Technology: Hacks, How-To, Programming, Security, Ethics and Politics
I’m pretty sure this one made a sound.
The tree had roots so large that it took out a huge section of ground with it. There is actually another tree growing out of the now vertical ground.
Read the rest of When a Tree Falls in the Forest… »
Hewlett Packard has long been a shining example (despite the controversy about pretexting in 2006) of how to run a technology company. Many people are reading this on a Hewlett Packard computer, sitting next to a Hewlett Packard printer and resting their hands on a Hewlett Packard keyboard. But does the technology giant still set a good example for other technology companies?
A year ago (minus 13 days) I bought an HP laptop on Newegg. The smiling people on the HP website assured me that I would be getting award winning customer support. I was sure I wouldn’t be needing it, I almost always fix my computers myself. Nothing could go wrong enough that I would need to even bother calling tech support.
Three months later (and with a battery that lasted all of 10 minutes), I found myself on hold, calling tech support. I talked to 8 people, all of whom asked for my name and contact information and then without even asking about my problem asked me to hold. Finally, after an hour on the phone, I was directed to the tech support office. I was told I would need to download a battery diagnostic tool. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Wrong! I booted into Vista (they didn’t have a Linux version, but I didn’t really expect them to) only to find that the diagnostic tool didn’t work under Vista. I’m not about to repartition my hard drive to run Xp, for some stupid diagnostic software, when there was a similar piece of software that did work with Vista.
Read the rest of An Open Letter to Hewlett Packard »
Just about all Scientologists would be insulted to be compared to Evangelicals. The same is true for Evangelicals. But does one really make any more sense than the other? This article will attempt to compare the two very different religions and come to the conclusion that they are at least similar in one way: they don’t make any sense.
Evangelical Christianity
Evangelicals believe that through the process of “salvation” they can earn immortality in heaven. They will receive “eternal life” in the afterlife if they are “born again” in this life. While this is comforting to mortals, there is no evidence that it is actually true. Through a thought process of circular logic (that eventually leads back to the Bible) Evangelicals can prove this to themselves. They can do this because they want to believe it. While there is a real scientific possibility of life extension, a short cut to eternal life is always easier.
Scientology
Similar to the Hindu ideas of rebirth (except much more violent and with monetary strings attached for the next billion years), Scientologists believe that a soul-like entity (that has existed longer than the universe) can be born in to different bodies and minds. This is no more or less logical than being “born again”. There is no reason to believe that there is any part of the consciousness left after brain death.
Read the rest of Scientology vs Evangelical Christianity »
Description:
The Chad oil pipeline was originally designed to “generate revenues for Chad’s poverty reduction,” The project was approved and construction began. However, things quickly fell through with the Chad government and the World Bank as less and less money went to poverty reduction. The problem was settled, but not before a large amount of oil money went out the window.
Project Status:
Active/Completed
The Chad-Cameroon pipeline has been working since 2003. There was a brief period when the Chad government did not spend the money they were receiving for the oil responsibly, but the World Bank seems to have settled with them. The end result is that the people who needed the money the most didn’t get it. A very few top officials and projects got the money that was set aside to feed the people. According to the project web site, “The World Bank and the Government of Chad signed a memorandum of understanding on July 13, 2006 under which Chad has committed 70 percent of it’s 2007 budget spending to priority poverty reduction programs,”
Read the rest of 3 Stupid World Bank Energy Projects »
People have hacked Digg before. This guy found an xss injection that allowed him to force users to Digg his articles. Digg happily patched the problem and went on with their business. However, there is another problem with Digg that has to do with their content parsing system. The difference is that it doesn’t compromise their system, it forces them to compromise other systems.
The problem is that users can submit urls that have attacks embedded in them. When digg parses the submission to get the title and description and images and such, the attack is executed on the server. What is the advantage to this? Being anonymous! In this case, Digg acts as a proxy, allowing you to perform an attack without ever directly connecting to the server.
If the article ended here, it wouldn’t be very exciting though, would it? I cooked up an example application and attack for you. Here is the server side source code that is vulnerable to sql injection.
<html>
<head><title>This script is vulnerable to sql injection</title></head>
<body>
<form action="sqlinjection.php" method="GET">
User: <input type="text" name="user" /><br />
Email: <input type="text" name="email" />
<input type="submit" value="Inject" />
</form>
</body>
</html>
<?php
//connect to the database
//mysql_error() will be usefull to play around with other injection examples
mysql_connect("localhost", "username", "password") or die(mysql_error());
mysql_select_db("database") or die(mysql_error());
$user = stripslashes($_GET['user']); //stipslashes for demonstration purposes (magicquotes)
$email = stripslashes($_GET['email']);
//the query that the injection is performed on
echo $query = "UPDATE users SET email='$email' WHERE user='$user'";//print the query for testing purposes
$result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());
?>
Read the rest of Making Digg Attack Sites For You »
The pipe is the vertical line above your enter key. It looks like this without the quotes: “|”. Using the pipe character in the Linux shell allows you to string commands together, performing another command on the output from the first. This is a list of 10 things you can do with the pipe that will help you master the command line.
Remember, these commands don’t have to be used as given in the list below, look up the man pages for additional options and arguments. Also, don’t forget that you can string piped commands to use more than one. Stringing piped commands are very powerful when combined.
1. Grep
Grep is one of the most common commands used with the pipe. It allows you to quickly search through the output of another command. For an example, look at the following code. Grep can also take regular expressions as arguments.
ps ux | grep /usr
This command will print every line of the list of processes with “/usr” in it.
2. Head
Head simply displays the first 10 lines of whatever you piped into it. Here’s your example:
ls / -l | head
This example shows the first 10 lines of the directory listing.
Read the rest of 7 Things To Do With The Pipe In a Linux Shell »
Introduction
With the development of modern science came an ambition to live forever. The desire to live forever goes back almost as far as history. Religions often promise eternal life in a different form, but what about a real life extension application developed by science? In the past few decades money has slowly started to trickle to research groups looking for ways to preserve the body and it’s organs. Unfortunately, the one organ that is important is the organ we are furthest behind in saving: the brain.
We have a very poor understanding of how information is stored in the brain on a scale that we can recognize. Without being able to preserve information in the brain, there is no way to extend your life indefinitely. Even if a brain could be transfered to a new body, it will eventually die of old age and the information in the brain will be lost. This happens because while the brain does grow new cells it grows them too slowly to retain enough information.
However, all hope is not lost. There are a few potential ways to preserve the information in the brain. Science is far from a real application, but at least there is a foot in the door. Like with many answers, we have only found more questions. One such question that arises in an attempt to preserve information in the brain is: how far are we prepared to blur the line separating a human being from the information that they are made up of?
Read the rest of Problems With Life Extension: The Brain »
In the past, science has been limited to the boundaries religion places on it. As long as science did not conflict with the ideas of the regional religion, then all was good. However, science is going to conflict with religion. Scientific facts will grow further and further away from religion. Religion isn’t going out without a fight though. Here are 7 ways religions are trying to fight back against science.
1. Faith and the Scientific Method are Opposites
2. People Vote Based on Religious Ideas
Stem Cells weren’t the first time a body of research didn’t get proper funding because some religious wack-jobs. If a group of fundamentalists uses their religion as a basis for morality, they may lose sight of the big picture. This creates a gray area in opinion for moderates as they struggle to find their place somewhere between the fundamentalist and the scientist.
This manifests itself on election day when moderates either stay home or give in to larger social pressures to vote for representatives of a religion rather than someone who is willing to make decisions based on evidence even if it goes against their faith. This has a very real impact in funding that certain research is subject to if it crosses a line determined by faith. This effects everybody who could benefit from the research. When the research is of a medical nature, policy based on religion literally kills.
3. Religion Removes the Need For Science
When people are content to believe in something that explains why they are here, even if it is wrong, they may become less interested in other ideas. Religion often leads people to believe that they have all the answers. Science is self-correcting in that nobody assumes they are absolutely correct. It is naive to think that such a simple idea could explain all the complexity around us.
Read the rest of 7 Ways Religion is Detrimental to Science »