Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

It looks like the recent outbreak of near zero-day attacks on Windows 2000 systems has degenerated into a bot war between different gangs of system hijackers.

This time it isn't about who can compromise the most machines - it's, as they say, all about the benjamins. Spammers and phishers hire botnets to send their mails, while extortionists use them to run DDOS attacks. Apparently it costs only $350 to hire a network of 5,500 compromised systems...

One thought: if the price is so low because there are so many infected machines out there, then monitoring the market prices for botnets will be a good indicator of how well security systems are working. The less machines infected, the higher the price...

There's also an interesting SFnal thought here. I've been playing with the idea that fast burn singularities are inherently unstable - especially once they've built computronium Matrioshka brains around their home stars. While I've speculated that this instability is due to light speed lag leading to wars over computational resources, there's a possibility in massive (and literal!) identity theft...

You've seen Catherine Zeta-Jones dance through them, now have your own set of laser trip wires for less than $30...

Well, sort of.

Unfortunately these don't really have lasers (that would be too cool), and instead use IR LEDs and detectors (which is why they call them lazer). So actually rather simple. In fact, I built one of those for my electronics O-level all those years ago... Perhaps you should just buy the bits from Maplin and make your own! You could even use a set of LED lasers rather than IR LEDs and have a real laser security array. Of course that would flatten AAA batteries rather quickly....

They still look nifty...



Use them to protect your desk so no one can steal your stapler, seal it in jelly and sell it on eBay...

Or maybe just go watch an episode of Team Laser Explosion.

Scoopt - a press agency for "citizen journalists" and mobile phone photographers...

...ego-surfing my Technorati watchlists, I found at least two Blogger sites were copying my (and others content) for pages that had nothing else but vast swathes of Google AdSense advertising. I've been splogged.

Spam blogs or "splogs" are getting more and more prevalent, and they're being automated.

Grrr. Not much I can do about that...