Weapons of Mass Distraction.
29/08/2007 Written by tripwire
Powerful weapons are being studied, developed and deployed on the Middle East battlefield. They are lethal, and meant to destroy the opponent’s morale thanks to a well-known “shock and awe” tactic.
But they do not require explosives, nor they require expensive training to be launched or operated: on the contrary, they’re so cheap compared to the damage they can impose on the enemy, that they are more and more spread every day.
To build these weapons is also very easy: it just takes a few chicks and guys in need of some easy cash, a camera, and a web server.
Staring into the Singularity.
28/08/2007 Written by tripwire
If you use a finite resource it tends, well, to deplete. Especially if you use more and more of it, every year, just like it wasn’t *really* finite.
We live in a paradoxical age, where everyone, at every level, wishes and believes that, magically, hydrocarbons will continue to flow abundantly for some time, if not forever. Maybe in 20 years, they say, maybe in 30, oil will become scarce. By that time, they say, we’ll be prepared to manage it.
This is very wrong. Oil is not yet completely depleted, of course: but in 3 – 4 years it will be as if it were mostly gone, and nobody is ready to cope with this.
This incredible state of blindness is due to many reasons, one of them being our weak pattern-matching skills when adverse conditions build up slowly enough to go unnoticed by our collective nervous system. And, of course, we are being systematically deceived on this subject by the media and the powers-to-be, thanks to our will to be deceived.
19th International Olympiad in Informatics
28/08/2007 Written by Ivica Koritic
Readers of this portal may have not been aware, but the 19th International Olympiad in Informatics ended last week in Zagreb, Croatia. There were total of 285 high school contestants from 77 countries, 11 of them were girls. The contestants were situated at the student dormitory of Stjepan Radic, while the contest and the opening and closing ceremony was held at the Zagreb Fair.
Each participating country can have a team with 4 contestants, a team leader, a deputy team leader, and one or more observers and/or guests. This year there was only one contestant with his team leader from Cuba, while the Egyptian team had about 20 members (next year’s olympiad will be in Egypt, so they wanted to get themselves very familiar with the organization of this year’s olympiad).
Own your local SCADA!
24/08/2007 Written by minor
Doing penetration tests can bring sometimes surprising results. But doing penetration tests on critical targets should not bring any surprising results. As Forbes few days ago informed, Scott Lunsford was offered to penetrate into nuclear power station.
As owner of the plant claimed, critical components could not né accessed from the Internet.“It turned out to be one of the easiest penetration tests I’d ever done,” Lunsford said.
Second Life. Again.
23/08/2007 Written by minor
Second Life is real phenomenon — it is not only virtual world or place for online fun. It seems, it’s a place for business, fun, leisure… But if you think, it’s ideal world, forget it. It is not. Second Life seems to get diseases from Internet or real world and as we already stated in article about Second Life, it needs strong regulations, otherwise there will be more problems.
Just consider, online gambling on the Internet is widespread and daily you find lot of spam messages, which tell you about gambling possibilities. Casinos and other hazard games arrived also into Second Life. Since everything there is only piece of code, it might be created to make profit for the publisher of the game, not for the player.