bens

28 posts
Mr. Botswana won me in a card game. What you don't know is that I'm a 14 year old Malaysian child, saved from the life of sewing Russel Simmons brand jeans when I was taught computars by Mr Botswana so I could help him with his vision of taking over the world, one blog at a time.

Boom Bye Bye: Buju guilty!

14 comments

Boh! Buju Banton:  Dancehall artist/Hip hop collaborator/Batty mon killer/cocaine trafficer was convicted in Florida (Babylon) for conspiracy to traffic cocaine. It kinda dispells the whole Rasta image to get convicted of trying to buy 11 pounds of coke. What? You’re going to tell me that he eats meat and sugar and doesn’t just eat bannanas and yams? Buju’s gawn have to man up in prison, lest the battys get to him.

Here’s some vids: I didn’t embed them because it slows crasstalk.com down like crazy. Hah, what am I kidding, no one reads the articles!

Boom Bye Bye

I don\’t know why – Wayne Wonder & Buju

Damian & Ziggy & Buju – I know you don\’t care

LOTR reversed: The prespective from Morodr

33 comments

Crazy Russian scientist, Kirill Eskov posted up a free English translation of his LOTR re-work, this time from the perspective of Orcs living in Mordor. This retelling casts Gandalf as an overly-spiritualist war-monger, intent on destroying the scientific and industrial innovations Mordor and Sauron have established.

This isn’t some flash-in-the-pan slashfiction, this is serious stuff. Eskov is a HUGE fantasy author in Russian language fantasy circles. I’ve been hearing about this guy for the last couple of years, one of my ex-girlfriends tried to get me to read a fan translation but it had the prose and subtlety of, well, a Russian language fan translation of a Russian trying to write in the prose of Tolkien. (It takes balls of a distinct Soviet/Russian variety to re-tell LOTR with an emphasis on technology as opposed to magic.)

This is an authorized translation, and its pretty interesting (at least to LOTR fans.) Tolkien had a huge mythology made for the Middle-Earth series, one of which is the map of Middle-Earth. Its basically Europe, turned 90 degrees, with the Shire being England and the Soviet/Balkan states representing Mordor. I can’t help but think that Eskov is trying to turn the tables at this perceived slight.

You can find it here: http://ymarkov.livejournal.com/270570.html

Note: You’ll probably need to update to the latest version of Adobe reader to view it.

Why the Feds Don’t Need a New Social Media Wiretap Law

21 comments

Are web 2.0 services like GMail, Facebook, and bit-torrent really making it harder for the FBI to wiretap people doing illegal things? Do they need congress to pass a set of laws to aid them in capturing someone who uses Facebook? As someone who works computer forensics with law enforcement agencies, I’d say no. Its not enough for them to get your data after a wiretap, they want it now!

Sure, if data lies on Facebook’s servers and not your local hard drive, the feds will have to get a separate warrant/subpoena for those locations. The government already can wiretap your e-mail using the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).

CALEA requires telcos and ISPs to turn over real-time monitoring to the feds if they are presented with a wiretap order. If the FBI had it their way, when those providers get the wiretap order authorities would not only have access to your real-time data, but also everything stored remotely.

So you might not be updating your pics on Facebook, but since you logged in anyway, they’d have access. Its a scary thought that everything online would be this accessible. Compound that with the risk of warrantless wiretaps and it’s enough for normal people to be concerned about their privacy online.

The feds know how much they can push, though. They’ve decided that the best way for them to address real-time wiretaps is through a shady program known as “Going Dark.” It’s shady enough that the Electronic Frontier Foundation had to file a freedom of information act request to find out any info on it.

This program aims to offer “incentives” to software developers to join their program. What incentives they’re offering, they don’t say. This week a software security company was hacked and it was revealed that the government was paying them to write backdoors into software for them. Microsoft has long been accused of having a backdoor in all of their products for the NSA.

I’m guessing that the FBI is asking, politely, for similar things. I don’t know what incentives the feds could offer a company, but since the “Going Dark” program is multi-agency and spans defense, law enforcement, and the Department of Justice, they could offer all kinds of under-the-table deals that we’d never hear about.

One of the problems we’re going to face in the future is that the government has no real standards in terms of computing. One agency will run one piece of software, another will run a completely different piece, on a different platform. The government also gets bilked by IT companies. I’ve seen broke school districts paying $2,000 for a Dell workstation because that’s what their contract says they’ll do.

I’m sure the different federal agencies work in a similar fashion. I’ve given presentations at law enforcement seminars where the previous speakers were standing up and teaching computer crime units on how to use Google. (As in, “put what you want to search for in the text box, click “search!”) And while I’ve given presentations where people actually know what they’re doing, the majority however have no clue. The people who are dreaming up these projects are trying to win support from people who have absolutely no clue when it comes to technology.

Privacy might not be a major concern for you now, but if programs like “Going Dark” get slipped under the radar its going to be too late for any of us to have privacy online ever again.

Japanese Robot Babies: because not enough people think robots are going to take over the world

16 comments

Check this little guy out! A group of scientists at Osaka University designed him to make realilistic human expressions in an attempt to study human social development between parents and children. There’s some scientist who is totally marking off a graph being really pissed off that he can’t find a suitable control model for his experiments because some babies are happier than others, and dreaming up this little abomination. They tried using robots in the past, but the robots didn’t work “in a natural way” and therefore the parents didn’t interact properly with them.  Video of them in action:

I don’t know about you, but look at those eyes. I’d totally name him “Shifty.” He needs some servos adjusted, stat!

Here he is, without the “realilistic” skin! :

Look! The full range of emotions!:

I hope they never show this infographic to “parents” in the study:

Totally creepy, but I think it could be viable. For all of those people out there who are stuck in their phones updating facebook and think that social interaction in over 140 characters is taxing- there’s a companion for you! The maternal/paternal instinct in humans is huge! Make this thing Wi-fi, be able to download a playlist from iTunes and have a wireless charging platform (it already looks like it’s an Apple product) and make a billion dollars! Isn’t a new “Chucky” movie in production?

Music Documentary: The Decline of Western Civilization:III

7 comments

Whoa dude! This is part III of the legendary documentary series on the L.A. music scene. It never got a commercial release and is really hard to find. Part I was on punk rock circa ’79, part II on hair bands circa ’88, part III deals with the gutterpunk scene circa ’97.

I remember going to Hollywood during high school and seeing these guys scare the tourists. One of the girls works (works!) at a clothing shop on Melrose (she’s the kinda-cute girl) but I’m guessing most of these guys are dead or in prison or something. Its shocking and kind of sad, but still a very good documentary.

The rumor was that Penelope Spheeris bowed to pressure from civic leaders and didn’t release this commercially. It would have come out during the whole Rampart scandal, and it would have painted a very negative image of the city. We used to give these guys money and offer them rides to Covenant House (homeless shelter for kids) and wonder why they never took us up on the offer.

When I was sixteen I guess it was kind of secretly appealing to think that someone could just drop out, quit it all, and live with nothing but their wits and some raggedy clothes, maybe have a 40 to look forward to at night.

After watching the doc and learning that most of these kids were horribly abused and drunk 99% of the time, I feel sorry for them. $5 isn’t a lot of money to you or me, but its a fortune to them. Maybe I’m just a sucker, but I think I’ll always give these kinds of people a couple bucks. Anyway, here’s the doc, its pretty good, just lower the volume when the bands are playing and watch it as high-brow social commentary.

The Decline Of The Western Civilization: Part 3 – Gutter Punk (1998) Musidocs.com from documentaries on Veehd.

Not a Black Swan Ad / Joan Rivers

Joan Rivers- A Piece of Work, DVD Screener, 700mb Divx

Black Swan, DVD Screener, 700mb Divx

As always, see these films! Use a Bit Torrent client to download these. Google for instructions if you don’t know what to do (its not at all difficult.) If you get a message saying that the torrent cannot be downloaded, try a different torrent client. VLC plays both of these, you may have problems playing on things other than your computer. I’m not responsible if you try to play it on your ps3 and it blows your house up!

An expert’s take on the Gawker hack

40 comments

Note:

Here’s resident IT security expert bens and his analysis of the Gawker hack. He also has some tips for how protect yourself when stuff like this happens….

Gawker media got hacked, and in the hack Gawker’s master password file was stolen. What does this mean to you? Well, if you have linked any e-mail address that has any sort of real-world relevence to you to your Gawker account, you should change your password immediately. The same goes for your passwords. There’s a concept called “password entropy.” That is, if you use a login/password for one website and its compromised, you might use a similar login/pass on another site.

Change your passwords, and make sure they’re dissimilar from other passwords you’ve used.

Insofar as the “hack,” it looks like a script kiddie was looking for notoritety. From the released info, it appears that simple measures like having mildly secure passwords were not adhered to. Does it surprise me that between the Gawker Media Network there are machines running potentially inseucre software? No.

What is surprising is that even the site owner is using an eight character-long numeric password. Hey Nick, “24862486” might be a really easy password to remember, but dude, you’re running a media company with a huge online presence. You couldn’t tell me that a password like “N1ck$$d3nt0n$$$$$” isn’t a much better password that would be pretty easy to remember (its your name, with vowels as numbers, a couple non-alphanumeric characters, and its nice and long.)

A lot of brute-force methods won’t try to brute-force non alphanumerics, so signs like “$” and “!” and even more esoteric characters can slow down a brute force attack. However, if the password file is stolen it’s only a matter of time for it to be decrypted and all passwords revealed.

So what should you do? I know most of you are not technical users. The main thing you have to worry about is someone reading that your email address/password linked to Gawker is the same email account/password linked to your bank account.

So, change your bank password. Change your email password. Use multiple e-mail accounts so that if one is hacked, potentially you can compartmentalize the damage. If your bank statements go to your Gmail account, but you use a Hotmail account only for web forum passwords; you’re going to be much less exposed to risk if there’s a security leak.

Use strong passwords. Don’t rely on your password to remain secure. Change it every couple of months. Keep your software updated. If there’s a popup when you start your computer telling you that there’s a “critical software update” … download and install it! No computer system is 100% secure, but there’s a lot you can do to minimize damage.

Oh, and Gawker… who’s running your security policies? I’m not doing anything next week. Send me an email and lets run a pen. test. Were you guys running any IDS? You’re probably on the phone to the FBI right now and getting the run-around. You guys have my email address already!