Archive for July, 2008

The Quivering Hands of FAIL

If you are going on TV to handle a one-of-a-kind rare piece of machinery, try not to have shaky fingers. And that whispery laughter you hear in the background? That’s Edison in his grave laughing his ass off.

I love how the host uncaringly asks, “So are you done with that then?”

Have you bookmarked the Failblog site yet? Its from the same jokers that bring you the lolcats of ichc.


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How Secrecy Works- Patch the Whole Internet

Update! This entire article is cross-posted over at GeeksAreSexy.

US-CERT is finally doing the job it was envisioned to do back in 2004 when it was absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security. It is coordinating the efforts of Industry Leaders and maintaining top secrecy to do so to keep the internet secure. Yesterday an unprecedented effort came to a conclusion and patches for DNS Internet Infrastructure were released simultaneously by the biggest companies on the Internet. Cisco, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems each released patches that address a fundamental flaw in DNS, and they did so after secretly collaborating with each other and the Federal Government.

The flaw in DNS could have allowed an attacker to impersonate any server on the Internet by poisoning your DNS cache. And it was easy to do. Luckily the bad guys hadn’t stumbled across the vulnerability. And perhaps more amazing than the world’s largest internet companies collaborating with the government under a cone of silence? The vulnerability researcher, Dan Kaminsky, could have sold the vulnerability to the bad guys for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but being one of the good guys, he turned the information over to the US-CERT team for free.

To read the rest, you gotta go to [GAS]!


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Crystal Skulls are Frauds. Surprised? Nah.

I had never heard of the whole crystal skull mythology until the latest Indiana Jones movie came out. And leading up to the movie premier were ridiculous documentaries on the Sci-fi channel about how the crystal skulls were “impossible to have been created by human hands” and they had “immense power to heal” and other such claptrap.

Today the AFP sticks a dagger in this myth by reporting that the skulls in the Smithonian, British and French Museums, on which this myth was based, are all frauds. So take that, freaky crystal worshippers.

From AFP here:

Less than three months after the Quai Branly Museum in Paris discovered that a crystal skull once proclaimed as a mystical Aztec masterpiece was a fake, it is now the turn of the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution to find they were victims of skull-duggery.

Scientists from those two prestigious institutions on Wednesday said their crystal skulls were cut, honed and polished by tools of the industrial age, not by Mesoamerican craftsmen of yore.

“The skulls under consideration are not pre-Columbian. They must surely be regarded as of relatively modern manufacture,” they say. “Each skull was probably worked not more than a decade before it was first offered for sale.”

The skulls became star exhibits in all three museums long before the Indiana Jones movie, “The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” hit the movie screens this year.

The superstitious deemed them part of a collection of 12 skulls, endowed with healing or mystical powers, that dated back to the ancient culture of Central America.

Reuniting all 12 skulls, together with a putative 13th, would conjure up a massive power that would prevent the Earth from tipping over on December 21 2012, the “doomsday” in the Mayan calendar, according to one fable.

The investigators also found a black-and-red deposit in a tiny cavity of the Smithsonian skull. X-ray diffraction showed it to be silicon carbide — a tough compound that only exists naturally in meteorites but is widespread in modern industrial abrasives.


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