My Status: Geek and Jealous

I gotta hand it to the author.

It really fits me to a Tee USB port...

and you need to HOVER (with your mouse) to read the alt-caption text that is SO so essential.


Yes, I want one too!



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OK, you wanted a Political discussion: Here goes.

The background I believe that:
* We're HEADING into a DEPRESSION. We're (now) IN a depression!
* It's going to be as BAD as the last one.
* I call this Depression 2.0
* The current failures only bring us 25% into the problem!!
* According to Robert Reich (former Sec'y of Labor under Clinton): The only number that he EVER saw, defining the
depression was that the unemployment rate hovered around 25%.
* We need a new deal.
* After 58 years of NO Health Care Reform (since 1950!) it will FINALLY be coming soon...
* We've managed to WASTE a FULL generation (from Zero to thirty) with decaying social, educational, and interpersonal skills.
* Our nation is no longer DOING (producing) anything.
SO, from these few premises, I have extrapolated a great deal of items to FIX our society...

But....
We need to make sure that a number of issues are resolved ALL at once.
If we don't do them ALL at once, its like juggling three RUNNING chain saws, but dropping one!

Here's what I came up with:

We need to do the FOLLOWING to FIX our Society:
* Create A Living Wage
* Create a National Single payer Healthcare
* Create a National 3-4 year draft (or alternate service)
* Create a Federally paid Day Care starting at six months
* Implement Tax Reform on the ULTRA Rich
* Lobbying (Political Reform)
* Education
* Infrastructure (road /bridge/Systems repairs)
* Lack of Training/futures
* Truth and Reconcilliation Commission
* A new "Manhattan" project, focusing on Energy INDEPENDENCE

See my other blog: http://sos-newdeal.blogspot.com for more details.

TecH: RFID Passports HACKED again! (2nd yr in row)

I've really gotta hand it to this overweight, German hacker (eats too much western junk food too!)

Lukas Grunwald, an RFID expert who has served as an e-passport consultant to the German parliament, says a security flaw with his German RFID enabled passport can allow him to CRASH the passport reader.

In "Geekspeak",

The security flaws allow someone to seize and clone the fingerprint image stored on the biometric e-passport, and to create a specially coded chip that attacks e-passport readers that attempt to scan it.

Grunwald says he's succeeded in sabotaging two passport readers made by different vendors by cloning a passport chip, then modifying the JPEG2000 image file containing the passport photo. Reading the modified image crashed the readers, which suggests they could be vulnerable to a code-injection exploit that might, for example, reprogram a reader to approve expired or forged passports.

"If you're able to crash something you are most likely able to exploit it," says Grunwald, who's scheduled to discuss the vulnerabilities this weekend at the annual DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas.

Last year at the BlackHat security conference he showed how he could extract the data on a read-only passport chip and clone it to a read-write chip that appears the same to an e-passport reader. Now Grunwald says he was able to add data to the cloned chip that would allow someone to attack the passport reader.

Buffer-overrun vulnerabilities occur when coding errors in software allow an attacker to overflow a section of memory dedicated to storing a fixed amount of data. Carefully exploited, they often permit the hacker to execute his own instructions on the vulnerable computer, essentially taking over the device.

Now HERE's the scary part!
If a (rfid-passport) reader could be compromised using Grunwald's technique, it might be reprogrammed to misreport an expired passport as a valid one, or even -- theoretically -- to attempt a compromise of the Windows-based border-screening computer to which it is connected.


Or even worse, take over the computer, infect a brand new unknown virus into the network
AND SHUT DOWN THE ENTIRE AIRPORT
*** WHICH FOR STUPID COMPETITIVE REASONS all RUNS Microsoft WINDOZE!
Now it's time to be AFRAID.
Be REALLY afraid

Scenario one:
Al Queida:
Terrorist network hacker develops new virus/worm (see the Morris worm Here)
which will use the RFID reader to insert code allowing the terrorists into the country, and (say) 1/2 hour later take down the entire AIRPORT, then take down the
internet (the MICROSQUISH internet that is...) a section at a time

Remember " we presume that the terrorists have written a brand new, never before seen virus, that has NEVER been seen, so that ALL virus programs DONT recognize it to stop it!"
SO EVERY single darn WINDOWS box in the WORLD gets infected, and taken down...

(oh and the terrorists are NOW in the country, but their information was also erased from the network before it was blown away (erased).


AUGH... I can't even continue to a use attacking the food supply...

BTW, I AM available for hire... for the right price!!!

Random TecH: MicroSquish conqueors all

I love the UserFriendly comic Strip (see here for another Strip)

Geek-speak translation into English:

Dell is finally going to sell LAPTOPS with LINUX installed instead of Microsoft
Windows/XP/Vista...

Dell will be using "UBUNTU" brand Linux, made by a company called Cannonical.

Hope this explains the following:
Remeber: It's MY blog, and I'll go crazy if I want to!



In a perfect world, the GOVERNMENT would label Microsoft a predatory monopoly, and require Microsoft to put EVERY previous version of WINDOWS that they stop selling and supporting into the PUBLIC domain, so OTHERS could still use/support it!