] The Witty worm: A new chapter in malware
]
] Opinion by Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Internet Security
] Inc.
]
] JUNE 02, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - If press coverage is any
] guide, then the Witty worm wasn't all that successful.
]
] But Witty was a big deal. It represented some
] scary malware firsts and is likely a harbinger of worms
] to come. IT professionals need to understand Witty and
] what it did.
]
] Witty was the first worm to target a particular set of
] security products -- in this case Internet Security
] System's BlackICE and RealSecure. It infected and
] destroyed only computers that had particular versions of
] this software running.
]
] Witty was wildly successful. Twelve thousand machines was
] the entire vulnerable and exposed population, and Witty
] infected them all -- worldwide -- in 45 minutes.

The Witty worm: A new chapter in malware - Computerworld

I love it.

BTW, try not to scream when you see how much the other (Morpheus' nose-grabbers, for example) glasses by Blinde Design cost.

Agent Smith sunglasses

If you don't already have reason to vote for anyone other than the incumbent, including any household appliance that might suddenly gain sentience and make a bid for the US presidency, this might help you out.

Anyone but Bush

This has to be the _most_ ignorant and irrational decision ever made by a cable network. Granted, G4 is Comcast's "baby", but that channel absolutely _sucks_ and is very likely to continue to suck. TechTV has managed to produce consistently entertaining and informative programming for quite some time now. Are newbies expected to now learn about computing technology from Microsoft press releases or something?

TechTV Staff Being Fired?

Even though it would mean I'd probably be out of a job, since the job market is sucking at the moment it doesn't really matter, so I'll recommend this. End users need to stop whining and understand that operating a computer requires that they actually think and read while at the keyboard instead of just clicking on all the shiny buttons. It's never going to be so simple that just anybody can use it, without it being so simple that just anybody can.

Stop Being A Victim

If you're a fan of comic books, you've probably already heard about this.

If you're a fan of MMORPGs, you're probably starting to hear about this. Some of what you're hearing is likely bad. Some of what you're hearing probably sounds like nothing more than incoherent fanboy ravings. Likely none of it mentions that Cryptic Studios has produced a decent game of a new genre in a field packed full of elves, trolls, and mostly stagnation. In City of Heroes, comic fans can finally live out their favorite fantasy... i.e., running around a city in trouble equipped with nothing more than a fancy spandex suit and an expression of grim determination.

Oh, and super powers.

Cryptic Studios has done some things upside-down from other MMORPGs, and in the process eliminated a lot of the dross that generally bogs down other games. There is no inventory, no loot, and no money to speak of, so you don't have to worry how you're going to buy the next needed sword of munchkin-slaying +6. You don't have to stop in the middle of a fight to pick up the loot before some @#$@ twit makes off with it. You don't have to worry about organized crime rings in Korea embargoing the "best" areas and selling everything on eBay. You don't have to mess around with endless clicking to make piles and piles of boots and/or paper dollies. You just talk to your nearest contact (think Department of Employment for superheroes) to pick up a mission and go there, or not. The city itself is _rife_ with crime. Go down almost any alley or into any back parking lot, and you'll find muggers, thieves, vandals, and street fights, all with a serious hatred for people wearing tights.

Character generation is a breeze unless you're an obsessive-compulsive. You pick from a set of five origins (namely, whether your superhero got his powers from magical study, through genetic mutation, by prudent use of technology, etc) and then from there pick two sets of how your powers play out (energy, weather, gravity, fire and etc). Unlike other games where you start out looking pretty generic, and have to play for years to collect the shiny baubles known as "uber gear", you also get a really, _really_ customizable costume. You can look like pretty much any 4-color process freak you've ever seen, and there's even a button there for generating a costume and look entirely at random if you can't think of anything. Your starting super-powers are about as visually impressive as what most games pass off as high-level abilities... and there's almost no way to pick a set of powers that don't entirely "work" together. Things progress quite quickly as well, as one of my housemates bought this and has been playing it, and after about 12 hours total of gameplay, with a small group the screen fills with so much eye-candy during combat, you'll wonder why it's not going to turn your eyeballs into rock candy.

Basically, this game combines the best elements of what makes MMORPGs ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

City of Heroes

The real question that should be coming to people's mind by now, is that regardless of what kind of happy smiling support contract you're paying through the nose for, if a platform has a history of frequent, wide-sweeping, and catastrophic failures in it's security mechanisms, should you really be using it on your mission-critical systems?

Coastguard Sunk by Sasser

...show your support by printing these out as large as you can and posting them in public places (when no one's watching).

Patriotic Posters

Not the homepage for the site's utility, but talks about a feature of this revision control package I find intriguing.

Arch you say?

I am always surprised to find things like this on the 'net. Just when you thought it can't get any funnier...

[quote]This denies access to all services from all hosts. If you want to be notified by mail of any failed connection attempts, you can modify the above to read:

ALL:ALL:/bin/mail -s "%s connection attempt from %c" mike@localhost
[/quote]

Oh yes, please.