MindlessCode.net

Student accused of trying to crash school’s computer system vs Judge tentatively OKs Sony BMG settlement

From the first story:

Police say the student created a website, which connected to the school’s system.

When enough users logged on and hit the F5 button, it overloaded the school’s system.

Aside from the bad (terrible?) grammar, this doesn’t sound like the student broke into the system, it sound like a DoS (denial-of-service) attack caused by people hitting refresh, I guess. Not sure how he got people to access “his site”, and I doubt that there is any difference in his special site that “connected to the school’s system” and the schools webpage…

it could have done a tremendous amount of damage

Canton City Prosecutor Frank Fronchione
Oh yeah, sure, so somebody is going to break in with a DoS attack? Are they running their webserver on the same computer as their Access database?

The upshot of this article is that the student is being charged with a felony and possibly be sent to jail.

Now, switch to the other article, which is about Sony’s “problem” with their rootkit. Apparently the punishment for a big business installing software which ‘could have done a tremendous amount of damage’ (by opening security holes) is giving people $7.50 back (an average CD costs $15) and giving them a promotional code which lets them download another CD in MP3 format (no, not CD quality, MP3 quality).

Is there justice here? I think not.

How sad is this: Only two of the people in my “My Friends” list of blogs have the “met” XFN property set–I must be very geeky… By the way, does anyone I have actually met in real life (no, IRC and Skype don’t count) read this blog?

You’ve probably already heard about it, but this has more info on it, and also about how it does “phone home”. There’s also a comment from “xcp support”, the company who wrote the program.

Here’s an interesting article: Floating offshore wind energy…. Although I suspect that some of the article is hype–other parts of it are probably true. Although I don’t really understand how transmitting electricity 1000 miles under sea would be practical or result in little power loss (!!?)–it’s a neat idea. Using batteries doesn’t really make sense to me either (batteries pretty inefficient–it’s something like 40% loss–I think), but generating Hydrogen from the batteries (the off gas?) is a neat idea. At least, I’m glad to see someone is working on this stuff…

As reported by Yahoo News.

But researchers at Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley say it takes 29 percent more fossil energy to turn corn into ethanol than the amount of fuel the process produces.

“Ethanol production in the United States does not benefit the nation’s energy security, its agriculture, the economy, or the environment,” according to the study by Cornell’s David Pimentel and Berkeley’s Tad Patzek. They conclude the country would be better off investing in solar, wind and hydrogen energy.

The only thing I can say, is “Well, duh!”
Isn’t this what people have been saying to all the folks in Washington who are on the ADM payroll? ADM gets huge subsidys for ethanol, for every dollor that ADM makes off Ethanol, the US taxpayer pays out $30.

From Slate: Forget Me Not: How to win the U.S. memory championship.

You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes…

Wow!

Wow, great read: Bank Error In My Favor: Collect $95,000. 16 pages of a great story. (Don’t miss the little link on the bottem of each page that says something like “Part II: Getting A Cashier’s Check”).

Well, it sure burned up my afternoon, but it was worth it. Read it!

Yeah, yeah, it’s been forever since I’ve posted…sorry this isn’t more regular, I’m a lazy bum :P.

It seems like it’s spring here already, the weather has been beautiful, highs between 10C and 13C (NOAA weather report). Of course, that also means it isn’t raining, which is a bad thing. (It appears that California is getting all our rain…). Our spring-fed pond is way below normal for this year and the water level is actually going down. As our part of the country is very dependent on Hydropower for electricity, that’s a baad thing (even if we, the Morton’s, are on solar power…). Also, is the river going to be a dry riverbed when we need to irrigate? Let’s hope so :(. In Slashdot speak: “I, for one, welcome our new Climate Change Overlords”. /me sighs

Anyways, Autopackage 1.0 is coming out soon so I’ve been building packages and stress-testing it… I’ve recently been experimenting with creating an Autopackage of Mozilla Firefox. It’s almost working properly (having to hack the Autopackage source a little :(), and I’ll provide a link when it’s done. In the mean time, if anybody would like to try and Autopackage, I suggest Lincity (a fun little addicitve game), or Inkscape. I beleive that Inkscape is still a 0.7 Autopackage, not beta2, so they aren’t compatible :(. You can find a list of Autopackages in the PDB (Package Database). Have fun, and let me know how it works for you!

Can This Black Box See Into the Future?…interesting article, bixar article…I don’t know what to think, but read it and let me know what you think.

…according to the LA Times. I mean, like, WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? Aren’t scientists susposed to “report the facts, without spin”? Now from what I’ve heard lately doesn’t really suprise me…anybody have any explination?