got root?
Friday, March 24, 2006
shares and illegalities
How irresponsible - or plain stupid - needs a person be to put pictures of themselves and other friends indulging in large amounts of yayo? It isn't even snooping - seeing how I started iPhoto and the thing was mounted to my Library - so they can't even blame it on me. Heh, college life at its best. I simply think it's a bit risky to do that.

To each their own I suppose. I am going to begin more cluster failover testing and session replication issues. Things to do with how activities are being handled when nodes in clusters go under. Pretty interesting stuff and I can't wait for it. I think I'm generally slightly over-enthusiastic about aspects of work. Not that I find any reason not to be, really. :)

Be cool, stay in school! [or at least around it cause they have plenty of WiFiAPs usually :P

Thursday, March 23, 2006
dataloss
I have recently subscribed to attrition's dataloss list. So everyday I receive a few e-mails concerning recent thefts of large blocks of readily-identifiable customer data, which makes both ID theft and CC fraud a walk in the park for most people.

Only, a [too] large number of these data losses are not thefts per se. See, when someone leaves backup tapes at the door of some warehouse or a laptop on a table while they get a quick drink, the thief has little to do in the way of stealing. Heck, if I were walking down some street and I saw a bag of tapes or CDs or something, I'd pick'em up for fun, out of curiosity or something along those lines.

Now on the issue of liability, many of these companies do not even disclose breach information, let alone do serious damage control. In this part of the world, once your SIN has been compromised... well, you don't get another. It's as simple as that. So if some dumb assistant rushes to the pub and leaves backup tapes outside the off-site warehouse, well, he should be getting his ass kicked. After all he has failed to properly do his job and as such he should suffer whatever consequences, in excess of just losing his job.

Being stupid is no excuse. Keep hacking!

technology
hack
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
hackd got Mac'd
Well, well, well... Given the demise of my previous laptop I had to look for something new to fuel my mobile needs [and otherwise.] After many, many hours of deep thought and consideration I have decided to purchase myself an iBook G4 in the 12" variety [given that I was looking for a 12" laptop to begin with.] The new machine has been dubbed inferno as was its predecessor.

I am very impressed with it =) Not only integration across applications works flawlessly [something that Windows still does not do - and proof to that is my work computer.] but just how sleek and sexy it is. Yes, I said my laptop is sexy :) What can you do?

I got darwinports and gcc right away, also XCode 2 and some video codecs. Oh, and MacGPG plus a plugin for Mail that lets me encrypt on-the-fly.
It even knows what colour my iPod is :) I guess it's pretty obvious why people love them so much. Plus, it's a BSD-based OS, which means I'm still like home using it.

For those that consider I have sold out and moved out of the Linux sphere, they are gravely mistaken :) My 'server' box continues to run Gentoo at blazing speeds, and that's the box I use for everything from ripping movies to downloading torrents and hacking your box :P

Anyway so far for now... I'm also experimenting with technorati tags from now on, so we'll see how that goes. Although, in all honesty, I'm considering buying hosting and moving to wordpress soon enough. Not that blogger isn't cool and whatnot, but I need more :)

Cheers!


Friday, March 03, 2006
Microsoft's Develop Mental Tour 2006

So this is what I did tonight. Pretty good event I would say, of course far too short to cover in detail aspects of game programming. But a decent enough overview to peak my curiosity... yes, even mine, the Linux fiend. Plus I got a nifty book to get me started on C# [although I am currently getting into Perl]

In other news Shaw/Rogers, whom most Canadians recognize as one of the leading ISPs here, is starting to filter and throttle BitTorrent traffic on their network. Now, I never got any decent speed on b.t. before this was public on Shaw, at least on Telus it is constant and decent. But this is another proof of what RIAA/MPAA crusaders should be castrated, beaten with wet fish and shot with salt pellets for. I find it extremely hard to believe that the issue for this is trying to uphold users' traffic quotas. Should this come as a surprise for anyone? Far from. Expect this behaviour to pop-up around the world more and more.

Anybody willing to start up something like MindVox for the modern age? A high-speed, highly-anonymous ISP offerring. I guess at that point you run the risk of 3rd Tier providers denying your connections altogether.

I'm ranting :)

Trust your techno-lust!