There seems to be an ongoing war between the people who write the Bagle worm and the people who write the Netsky worm. Many variants of each are running around the Internet, and more seem to be found all the time. Embedded in the different versions are comments and taunts to the other.
Sounds like the nanite war in Diamond Age.
Also from Crypto-Gram: BeepCard
BeepCard is a technology company. They sell a sound authenticator for credit cards. The demo looks like a credit card – an actual credit card that passes all the credit card specs for bendability and reliability and everything – and contains a speaker and a sound chip. When you press a certain part of the card – the “button” – it spits out an audible 128-bit random string.
[…]
Why do I like this? It’s a physical authentication system that doesn’t require any special reader hardware. You can use it on a random computer at an Internet cafe. You can use it on a telephone. I can think of all sorts of really easy, really cool applications. If the price is cheap enough, BeepCard has a winner here.
Bruce Schneier and Paul Kocher point out that the cost of rigging the election with broken voting machines would be cheap
Let’s try another analysis: What is it worth to compromise a voting machine? In contested House races in 2002, candidates typically spent $3M to $4M, although the highest was over $8M. The outcomes of the 20 closest races would have changed by swinging an average of 2,593 votes each. Assuming (conservatively) a candidate would pay $1M to switch 5,000 votes, votes are worth $200 each. The actual value is probably closer to $500, but I figured conservatively here to reflect the additional risk of breaking the law.
If a voting machine collects 250 votes (about 125 for each candidate), rigging the machine to swing all of its votes would be worth $25,000. That’s going to be detected, so is unlikely to happen. Swinging 10% of the votes on any given machine would be worth $2500.
Debian for a long time tried to have their own xterm type ‘xterm-debain’. In order to work around some problem I was having some point in the past (the oldest dotfile I have in my home directory is dated “Jan 27 1997”) I created a my personal xterm terminfo file that had some bug fix.
Fast forward to present day: I’ve upgraded to gnome 2.4, bringing with it many other updates, and suddenly bash is printing “~” when I hit DEL and joe is DEL’ing when I backspace.
This drives me nuts trying to compare the setup on that machine with all the other well behaving debian boxes I have. Finally I ran strace
[...]
access("/home/myers/.terminfo/x/xterm", R_OK) = 0
open("/home/myers/.terminfo/x/xterm", O_RDONLY) = 3
[...]
Lessions learned:
strace is the greatest$HOME every so oftenToday I was playing with ctypes. I was getting this error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "mb.py", line 4, in ?
mb = cdll.LoadLibrary("/usr/local/lib/libmusicbrainz.so.4")
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/ctypes/__init__.py",
line 286, in LoadLibrary
return self._dlltype(name)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/site-packages/ctypes/__init__.py", line
222, in __init__
self._handle = LoadLibrary(self._name)
OSError: /usr/local/lib/libmusicbrainz.so.4: undefined symbol:
__gxx_personality_v0
Turns out that I had built libmusicbrainz.so with an older g++. This debian bug report helped, as did this posting on gcc-l.