under was not a forgery…

Sony installs a rootkit on your system

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The bastards!

Mark’s Sysinternals was playing around with RootkitRevealer and discovered that Sony installs its own media player on your PC, reroutes windows systems calls and hides itself to limit the amount of copies that can be made of the disc. Now you could call it DRM I guess, but if you try to remove the modifications it made, you end up breaking your windows installation, which nothing short of a format and re-install will fix. Begad, it’s a rootkit virus!

Khronos Projector

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What if by touching something, time would stand still for it? In video we can make time move by pressing on the ffwd / rev button, but that time lapses the whole of the video. Now in this project you can use a touch screen / mouse / pen thing to time lapse only that part of the playback that you’re pressing. The software will be available on the site, but the C++ it was written in isn’t due to specificalities. Loads of videos to see.

Posted in Art

MySpace Worm

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Samy posted a piece of very cleverly crafted stuff on his profile in MySpace, which basically made everyone who saw his profile add the same code to their profile, and add Samy to their friendslist together with some text. This shows the fragility of browsers when using AJAX to code sites, despite some fairly complicated filtering at MySpace, which Samy managed to get around.

The technical explanation and code itself is here

There’s an interview with samy and some more (easier) explanation here

Blizzard is using WoW to spy on your PC

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Agreeing to the new Terms of Service (which we all did without actually looking at them) for World of Warcraft now gives Blizzard permission to use their program “Warden” to search your harddrive and send any information they find and want back to them. That’s going a bit far for an anti-cheating system… the ToS is worded so that it doesn’t specify just the cheats! Come on corporate spys, this is a bit much for me!

At www.rootkit.com you can download a programme called ‘the governor’ which basically alerts you to what information is being sent to Blizzard. http://www.rootkit.com/vault/hoglund/Governor.zip

Rocket Racing

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Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize, has announced he’s starting a racing league for rocket planes, using all kinds of high tech to make it attractive to the public and TV stations. Things like HUD projected racecourses, with the racecourse and rockets visible on screens to the spectators. Cameras will be hung all over and inside the planes, and the rockets will create as large fiery plumes as possible.
The idea is to launch big, with large prize moneys and a standard rocket plane to make it accessible to as many people as possible. Back to the golden days of innovation by the people is the motto. Sounds very cool, but ambitious. I’ll be watching!

This site contains a lot of information on the format of the races, the rules, the specifications, etc. A lot of information!