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unixronin: Galen the technomage, from Babylon 5: Crusade (Default)
Unixronin

December 2012

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July 25th, 2006

unixronin: Pissed-off avatar (Pissed off)
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 10:39 am

Not a new page -- it's actually about a year old -- but I don't think I've previously mentioned it.  Something Randy Cassingham mentioned in this week's This Is True column reminded me, though.

PETA.

"People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals."

Or, shorn of the bullshit:

Join PETA!

Travel to exotic, interesting cities!

Meet exotic, fascinating animals!

And kill them.  (Ethically!)

PETA should rename itself.  Their name sounds all upright and moral and all that, but if you actually read their platform and policies, a more honest name would be PEDA -- People for the Extermination of Domesticated Animals.

unixronin: Closed double loop of rotating gears (Gearhead)
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 10:57 am

We've been yearing for years now about Windows Vista, formerly called Longhorn, and how it's going to be so much more secure than previous versions of Windows and will prevent the kind of trivially-executed machine compromises that have plagued existing versions, leading to the creation by crackers of zombie botnets of tens of thousands of compromised PCs.

Symantec calls bullshit.

And no-one will be surprised to know that all the usual suspects are responsible:

"We discovered a number of implementation flaws that continued to allow a full machine compromise to occur," Matthew Conover, principal security researcher at Symantec, wrote in the report titled "Attacks against Windows Vista's Security Model."  The report was made available to Symantec customers last week and is scheduled for public release sometime before Vista ships, a Symantec representative said Monday.

Conover looked at the February preview release of Vista.  The report describes how an attacker could commandeer a Vista PC with Internet Explorer 7, the reinforced version of Microsoft's Web browser.  The final version of Vista is not expected to be broadly available until January.

The attack starts out by planting a malicious file on a Vista PC when a rigged Web site is visited.  The placing of the file involves using a specially crafted Web program called an ActiveX control, which exploits a security hole.  The report then describes how the malicious program could gain privileges and ultimately give an attacker full control of the PC.

Microsoft claims to have addressed the issues raised by Symantec.  But they've claimed a lot of things about Windows security before that have turned out to be false.

The biggest single thing Microsoft could do to improve the security of Windows is perfectly simple:  Decouple Internet Explorer from the operating system and rip the inherently insecure ActiveX out of it.  But Microsoft will never do it, because they're afraid of losing browser market share -- for a browser that they don't actually sell as a distinct product or make any money from anyway.

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unixronin: The kanji for "chugo" (Duty/loyalty)
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 01:32 pm

Ken Kipnis, a philosophy professor at the University of Hawaii at Manao, discussing medical professionals who refuse to treat patients or perform abortions on religious grounds:

"If your religious orientation is such that you can't discharge your responsibilities, you should find other work."

(New Scientist)

unixronin: Very, very silly. (Goonish)
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 05:36 pm

Q:  What do you get when you cross a duck with an alligator?

A: )

Q:  Why can't you get ducks out of the kitchen tap?¹

A: )

And I'm still trying to remember the completely absurd one that popped into my head the other day....

[1]  Other than "They get stuck."

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unixronin: Closed double loop of rotating gears (Gearhead)
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 06:26 pm

Yup.  You better believe it.  Gizmag has the gen here, and drops hints about four other turbo-diesel motorcycles in development.  See another viewpoint here.  It's designed and built in Holland, uses a modified 1200cc VW 3-cylinder turbodiesel engine, weighs 445lb, and reportedly makes up to 120BHP and 200lb.ft of torque ... and gets 150mpg.  That's about 700 miles between fuel stops on a 5-gallon tank, or two weeks of your daily commute between fill-ups.

Photo gallery page here.

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