Ramblings & ephemera
From a Special Operations officer quoted in Tom Ricks’s Inbox (The Washington Post: 5 October 2008):
One of the most interesting operations was the laundry mat [sic]. Having lost many troops and civilians to bombings, the Brits decided they needed to determine who was making the bombs and where they were being manufactured. One bright fellow [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Damien Carrick’s interview with Nicholas Johnson, “The psychology of conmen” (The Law Report: 30 September 2008):
Nicholas Johnson: I think what I love most about con artists and the world of scammers is that they’re criminals who manage to get their victims to hand over their possessions freely. Most thieves and robbers and the like, [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Richard Alleyne’s “Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams” (The Telegraph: 17 October 2008):
New research suggests that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the colour of your dreams.
While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were brought up [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Nicholas Carr’s “Remembering to forget” (Rough Type: 22 October 2008):
Slowly but surely, scientists are getting closer to developing a drug that will allow people to eliminate unpleasant memories. The new issue of Neuron features a report from a group of Chinese scientists who were able to use a chemical – the protein alpha-CaM kinase [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Wiktionary:
Sitzfleisch:
From German Sitzfleisch, from sitzen (“‘to sit’”) + Fleisch (“‘flesh’”)
…
The ability to endure or carry on with an activity.
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Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Asavin Wattanajantra’s “Windows worm could create the ‘world’s biggest botnet’” (IT PRO: 19 January 2009):
The Downadup or “Conficker” worm has increased to over nine million infections over the weekend – increasing from 2.4 million in a four-day period, according to F-Secure.
…
The worm has password cracking capabilities, which is often successful because company passwords sometimes [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steve Boggan’s “‘Fakeproof’ e-passport is cloned in minutes” (The Times: 6 August 2008):
New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports.
Tests for The Times exposed security flaws in the microchips introduced to [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Sterling’s “2009 Will Be a Year of Panic” (Seed: 29 January 2009):
Let’s consider seven other massive reservoirs of potential popular dread. Any one of these could erupt, shattering the fragile social compact we maintain with one another in order to believe things contrary to fact.
…
2. Intellectual property. More specifically, the fiat declaration that [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Michael Reilly’s “In-flight surveillance could foil terrorists in the sky” (New Scientist: 29 May 2008):
CCTV cameras are bringing more and more public places under surveillance – and passenger aircraft could be next.
A prototype European system uses multiple cameras and “Big Brother” software to try and automatically detect terrorists or other dangers caused by passengers.
The [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From “Missing SFO Laptop With Sensitive Data Found” (CBS5: 5 August 2008):
The company that runs a fast-pass security prescreening program at San Francisco International Airport said Tuesday that it found a laptop containing the personal information of 33,000 people more than a week after it apparently went missing.
The Transportation Security Administration announced late Monday that [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From danah boyd’s “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” (danah boyd: 24 June 2007):
When MySpace launched in 2003, it was primarily used by 20/30-somethings (just like Friendster before it). The bands began populating the site by early 2004 and throughout 2004, the average age slowly declined. It wasn’t until late 2004 that teens [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Bill Gertz’s “Outsourced passports netting govt. profits, risking national security” (The Washington Times: 26 March 2008):
The United States has outsourced the manufacturing of its electronic passports to overseas companies — including one in Thailand that was victimized by Chinese espionage — raising concerns that cost savings are being put ahead of national security, an [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Brian Krebs’ “Atrivo Shutdown Hastened Demise of Storm Worm” (The Washington Post: 17 October 2008):
The infamous Storm worm, which powered a network of thousands of compromised PCs once responsible for sending more than 20 percent of all spam, appears to have died off. Security experts say Storm’s death knell was sounded by the recent [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From “Storm Worm botnet cracked wide open” (Heise Security: 9 January 2009):
A team of researchers from Bonn University and RWTH Aachen University have analysed the notorious Storm Worm botnet, and concluded it certainly isn’t as invulnerable as it once seemed. Quite the reverse, for in theory it can be rapidly eliminated using software developed and [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Kelly Jackson Higgins’ “The World’s Biggest Botnets” (Dark Reading: 9 November 2007):
You know about the Storm Trojan, which is spread by the world’s largest botnet. But what you may not know is there’s now a new peer-to-peer based botnet emerging that could blow Storm away.
“We’re investigating a new peer-to-peer botnet that may wind up [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Gregg Keizer’s “Dutch Botnet Bigger Than Expected” (InformationWeek: 21 October 2005):
Dutch prosecutors who last month arrested a trio of young men for creating a large botnet allegedly used to extort a U.S. company, steal identities, and distribute spyware now say they bagged bigger prey: a botnet of 1.5 million machines.
According to Wim de Bruin, [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Clive Akass’ “Storm worm ‘making millions a day’” (Personal Computer World: 11 February 2008):
The people behind the Storm worm are making millions of pounds a day by using it to generate revenue, according to IBM’s principal web security strategist.
Joshua Corman, of IBM Internet Security Systems, said that in the past it had been assumed [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Gregg Keizer’s “RSA – Top botnets control 1M hijacked computers” (Computerworld: 4 October 2008):
Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, presented his survey at the RSA Conference, which opened Monday in San Francisco. The survey ranked the top 11 botnets that send spam; by extrapolating their size, Stewart estimated the bots on his [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Robert Lemos’ “Bot-infected PCs get a refresh” (SecurityFocus: 28 December 2006):
On Christmas day, the number of bots tracked by the Shadowserver group dropped nearly 20 percent.
The dramatic decrease in weekly totals–from more than 500,000 infected systems to less than 400,000 computers–puzzled researchers. The Internet Storm Center, a threat monitoring group managed by the SANS [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Nate Anderson’s “Vint Cerf: one quarter of all computers part of a botnet” (Ars Technica: 25 January 2007):
The BBC’s Tim Weber, who was in the audience of an Internet panel featuring Vint Cerf, Michael Dell, John Markoff of the New York Times, and Jon Zittrain of Oxford, came away most impressed by the botnet [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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