One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

So there’s this thread going around these days called “crazy shit that you find hilarious” or some crap like that. I was sorting through my images-from-the-forum directory and happened on these two gif files, which I either mist the first time or completely forgot.

Either way, they’re REALLY funny.

Shift-refresh if you need them to start over.
first: (first line: “what about a catapult?”)

second: (first line: “I can’t believe we’re doing this”)

So there’s this story going around about this guy who ‘hacked’ myspace – which amounts to writing an interesting little javascript that caused anybody who viewed his profile to add him to their heros list… and then anybody who viewed their profile to be added to his heros list… and on, and on, and on. (For those people who haven’t been in a classroom for a while, this is what we call an exponential function.)

Now this in and of itself is kinda interesting in that “WoW Flu is kinda cool” way, but the technical details prove far more interesting for us nerdy types. I couldn’t help but think of Def Con and sitting on the john reading 2600 while reading this. This guy’s pretty clever.

Hey, World of Warcraft users: Read this. I’ll wait.

Now that I’ve gotten your attention, let’s think about this. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a technical article addressing the details of what an anti–cheating program does. I tried, but was unable to find any down-and-dirty details about what Punkbuster does, although I found a couple of security advisories and a fair number of criticisms.

The top of the list has to be that any security tools that are invented by hardware & software authors (i.e. DEP) make tools like this useless, and in the case of Punkbuster at least fucking require you to run with administrative privileges. (Ref: here, ctrl-F for ‘privileges’.)

Still, it’s nowhere near as disturbing as knowing that not only are people letting these programs crawl all over their shit without even thinking twice about what information is being lifted from their systems, or far more important, what potential security holes are being induced by this software.

Date: 30 Sep 2005
Time: 12:30 Hrs (approx)
Place: Upstairs in the Meyerhoffer Library

Two weeks and change ago RD talked me into attempting the Security+. By “talked me into,” I mean the conversation went something like this:
RD: “Hey Mav, wanna take Security+?”
Me: “Sure, why not.”
Continue reading “CSI’s Testing Center is Frighteningly Close to Hell”