Friday, March 26, 2010

A nuke reactor in every garage!

Bill Gates may very well get that Presidential Medal of Freedom and Nobel Prize for Peace before Steve Jobs and Eric (I stand up to Commies) Schmidt, but not for Windows, folks, he’s got something more powerful in mind, something a mini-nuke reactor that runs for a hundred years by recycling its own fuel waste
Check out the 30-minute TED talk (sorry you have to watch all of it, so get a beverage sit back an enjoy)

It’s stuff like this that drives Nicholas Negroponte to tear the hair out from his testicles in bunches distraction.


Find your own bugs!

I betcha' Jobso and Fester feel about this tall now - 'cos I'm the king

Three-peater winner Charlie Miller of the Pwn2Own competition told Apple, Microsoft and Adobe to find their bugs in their software. Not unlike Sheldon from Big Bang Theory,  our man took  mere seconds to detect and exploit flaws in all targets before the other contestants applied finger to keyboard. Tradition states, the winner demonstrates the exploit to the companies’ engineers, but Mr Miller has taken great offense to the idea.

“We find a bug, they patch it,” said Miller. “We find another bug, they patch it. That doesn’t improve the security of the product. True, [the software] gets incrementally better, but they actually need to make big improvements. But I can’t make them do that.”

Miller’s technique is not unique and is in fact used by all three companies to test software for flaws before it’s released, which begs this question : does Microsoft, Adobe and Apple’s software development teams knowingly release “buggy” software, hoping no one will find, detect or exploit the flaws? What is going on around here, anyway?


OK, but does Bing follow the long tail?

It doesn’t look like it to me, which means Microsoft is satisfied eating Yahoo’s lunch, while Google continues to grow leaving the other two search engines way way way behind. Redmond still doesn’t get it. Amazon got it. Ebay got it. Apple got it, believe it or not. All these little thriving etailers online get it. Even Big Blue, IBM gets it. But big lumbering Microsoft doesn’t understand the idea of the long tail yet.

Here, somebody direct Ballmer here, okay. And fire about, everybody, in Microsoft marketing, too. Wipe clean. Start again.


Where were you when the lights went out for an hour?

A lot of greentards are promoting Earth Hour awareness for tomorrow where for one hour, when we’re all supposed to take ourselves off the grid to help bring about global warming awareness (look, knock off the global warming/cooling labels and call it accelerated extreme climate change, okay, so you don’t have to deal with wise-ass non believers belittling you, cos they only read LARGE PRINT and not the fine print) MY city is participating, so downtown will go dark from about eleven until twelve. Hospitals and care facilities are not affected, which I think misses the point. IN fact, I’m really not sure why turning off the power for an hour tomorrow night is supposed to help me think about climate change and going green. People really do not know where electricity comes from or how it’s generated – as long as it’s there, that’s the important thing. When it’s not there, it’s either an inconvenience or a catastrophe, but people still won’t know, don’t wanna’ know, will refuse to to wanna’ know how it’s generated – they want it to be there, invisible and that is that.  I’m not anti-green just anti-greentard. There is a difference. The tards go about broadcasting their  message all wrong, and their opponents will always have the upper hand in countering them as Chicken Little, until it’s too late for everyone and everybody is fucked. The countries that really should know better besides us capitalist pigs in the west is China and India. They should be leading the way, implementing green technology by the boatload and demonstrating to Western capitalists green is not only good and affordable but profitable,too. But they’re just as bad as gobbling up resources, being wasteful and using petroleum and coal like nobody’s business. Which goes to show tards have infected the planet overall and future generations will be fucked cleaning up our worldwide mess. So, go off your grid for hour tomorrow. Do it every night if you like. You’re not making a serious difference yet. It’s not enough if you do it. You have to get everyone on the team and it has to be a serious concerted planned effort not some higgly piggly scattershot thing. We should be developing solar cell technology like we develop silicon chips – if we did that right now, in less than a half generation, seventy percent (70%) of homes would have access to do it yourself solar power roof kits that would provide more than enough electricity for every household , apartment and office buildings and factory in the Western Hemisphere and eighty five percent (85%) of the whole world by a generation and a half. Petroleum run vehicles would be outmoded hobbies.  Of course, we may cut down on carbon emissions, but we also need to stop cutting down forests and start planting trees everywhere possible. You get the idea, right?


The mystery online outages continue

Slate.com is currently (2:00am-3:ooam CST) loading very slowly and the webpages look like they’ve been through an HTML hedge clipper – very choppy – claims that the servers are experiencing some “difficulties” – apparently someone is being very selective in their DNS attacks lately or it’s just a co-incidence that several prominent web sites go down for an hour or two and it’s always “the servers” or their software doing something glitchy. C’mon, blackhats, time to take out Baidu!


Thursday, March 25, 2010

How to make co-workers feel stupid at work

Just tape this onto the top of the copier. This one is for HP, but you can find others here. (PDFs.)


No brakes for Americans!


iPhone SMS database hacked in 20 seconds

Vincenzo Iozzo and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann hacked the entire iPhone database- that’s sent, received and deleted text messages.  They did it for a hacking contest and won 15K for their efforts.  Apple should hire these guys.


More on that great Chinese media

The Washington Post has discovered “regulations” passed down to Chinese media (snicker, snicker) from their government overlords, on what is and what isn’t permissible in covering the Google mess.  Get a load of this. I mean, these guys are priceless.  I may have to swear off my favorite “Combo Fried Rice” order from the local Chinese restaurant.

It is not permitted to hold discussions or investigations on the Google topic.

Online programs with experts and scholars on this matter must apply for permission ahead of time. This type of self-initiated program production is strictly forbidden.

All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy.

Do not participate in and report Google’s information/press releases.


Google is definitely no “God”

Well, of course not.  The People’s Daily, surely a bastion of impartial reporting, let that fly in an editorial. (Found their English language site by, um, Googling it.) These Chinese government dudes are an especially tricky people.