@WestWingReport: Pentagon is by far the #1 consumer of energy in U.S. The Air Force alone uses more oil than some countries. Renewable energy is top priority
@WestWingReport: Navy is also investing big in renewable energy. It has conducted test flights of F-18s powered by biofuels – & developing a “Green Fleet”
My question for the President: aren't you missing the point?
As of TODAY Julian Assange has been detained for one year without charge (prison, then house arrest) swedenversusassange.com
~ @wikileaks
Andy’s Answers: How Microsoft is influencing the influencers:
Microsoft is carefully constructing a network of credible, motivated digital evangelists to spread the word about its products, says communities director Nestor Portillo. That’s allowing the company to scale up its outreach, and to build relationships with customers around the world.
An even more far out idea, make products people desperately want to use and talk about, and we'll do it for you. Or to put it in the context of a film:
Technology may have created new ways to engage audiences but industry players say success boils down to something tried-and-tested – a good, engaging storyline.
If QEMU 1.0 fails to build on Mac OS X (as I described on Sunday), you may be attempting to do it on a case-insensitive file system, like I just tried to do!
If you're installing QEMU on a case-insensitive file system, you'll need to modify the ./fpu/softfloat.h header file. Apply the patch from here, or simply open the file and add the following lines:
It should build without problems now, you unsigned integer you.
John Gruber, on Marco Arment's Kindle comments:
His surprising (to me, at least) conclusion: "The low-end, non-touch Kindle 4 is actually my favorite e-reader today."
I've used my old man's iPad to read books, and I've read books on my iPhone and my computers. The lowest end Kindle can't do everything an iPad can (or the Kindle Fire, or those other tablets), but it has the single best form factor, controls, weight and display for long form reading. It's as simple as that.
If you’re thinking of buying one, feel free to use my referral code to support the site, or go here if you don’t like the idea of referrals. Thanks :)
Speak of the devil, security research firm Sophos performed a study on fifty USB keys they purchansed from a New South Wales RailCorp lost property auction. Personally, I didn't find the results too shocking.
(Starting in 2009 I got into the habit of always taking tech hardware photos with Yuki in them. This time I tried to use really harsh light to make her look sinister, did it work?)
From the report on Sophos Naked Security, a must read blog that you must read.
Lost USB keys have 66% chance of malware
by Paul Ducklin on December 7, 2011We ended up with Lots 671, 672 and 674: bags containing a motley assortment of 20, 21 and 16 keys respectively. For this rag-tag collection of 57 USB sticks, we paid $409.96 once the auctioneer’s 16.5% fee was added in. We could have bought brand-new for slightly less than half that price.
The data on drives are more valuable than the drives themselves now. Not surprising.
Five of the keys were broken, including the two novelty items in the set (a car and a Lego-like block). Two of the rest were unreliable, so we excluded them, although one gave up just enough data to reveal an Autorun worm but little else.
That left a conveniently-round number of 50 devices in the test.
The study revealed that two-thirds were infected with malware, and quickly uncovered information about many of the former owners of the devices, their family, friends and colleagues.
Disturbingly, none of the owners had used any sort of encryption to secure their files against unauthorised snoopers.
In perhaps a socioligically optimistic way, the Sophos team in Sydney were "surprised" at the prevelence of malware. To be honest, I would have been more surprised if fewer of the memory keys contained malware.
As I've reiterated here many times, Windows itself can be a usable operating system provided it's thoroughly patched and well maintained. Unfortunately, for most people the chore of doing so is simply still too great, and those who think otherwise are kidding themselves. Nerds are not typical users.
These findings can also be seen as further proof that despite the increased prevalence of network attacks, sneakernet infections are still alive and well. I can still remember the first time I brought home an infected floppy disk from school and our McAfee AntiVirus for Windows 95 had a fit. Chernobyl W32, I'm looking at you. Hey, that rhymed.
Pointless nostalgia aside though, the prevelence of these worms on memory keys only adds further evidence for their effectiveness as an attack vector. Stuxnet is but one contemporary example of malware using this system, which conveniently avoids firewalls and other such network intrusion detection.
As for the personal data they contain, it's also no surprise to me people are so cavalier, and don't use encryption of any sort. I use TrueCrypt and/or GnuPG on my memory keys and external hard drives I intend to use for anything other than media transfer (ahem), but again I'm not a typical use case, and assuming you're reading my blog, you're probably not either.
Either everyone becomes more adept at understanding the need for encryption and how to use it, or people stop losing things, or encryption software becomes easier/more transparent for users. I can predict which of the three already is more feasible, but will it happen?
Finally, it appears we can also draw some other conclusions. Those who take public transport in New South Wales — trains in particular — lose infested memory keys on a regular basis. Is it the fact they take train that's the cause of them having malware on their memory keys? I report, you decide!
I've decided whenever I recieve one of Sydney's CityRail new information-laden tickets, I will impart their knowledge here so we may all learn from them.
Your line, online. Oh you ;).
WordPress 3.3 continues the mad march to add more features, fueling further desire in me to move to something else.
When I first started using WordPress 1.6 in Febuary 2006, I was excited at how much easier and cross platform it was to create posts, though I was disappointed at the lack of tag support. As a stopgap, I used a Technorati tag plugin, and used categories as tags, a decision I'd regret several years later when WordPress finally got native tag support and I had hundreds of categories! With the aid of a graphic from that ridiculous[ly fun] IDOLM@STER Xenoglossia anime and Bugs Bunny, I talked about the problems I faced with all these categories in 2008.
Anyway, I belabour all this nostalgia to point out that since the introduction of tags, I don't think WordPress hasn't added anything I've used on a regular basis. I still upload all my material via SFTP/SCP, edit HTML rather than using the visual editor, mess around the backend with phpMyAdmin rather than using the GUI tools, and most of my plugins I've either written myself or sourced from other places are designed to disable features, rather than add new ones. I don't use the Links or Media sections at all, and have avoided using too many feature plugins so I'm not locked into the WordPress platform. I don't even use the standard web interface!
That's not to say those features aren't valuable or useful to the vast majority of WordPress bloggers. As with a lot of online services and applications, the initial simplicity from it's early days which attracted me to it have made way for more features to cater to its greater audience and market share.
Aside from perhaps the i17n features of WordPress 3.3, and despite the hours of tireless effort and work put in by Matt and the WordPress team, this is the first major release I'm scratching my head and wondering if anything here is useful to me at all. Complexity is one of the enemies of security, and frankly (for my needs) all I see is an even larger zip file and more files that need to be updated and maintained, most of which I'll probably never use.
I'm tentatively moving over to the (almost ten times!) smaller, simpler and nicer to use Textpattern software once a few outstanding issues are resolved, but this latest WordPress update has even got my nostalgic for my Perl CGI days. Now that was something that was easy to update and keep simple, and I even had support for different timezones which as far as I know (though feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) WordPress still doesn't have despite promising it to us for over half a decade.
Old man voice, over and out!
![Thousands of online accounts are hijacked every day. If you re-use yourGmail [sic] password on other websites, change it now.](https://rubenerd.com/files/uploads/screenie.gmail.spellfail.png)
Not to mention thousands of users access their Gmail accounts every day, so you'd think Google engineers would proof read their comments before posting them ;).
I'd never be caughtMaking such an obvious mistake.
After eight years of continuous development, QEMU 1.0 came out on the first of December. After assembling our Christmas tree this afternoon, I set to work building it on my Mac :).
Screenshot of my venerable MacBook Pro running Windows 2000, Windows 3.11 for Workgroups under PC DOS 2000 and FreeBSD 8.2 in the all new QEMU 1.0 :). All fully licenced I might add, I don’t run pirated software thank you very much!
/usr/local like a good FreeBSD-heritage guy, its one of the reasons I went back to MacPorts from Homebrew. Use –build-target during the ./configure stage to change the default.softfloat.h. I’ve since written a post about how to fix this.% sudo -s
/usr/local/src to keep things tidy.--help flag. In my case:
# ./configure \ --enable-cocoa \ --target-list=i386-softmmu,alpha-softmmu \ --audio-drv-list=coreaudio\ --audio-card-list=ac97,adlib,sb16
# make # make install # make clean distclean
Huge amount of thanks to Fabrice Bellard and all the QEMU committers for their incredible amount of wok over these 8 years. I use your software on a daily basis for work and play.
Now all we need is isapc support back!