Category: News

Posts might be few and far between over the next few weeks

fireWell if you haven’t heard already I had a bit of an accident this past weekend. While attempting to burn some brush I inadvertently burned both my face and hand (1st and second degree burns respectively). It’s funny what goes through your mind when put in such a position. For example, as soon as I bent down and clicked my lighter to ignite the gasoline soaked pile of brush, the only thing that went through my head was “Oh no…I’m down wind…”

*WOOSH*

A millisecond after the flame came out the end of the lighter I was engulfed in flames and instinctively rolling on the lawn to put myself out.

So that being said I have the next 10 days off work (with note) and I have to have my burn dressings changed twice a day (incredible inconvenience). I have quite a few blisters on my hand and the doctor tells me to expect quite a bit of pain as my nerves “reactivate”. To make a long story short, my one handed typing is very inconvenient and becoming painful.

I can’t help but think that had I been more seriously injured I probably would not be able to tell this story. I’m bound to have a nasty scar on my left hand but perhaps it will be a constant reminder of how lucky I am in life.

Hackers invited to break the security on $100 laptops

olpcThe $100 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is
inviting hackers to break test out and even break the security on the upcoming computers. Speaking at the Toorcon computer security convention, OLPC representative Ivan Kristic said the OLPC will create the largest monoculture in history and the it will present some “very scary” security problems.

One huge security risk, according to Kristic, is that new computers will transparently transmit application code from one computer to another. The cheap laptops are meant to operate in a mesh wireless network and if one computer doesn’t have an application, then it can acquire it wirelessly from another computer. Kristic calls this scenario “bloody scary”.

I think this is a fantastic idea and would love to get my hands on one of these laptops…if only I could find out how. I’d love to be able to get a few of these laptops if they were capable of running a security tools distro like BackTrack.

Links:
One Laptop Per Child – http://www.laptop.org/index.en_US.html
One Laptop Per Child Wiki – http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home
ToorCon 2006 – http://www.toorcon.org/

Hackers claim zero-day flaw in Firefox

ffoxAccording to ZDNet yesterday:

“The open-source Firefox Web browser is critically flawed in the way it handles JavaScript, two hackers said Saturday afternoon.

An attacker could commandeer a computer running the browser simply by crafting a Web page that contains some malicious JavaScript code, Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi said in a presentation at the ToorCon hacker conference here. The flaw affects Firefox on Windows, Apple Computer’s Mac OS X and Linux, they said.”

The full story can be found here and it looks as though the NoScript add-on can help mitigate the effects of the exploit (not a patch…just a workaround).

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