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

December 2012

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August 3rd, 2006

unixronin: Dogbert - Demons of stupidity (Fear The Stupid)
Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 05:53 pm

The BBC reports that X-ray fluorescence techniques have just enabled the reconstruction of some original texts written by Archimedes and others.  The parchment contains works including the only Greek version of On Floating Bodies known to exist, the only surviving ancient copy of The Method of Mechanical Theorems and of a mathematical puzzle called the Stomachion, as well as treatises on the Equilibrium of Planes, Spiral Lines, The Measurement of the Circle, and Sphere and Cylinder.  These are important and groundbreaking texts, several of which form the foundations of areas of modern mathematics.

So why were these writings lost in the first place?

The original texts were transcribed in the 10th Century by an anonymous scribe on to parchment.

Three centuries later a monk in Jerusalem called Johannes Myronas recycled the manuscript to create a palimpsest.

Palimpsesting involves scraping away the original text so the parchments can be used again.  To create [the] book, the monk cut the pages in half and turned them sideways.

[...] Myronas also used recycled pages from works by the 4th Century Orator Hyperides and other philosophical texts.

Destroying and recycling the writings of Archimedes, among others, to create ... a book of prayers.  It's enough to make you weep.  One has to wonder what other wonders of knowledge have been lost or destroyed through the centuries for no better reason than so that some pious fool who did not understand (or did not care) what he was destroying could scribble paeans to the ineffability of his chosen deity.

unixronin: Closed double loop of rotating gears (Gearhead)
Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 06:09 pm

RFID passports, that is.  Little better supporting reason for actually implementing the scheme, due to go into service in the US in 2007 or 2008, has been given besides "because we can".

Well, it is reported (via [livejournal.com profile] schneier) that a year before the new RFID passports even enter service, someone has already figured out how to clone them, and demonstrated the technique today at the BlackHat hacker conference.  He says it only took him two weeks to figure it out, based solely on publicly available specifications of the ICAO standard, and tested the attack against a new EU German passport.

unixronin: A somewhat Borg-ish high-tech avatar (Techno/geekdom)
Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 06:15 pm

To kick things off on his Browser Fun Blog, author H. D. Moore started things off with a Month of Browser Bugs, during which he promised to publish a new browser havk every day for the entire month of July.

The final tally of bugs:

  • Internet Explorer: 25 exploits
  • Mozilla (demonstrated against Firefox): 2 exploits
  • Safari: 2 exploits
  • Opera: One exploit
  • Konqueror: One exploit

Both Firefox bugs have already been fixed (one of them was fixed within 24 hours).  The Internet Explorer bugs?  ..... What do YOU think?

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