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!

Saving the Earth through fuel efficiency and emission cutdown

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With a $7.5m budget this guy has invented a car ‘plug in’ which drops your emissions by up to 100% and your fuel efficiency by 10%. Should be on the market in about a years time.

Basically, the H2N-Gen contains a small reservoir of distilled water and other chemicals such as potassium hydroxide. A current is run from the car battery through the liquid. This process of electrolysis creates hydrogen and oxygen gases which are then fed into the engine’s intake manifold where they mix with the gasoline vapours.

It’s a scientific fact that adding hydrogen to a combustion chamber will cause a cleaner burn. The challenge has always been to find a way to get the hydrogen gas into the combustion chamber in a safe, reliable and cost-effective way.

Sniff traffic by listening to keyboard clicks

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What makes the technique feasible is that each keystroke makes a relatively distinct sound, however subtle, when hit. Typical users type about 300 characters per minute, leaving enough time for a computer to isolate the sounds of individual keystrokes and categorize the letters based upon the statistical characteristics of English text. For example, the letters “th” will occur together more frequently than “tj,” and the word “yet” is far more common than “yrg.”

This sounds a lot like Solar Designers technique for analysing SSH traffic, as presented at Hackers At Large in 2001…