May 18th, 2010 at 8:17 am
LOST creator tweets fan made finale trailerStalk us on Facebook and Twitter or grab the RSS Feed
A hardcore LOST fan spent 32 hours cutting together his favorite scenes to bring us a fan-made finale trailer that is nothing short of awesome. Even LOST creator “Damon Lindelof” gave it some love via Twitter.
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Mark Hamill is directing ‘Black Pearl’
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
LOST creator tweets fan made finale trailer «furiousfanboys.com
Black duck eggs and other secrets of Chinese hackers | NetworkWorld.com Community
Black duck eggs on the menu of a Chinese restaurant drew the suspicions of a security consultant reporting to renowned security expert Ira Winkler.
The colleague, a former Russian security agent named Stan, was at a new Chinese restaurant in "the middle of nowhere" in the United States, but conspicuously near the R&D center of a Fortune 5 U.S. business.
"Don't you know black duck eggs are a delicacy in China?" Winkler said Stan asked. "I can't get black duck eggs in San Francisco, let alone this little piece of crap town in the middle of nowhere." Stan's conclusion was that the Chinese restaurant was a front for a Chinese espionage operation targeting the Fortune 5 business.
"That's an example of how they work," said Winkler, president of Internet Security Advisors Group, in a Web cast today hosted by the RSA. It was a followup to a presentation he made at the annual RSA Conference 2010 held in March in San Francisco.
Winkler, who considers the attention and outrage paid to the reported attack on Google from inside China last year to be "laughable," says Chinese espionage and cyber espionage is far more pervasive than anyone realizes, and that physical and computer security systems are extremely ill-equipped to deal with it. Although computer defenses can and should be improved, Winkler thinks those operating computer networks need to be much more aware of the scope of the threats.
Listening to the Web cast was an eye opener, making me realize that as robust as the network security market may be, the bad guys may be more robust.
Besides continually innovating at hacking computer networks in the U.S. and globally, Chinese interests also hack companies physically by infiltrating them with people who can then be recruited as spies, Winkler said.
A U.S. oil company seeking drilling rights off the coast of China was told that it could help secure those rights with a "gesture of good will" of hiring 30 recent Chinese graduates of various U.S universities. The company did that but later became suspicious that one of the employees was speaking a lot in Chinese on the phone. An investigation revealed the employee was calling an official in a Chinese consulate known to be a Chinese intelligence agent.
"Hacking Google? They're already inside Google. Why do they have to hack them?" Winkler asked.
Far more alarming are the attacks by Chinese hackers, be they with the government or condoned by the government, on U.S. interests including power grids, military and other government systems. In recent years, he said, hackers have broken into the networks of the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the White House, the Naval War College and NIPRNET, a defense logistics agency that keeps track of the location of critical military assets.
U.S. corporations are vulnerable, too, he said, because China sees nothing wrong with committing economic espionage in the service of Chinese companies, many of which are state-owned anyway. Of course, the U.S. and other countries spy on each other all the time, but the U.S. would never spy on Toyota and share that intelligence with General Motors, for example. China, on the other hand, has no such qualms.
After explaining the elaborate schemes hackers use to infiltrate computer systems, Winkler lamented the lax security that networks use to protect themselves. "We don't have proactive-based defenses from zero day attacks," he said, referring to software vulnerabilities discovered by hackers but not yet by IT security people. Sure, signature-based intrusion detection is a typical way to protect networks, "but I don't see behavioral-based intrusion detection. There's very little of that," Winkler said. Two-step authentication is "exponentially" better protection but not foolproof.
In previous posts, I've reported on how Microsoft argues that if organizations adopted the most up-to-date operating systems or Web browsers, and were diligent about patch management, they'd be better protected against threats. But Winkler said, despite the wide use of Microsoft globally, this threat goes way beyond anything Microsoft alone can do. "Many companies, when you actually do an audit on them, they're not running the latest version of whatever operating system they have."
Winkler's conclusion: "We're generally screwed. They are constantly innovating. But what we can do is be more aware of what's going on."
Think about that the next time you see black duck eggs on the menu of a Chinese restaurant in the middle of nowhere.
It's that time of year again. Construction in Columbus Ohio
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
Steve Jobs was robbed
Alert Email Print Share #var paragraph = content as Paragraph; #var textChunk = chunk as TextChunk; #// #// -->By Brett Arends, WSJ.com and MarketWatch
BOSTON (MarketWatch) -- You've already heard about "the greatest trade ever" - hedge fund manager John Paulson's giant score betting against subprime mortgage bonds.
But no one's told you about the dumbest trade ever.
Sure, there are plenty of contenders.
But this one is a doozy.
Steve Jobs makes the worst trade ever
Brett Arends tells us about one of the greatest trade blunders ever: a decision by Steve Jobs in 2003 to accept a safer but much lower returning investment in exchange for his 55 million Apple stock options, now worth nearly $13 billion.
It's got everything. Fame. Glamour. The exactly wrong trade at exactly the wrong time. Billions of dollars blown.
And you won't believe who pulled it.
No, it wasn't some semi-pro hedge fund manager in Greenwich. An obscure European banker. Or a crazy trader in Hong Kong.
You ready?
It was Steve Jobs.
Yes, the man who walks on water. The same genius who invented the iPhone, restored balance to the Force, and rescued Morpheus from the Matrix.
Steve - Luke - "Neo" - Jobs.
"The One."
Everybody knows that Apple Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!aapl/quotes/nls/aapl (AAPL 250.10, -2.26, -0.90%) stock has skyrocketed in recent years, thanks to the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and the forthcoming edible iPod Shuffle. A look through the company's proxy shows Jobs is holding a fistful of valuable paper, as you'd expect. He has 10 million shares. At the latest prices, around $250 each, that's made him a thumping $2.5 billion.
What isn't so widely known is that it was so nearly more. A lot more.
Let's go back in time.
The moment: March 2003.
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Now that's a catchy title... isn't it?
Dolphins are violent predators that kill their own babies.
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It never fails. Every single cocktail party, as soon as someone finds out that I'm a graduate student studying marine biology, they ask, "So, do you get to play with dolphins?" Since my heart is as black and cold as the oceanic abyss, I usually take this opportunity to disillusion yet another poor soul of their childhood fantasy of Mystical Dolphin Love.
Dolphins are not gentle or psychic. If they could talk they would not impart eco-wisdom or deep spiritual truth. Dolphins are violent predators with a predilection for baby killing and rape. I feel it's my duty to warn you, despite the risk of insulting creatures made of hundreds of pounds of muscle and rows of sharp teeth. Throw out your rainbow dolphin painting, and check out dolphins' low-down dirty secrets:
--Dolphin sex can be violent and coercive. Gangs of two or three male bottlenose dolphins isolate a single female from the pod and forcibly mate with her, sometimes for weeks at a time. To keep her in line, they make aggressive noises, threatening movements, and even smack her around with their tails. And if she tries to swim away, they chase her down. Horny dolphins have also been known to target human swimmers—Demi Moore is rumored to have had a close encounter of the finny kind.
--Dolphins kill harbor porpoise babies. In Scotland, scientists found baby harbor porpoises washed up with horrific internal injuries. They thought the porpoises might have been killed by weapons tests until they found the toothmarks. Later, dolphins were caught on film pulping the baby porpoises—the dolphins even used their ecolocation to aim their blow at the porpoises' vital organs.
--Dolphins kill their own babies. Baby dolphins have washed up alongside the dead porpoises, and some scientists think that all the porpoise-slaughter was just practice for some old-fashioned infanticide. For other mammals like lions, killing the babies makes the females immediately ready for the next pregnancy, and maybe that's the case with dolphins, too.
The scariest part is dolphins can wreak havoc day and night without sleeping. A recent study found that dolphins could stay awake for five days straight with no loss of mental acuity. The dolphins didn't even need to make up sleep at the end of the study, though the scientists sure did.
If the dolphins ever evolve thumbs, we're in trouble. It will be like a slasher-film remake of Douglas Adams' So Long And Thanks for All The Fish. If I wash up with pulped innards and dolphin tooth marks, you'll know why. After all, you never hear about the people the dolphins push out to sea.
Wow... I guess you can still learn something new, every day.
The Pirate Bay Offline Following Injunction Against ISP | Digital Media Wire
Los Angeles - Notorious file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay has been knocked offline by its Internet service provider, following a court ruling in Germany last week ordering the ISP to disconnect the site on copyright violations, TorrentFreak reported. The Motion Picture Association was successful last week in its litigation at the Regional Court of Hamburg, where it secured a preliminary injunction against ISP CyberBunker and its parent company CB3ROB.
A Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak that the operators of the site are already working to get the site back online with a different hosting provider.
The same circumstances have befallen The Pirate Bay with two of its previous hosting providers, who where ordered by courts to take the site offline at the behest of entertainment industry interests.
Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/wf80j (TorrentFreak)Published in DMW Daily, May 17, 2010
shit. it's a slippery slope and the end game is government regulated internet. call me a conspiracy theorist... but it's going to happen, as more and more of the rights to our digital paly-land are being revoked. the fact that there are cyber-crime task forces makes me shake my head with the thought of inevitability. TPB is going to end up running into a court ordered isp shutdown or subpoena at every corner. good night sweet prince...