Bruce Schneier talking at USC

Bruce Schneier, of international security fame, is speaking at USC tomorrow, Tuesday September 26th @ 7pm.  I'll be there...

What is a Hacker?

Absolutely fantastic essay written by one of my favorite technologists, Mr. Bruce Schneier.  If you know me, or you know technology, I urge you to read his essay that appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of 2600.  It summarizes my exact view and beliefs of many things, including what must be one of the most dynamic technology-related words: 'hacker'.

Jelbert GeoTagger

The Jelbert GeoTagger is a very cool device that fits into the flash shoe of your favorite SLR.  Once on, it records the precie location and direction of every photograph you take.  It gets even better when thought of next to the Microsoft's Photosynth product.

Yahoo Gives Users a Reason to Buy Viiv

So it looks like Yahoo! launched their Viiv service yesterday with an initial focus on providing fantasy football information to those rabid fantasy football fans.  Looks pretty cool.

Yahoo Gives Users a Reason to Buy Viiv

Sudan Man Forced to 'Marry' Goat

Good times in the Sudan!

"A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his "wife", after he was caught having sex with the animal."

From BBC NEWS

It's Raining ... Batteries?!

According to this ad, 970 trillion kWh of energy (sunlight to you non-nerds) goes unused everyday.  I for one would like to start using it. In the meantime, here is the very cool ad for German Solar Power 'Pioneers' Solon.

BugMeNot: Complete with Firefox Extension

 So BugMeNot.com is a great little service that provides you with a general, 'public' username and password for sites that require registration.  That, in and of itself, is pretty cool.

But couple it with the Firefox extension that I found today, and logging on to all those annoying news sites becomes trivial.  It even reduces context menu clutter by only showing you the BugMeNot option on username and password fields.  Thanks much Dmytri!

The DoJ's War Against Online Gambling

 I stumbled upon (thank you Google Alerts!) an interesting and seemingly complete synopsis of the current legislation used in prosecuting those involved with online gaming, as well as information about those that have been prosecuted by the US.

My favorite snippet is probably this quote from John G.Malcolm, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, United States Department of Justice on 2003.06.11:

"Broadcasters and other media outlets should know of the illegality of offshore sportsbook and Internet gambling operations since, presumably, they would not run advertisements for illegal narcotics prostitution, child pornography or other prohibited activities. We'd appreciate it if you would forward public service message to all of your member organizations which may be running such advertisements, so that they may consult with their counsel or take whatever actions they deem appropriate."

From bettingmarket.com: The Department of Justice's war against online gambling.

ars technica

I've found more and more stuff on the ars technica website that I've liked and enjoyed; and less and less of the garbage that infiltrates most blogs (like this one).

Carbon: The Gift That Keeps on Giving
"Planet Earth seemed to have a pretty good system going. Carbon [...] got used as the building block for all life on earth. [...] Eventually, the carbon would make its way deep underground where heat and pressure worked their magic, creating coal, oil, and natural gas. All well and good. Then things started to go wrong."

Open-Source OCR Tool: Thanks Google and HP
Built on top of 10-year old shelved HP technology, Google is releasing this OCR Tool to the open-source community.  Printed documents are no match for the Google Brain-Trust Bulldozing Machine.

WiFi Uniqueness is not skin deep
A Carleton University researcher by the name of Dr. Jeyanthi Hall analyzed a dozen or so devices, and found that due to manufacturing variances each WiFi stack gives a unique fingerprint that is accurate to within 95% during her testing.  Pretty cool.

GPL: GPL's Pro Lawsuit
So IChessU is dedicated to teaching chess to the masses.  That is all well and fine, but apparently they have trampled on the GPL in the process, which is a general no-no.

MS XML Notepad 2006

So Microsoft released a cool XML viewer editor that was written in .NET 2.0.  Supposedly it will be available on Codeplex with full source in the near future...

Check it out:
XML Notepad 2006

Live Writer Addon for Firefox

So Can Erten has whipped together an extension for Firefox called Live Writerfox that will allow you to easily blog pages that you browse through Firefox using Microsoft Live Writer.

How easy is it to hardware hack a Voting Machine?

The answer: Easy.

This is a very interesting piece that I came across today regarding our current state of voting machines here in the states.  Apparently Diebold still hasn't learned from their ATM mistakes of years past (remember the cash door that could be lifted just enough to retrieve your money, but not trip the switch?).

Cracking a Diebold
“A couple of untrained 54-year old women from Black Box Voting bought $12 worth of tools and in four minutes penetrated the memory card seals, removed, replaced the memory card, and sealed it all up again without leaving a trace.”

Many thanks to the continued great work on Bev Harris’ Black Box Voting site.  Donate some cash today, they'll appreciate it and so will I.

Found on The Raw Feed .: