technology – Page 25

A Demonstration Of The Next Generation Of ‘Phishing’ Attacks

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

[further content was recovered on 13 October 2018]

If you’ve been on the internet for any length of time at all, you’ll probably have come across the concept of a phishing [wikipedia] attack, or even been the target of one. The idea is that Joe Naughty sends you an e-mail, pretending to be your bank, credit card company, or whatever, and when you click the link in the e-mail it takes you to your bank’s web site. Or that’s what you think, anyway. Actually, you’re at Joe Naughty’s web site, and it just looks like your bank’s web site. And so he tries to trick you into giving him your bank details, so he can rob you blind.

I was recently the target of such an attack (one related to the CitiBank browser-bar scam [bbc news]). In this particular attack, the fake site tries to trick you into thinking it is the real site by making your Internet Explorer address bar ‘disappear’, and then replaces it with a picture of an Internet Explorer browser bar saying that you’re on the real site.

I decided that this was a particularly crude hack, and that I could do better. And …

Chicken-Heated Atomic Weapons, And Quake [TM] For Those Who Miss Text-Based Adventures

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

[further fragments were recovered on 13 October 2018]

Two fantastic bits of funny news for you this April Fool’s morning:

1. A seven-ton atomic landmine, designed to prevent Soviet advance through West Germany, would have been kept warm while underground by being filled with live chickens (with enough food to keep them alive for a week). This (not an April Fool’s – really!) report brought to you by the BBC. Weird.

2. Do you remember a couple of years ago when somebody wrote ttyQuake, a front-end for iD‘s groundbreaking game, Quake, which replaced the graphics with live-generated ASCII-art [screenshot]? Well; somebody’s gone one step further: IF Quake. IF Quake is an Inform program that acts an an interface between your Z-Machine Interpreter and the Quake data files. What does this mean? It means that it’s a text-based-adventure version of Quake. So instead of wiggling your mouse and…

All We Need Is A Microsoft-Hating US Judge And…

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

[further fragments of this post were recovered on 12 October 2018]

First, some info for the non-geeks out there, so you can truly appreciate the irony in what’s to come:

Lindows – manufacturer of a distrubution of Linux which is designed to be easy to migrate to for former Windows users – have been in court with Microsoft in the US for some time, who claim that their name infringes upon their trademarked name, Windows. The courts haven’t been friendly to Microsoft extending their tentacles in this way so far, and so Microsoft have mostly been trying to buy time, stalling proceedings, while they bring the case to courts internationally. The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxumberg have already caved-in and declared Lindows illegal (interestingly, it’s now being marketed in these countries as Lin—-, pronounced Lindash, which Microsoft also claim they own).

Okay, now you non-geeks are up-to-speed:

Just announced – Lindows are taking …

PHP 5 RC1

Terribly geeky I know, but I find it awfully exciting: PHP 5 Release Candidate 1 was released today. PHP 5 can now be considered feature-complete, and mostly stable. If only the program I’m writing with it could be considered the same…

For Sale: Wireless Network Cable

This auction on eBay Germany (you can use Babel Fish to translate it if you like) seems to be trying to sell a Wireless Network Cable.

(and, for the benefit of Adam, who won’t ‘get’ it: a wireless network, being wireless, doesn’t have cables – this is geek humour that even you can understand)

It’s All Psychological, Or Why Men Buy Little Blue Pills

An article on the Register amused me this morning. Go read it.

In other (slightly more geeky) news, there’s a plan to put a wireless internet point in every lamp post. It’s a very clever idea. If the market’s feeling healthy enough, it’ll grant the conceivers some venture capitalists, and it’ll go-ahead. Here’s hoping.

The Right To Read

[this post was lost during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004; it was partially recovered on 21st March 2012]

If you haven’t already read it, take a look at The Right To Read, a very short story written in 1997 and updated in 2002 – it’ll only take you a few minutes to read; it’s not ‘techie’ (anybody would understand it!), and it is relevant. The kind of things that are expressed in the story – while futuristic (and facist) sounding now, are being put into effect… slowly, quietly… by companies such as Sony, Phillips, Apple, and Microsoft: not to mention the manufactors of CDs and DVDs.

It’s been circulating the ‘net for years, but recent events such as InterTrust’s Universal Digital Rights Management System (report: The Register), which they claim will be ready within 6 months, and Microsoft’s ongoing work on the ‘Palladium’ project (report: BBC News) – topical events which mark the beginning of what could be the most important thing ever to happen in the history of copyright law, computing, and freedom of information.

So, go on – go read… [the remainder of this post, and three comments, have been lost]

AbNib & Str8Up!

Oh yeh; and, in case you hadn’t noticed – AbNib is down. And it’s not my fault! The server fucked up something rotten, but seems to be okay now. And whoever posted a comment to one of my entries the other day and had it not-appear; sorry: same issue.

I’ll try to get AbNib up again on Wednesday – my backup is at the office, and that’s when I’m next at work.

Went out to Str8Up! (Aber’s LGB Society’s event) at Bar Retro last night. Great night out with silly cocktails and dancing and general merriment. And I’d forgotten quite how horny it is to watch two guys – or two girls – getting it on. Fun in the sun.

And in other news, Tonari no Totoro, which I ordered from Japan on DVD last week, hasn’t arrived yet. It’s a great film. I hope it arrives in time for Troma Night on Saturday.

Next stop: Mecca, for lunch!

Warning: Extreme Geek Humour

Sat in Burger King…

Bryn: So many nice things come in .deb packages…
Dan: Yeh. Except for some nice things which still come in nasty RPM-shaped packages.
Bryn: I’m not even sure I have an RPM package manager installed.
Dan: I’m sure you can ‘apt-get’ one.

Oh; how we laughed.

Artificial Intelligence For Dummies

I’ve just written an artificial intelligence gamebot, designed to pseudointelligently play simple board games which involve a finite upper number of moves and a board of tokens – for example: Connect Four, Noughts & Crosses, Go!, or Othello. It uses the (appropriately-written) rules of the game in order to pre-anticipate a vast number of moves, and select the ‘best’ ones based on the likelihood of them winning. It’s not terribly powerful, but I’d never written such a widely-scoped A.I. before, and I fancied the challenge.

I let it out for it’s first run this afternoon, and started a game of Connect Four with it. Here are the results:

I took the first turn, and put one of my pieces into the first column of the grid.

The gamebot took the second turn, picked up an enormous handful of pieces, and put six of them into the grid (two in the first column and four in the next four adjacent columns). These four-in-a-row, of course, won it the game.

Perhaps I need to define ‘cheating’ for it. Hmm… back to the drawing board…

Rage Against The Monkeys

I’ve been thinking about a popular mathematical document easily available on the web, More Monkey Business, which uses the maths behind the otherwise inconceivable “infinite monkey problem” (if a million monkeys at a million keyboards^etc.… also known as Usenet…) as a gateway to argue against molecular biology’s evolutionary theory, which states that life ‘came together’ out of primordial soup as a result of a ‘miraculous’ coincidence.

It states, for example: “From a strictly mathematical perspective, the idea that life arose out of a pre-biotic soup is about as reasonable as the idea that Hamlet could arise out of alphabet noodle soup.”

What the author, and many creationists in general, fail to realise, is that there is nothing fundamentally ‘special’ or ‘miraculous’ about life. Life is nothing more than a series of stable, perpetual (although not eternally-perpetual) chemical reactions, and the fact that we see it as anything more than this is an example of our failings as rational entities to realise the fundamental truth about our existance: that life, intelligence, and humanity are nothing more than basic chemical processes examined at a level of blindingly indefinate abstraction.

Or, at least, that’s what I believe.

Read the article. It’s good.

Windows Longhorn Continued

It turns out that Windows Longhorn is a lot like the child of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, but (at this early stage) less stable. Just what we’ve come to expect.

On the other hand, it’s a lot faster than I might have expected (considering its dependency on the .NET framework). If you play with the pre-release version, though, be warned: you can turn off the themes and make it look like good old Windows 2000 (yay!) if you like but doing so isn’t very well implemented and it’ll make at least a little bit of a mess of all your Explorer toolbars.

Internet Explorer 6.05 introduces (at long last) some of the features that all of the other popular browsers have had for ages – including a download manager, security features, and pop-up blocking.

The ‘sidebar’ sucks. It really does. Lots. And it leaks memory all over the place.

I couldn’t actually find anything new in Internet Information Server 7.0, but then: I couldn’t check the documentation as they haven’t finished writing it. It’s existence, however, does lend weight to the suggestion that Microsoft will be making a Longhorn-powered platform for the Windows Server family, too.

Anyway: enough geekspeak.

Windows Longhorn

Have… acquired a pre-pre-pre-release copy of Windows Longhorn, the new version of Windows that’ll be coming out in 2004…2005…2006. Will post reports of my experience with it. But first I’ll need to buy a spare hard drive…

AbNib, Version 1.1

I’ve taken a step towards fixing AbNib. It now works correctly with Alec and Andy‘s LiveJournals, and loads significantly quicker by not updating the live-feed of everybody’s journals at the same time. Yay. Also, have swopped out Claire (who was never updating her blog anyway) for Bryn, a proper Welshman: give him a read!

I’d still like to finish AbNib one of these days… soo much to do…

I should be working;

Bluejacking

Both The Register and the BBC have stories today on bluejacking – that is, the practice of sending unsolicited messages to open Bluetooth relay points, typically mobile phones. There’s even a web site dedicated to bluejacking.

One of my personal favourites is the cinema. It’s fun to fire off pictures of fridge magnet letters with my web site URL, or note text, to random people as they come in to the cinema or as they turn their phones on and leave. Lectures, too: had a bluejack-chat with somebody a little while back. As always, us geeks are well ahead of the technological fashion trends.

I’ve gotten no work at all done so far today. Hmm.