Below are 20 journal entries, after skipping by the 220 most recent ones recorded in Boing Boing's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 -- Next 20 >> ]

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013
7:01 am	No rest for Richard III's bones http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/BTfkNVoaarc/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221380 Weeks after his remains were discovered under a car lot, Richard III's bones are yet to be put to rest. The University of Leicester, which led the exhumation project, plans to inter Richard at the local cathedral. But York, the seat of his branch of the House of Plantagenet, wants him back. Previously. [Reuters]
7:09 am	"Fake" tax-scam movie won film award http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/E-VeK0CRT9A/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221387 When British authorities began to suspect that a movie production was in fact a massive tax scam, the producers were forced to cover their tracks by actually making the movie. It even won an award from the 2012 Las Vegas Film Festival; an award only rescinded after tax inspectors nevertheless swooped in. The movie's name? Landscape of Lies. Enjoy the trailer! [Daily Mail]
7:40 am	Back issues of the NSA's secret, in-house mag http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/SIM0Rypoklo/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221263 The National Security Agency has released an archive of back issues of Cryptolog, its secret, in-house magazine, in a repository spanning 1974 to 1997. The issues are heavily redacted in places, but still look like a promising source of interesting and curious facts. Cryptologs Mirror (via Schneier)
7:41 am	Calculating product placement in hip hop songs: CDZA's $56 million musical shopping spree http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/RN0nvFfyI_0/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221390 How do you calculate the value of product placement in hip hop songs? Joe Sabia's CDZA ("Collective Cadenza") project on YouTube attempted to do just that, with a virtual 56 million dollar hip-hop shopping spree. Their "Methodology for price determination" breakdown follows: Prices were calculated based on current retail or market value, not resale value. For vehicles, values for the most part were selected from the high end of the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price range. ELECTRONICS Iyaz - Replay: 80GB Video iPod Notorious B.I.G. - Juicy: Super Nintendo/Sega Genesis prices were from packaged and unopened items found on eBay Chamillionaire - Ridin Dirty: We went with the PS1 price, even though Chamillionaire can probably afford a PS2. HIGH END FASHION Black Eyed Peas - My Humps: Went with average prices for a lot of these accessories Macklemore - Thrift Shop: Yes mink fur coats can be this expensive ACCESSORIES Bruno Mars - The Lazy Song Eminem - If I Had...: Nike Air Hat/Pair of Lugz Nelly - Air Force Ones: We should have gotten white ones, sorry. LMFAO - I'm in Miami Trick: Vans Notorious B.I.G. - Mo Money Mo Problems - Rolex Snoop Dogg - Drop it Like it's Hot: Went with a $9,100 rolex, even though they can be much more expensive. And a lower end bottle of Chandon at $109 BOOZE LMFAO - I'm in Miami Trick: Red Bull and an affordable Smirnoff even though they would probably drink Grey Groose Jagged Edge - Where the Party At: A fifth of Bacardi 50 Cent - In Da Club: A pint of Bacardi to sneak into the club Busta Rhymes - Pass the Courvoisier: A less expensive type and size Snoop Dogg - Gin and Juice: Seagram's Gin Ke$ha - TiK ToK: Jack Daniel's R. Kelly - Ignition Remix part 2: Got this empty bottle of magnum Cristal off of eBay for 25 bucks. TRANSPORTATION Sir Mix-a-Lot - I Like Big Butts: Mercedes E Class Jay-Z - On to the Next One: Lexus and Range Rover Far East Movement - Like a G6: CDZA doesn't provide items to rent. We only provide items to BUY. Vanilla Ice - Ice, Ice Baby - Lamborghini This edition of CDZA's weekly musical experiments features Mark, Todd and Stasia from the Key of Awesome. Related: CDZA merch, and an MP3 download, neither of which cost $56 million.
6:41 am	Troll comments on YouTube video by sending comment via postal mail to uploader's home http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/JVkFIRGA4MU/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221364 Bill and Mara, Florida-based electrical engineering majors, decided to get married. Their shared passion for their field inspired them to theme their "ultimate geek wedding" as “Circuit and Swirls,” and they created invitations with LED-running circuits. Ever the DIY-er, Bill posted a video and a how-to on his blog. Some jerk mailed a handwritten manifesto (which he described as a "concerned warning") to their home address, because sometimes posting a nasty YouTube comment on someone's sweet shared thing just isn't enough. Read the whole thing at PassiveAggressiveNotes.com. (via Matt Richardson)
6:45 am	Teen who pointed laser at aircraft jailed for 30 months http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/wbe95lov_m0/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221366 CNN's Aaron Cooper reports on the consequences for aiming laser pointers at aircraft. U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson sentenced a 19-year-old man on Monday to 30 months in federal prison for shining a laser pointer at a plane and police helicopter, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office, which prosecuted the case.
6:51 am	T-Mobile ditches cellphone contracts http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/m9nD0cGYzoQ/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221375 Cyrus Farivar: "T-Mobile's offering, dubbed “Simple Choice,” makes the company the first of the big four US-based carriers to drop one-year or two-year contracts in favor of purely month-to-month-based arrangements. T-Mobile outlined the new plan on its website Monday."
6:55 am	Charges dropped against groundhog http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/nqUShMnD0lU/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221378 The Ohio prosecutor who called for Punxsutawney Phil's indictment and execution has dropped the charges, saying that "I have really serious work to do." Previously.
6:39 am	Beautiful photos of cellphone masts disguised as ugly trees http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/x6A9GlKFAa4/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221297 Wired visits Dillon Marsh's photos of cellphone masts (badly) disguised as trees, and asks why they even bother. “There were already a wide variety of designs by the time I started photographing,” says Marsh, who completed the project over six months in 2009. “The designs loosely mimic trees that are found in the local environment.” Meanwhile, in the American Southwest, fledgling company Larson Camouflage was responding to similar style-sensitive network companies. Larson makes scores of different “trees” but it kicked everything off in 1992 with a naturalistic pine that concealed a disagreeable cell tower in Denver, Colorado. To dress up a cell tower in plastic foliage can cost up to $150,000, four times the cost of a naked mast. Marsh is skeptical about the need for high-tech camouflage. “Even though the gesture is well-meaning, in many cases the result seems clumsy and unconvincing,” he says of the South African technoflora. “Most people don’t feel strongly positive or negative about them, but simply view them as a curiosity.” Cellphone Towers Disguised as Trees Are a Puzzling Attempt at Aesthetics
6:25 am	Controversy over Esquire profile of the SEAL who shot bin Laden (or maybe didn't) http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/xcwq2m4D1yE/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221354 Was Phil Bronstein's 15,000-word Esquire profile of the SEAL Team 6 member who killed Osama bin Laden, a Navy SEAL who is "now retired and struggling to make ends meet while dealing with the psychological and physical scars of war," a bunch of “Complete B-S”? That's what some of "The Shooter's" fellow SEALs told CNN's Peter Bergen. Adrian Chen tries to figure it out. Esquire stands by the story. [Gawker]
6:22 am	DDoS storm breaks records at 300 Gbps http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/ljoYT7yKxdc/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221260 The Internet has been groaning under the weight of a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Domain Name Service, apparently aimed at anti-spam vigilantes Spamhaus, in retaliation for their blacklisting of Dutch free speech hosting provider Cyberbunker. At 300 mbps, the DDoS is the worst in public Internet history. “These things are essentially like nuclear bombs,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare. “It’s so easy to cause so much damage.” The so-called distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks have reached previously unknown magnitudes, growing to a data stream of 300 billion bits per second. “It is a real number,” Mr. Gilmore said. “It is the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet.” Spamhaus, one of the most prominent groups tracking spammers on the Internet, uses volunteers to identify spammers and has been described as an online vigilante group. In the past, blacklisted sites have retaliated against Spamhaus with denial-of-service attacks, in which they flood Spamhaus with traffic requests from personal computers until its servers become unreachable. But in recent weeks, the attackers hit back with a far more powerful strike that exploited the Internet’s core infrastructure, called the Domain Name System, or DNS. As bad as this is, it could be a lot worse. An anonymous paper called Internet Census 2012: Port scanning /0 using insecure embedded devices reports on a researcher's project to scan every IPv4 address for publicly available machines that will accept a telnet connection and yield up a root login to a default password. The researcher reports that 1.2 million such devices are available online (s/he compromised many of these machines in order to run the census). These machines are things like printers and routers with badly secured firmware, visible on the public net. They are often running an old version of GNU/Linux and can be hijacked to form part of a staggeringly large botnet that would be virtually unkillable, since the owners of these devices are vanishingly unlikely to notice that they are silently running attackware, and the devices themselves are completely unregarded. Firm Is Accused of Sending Spam, and Fight Jams Internet [NYT/John Markoff & Nicole Perlroth] (via Hacker News)
6:05 am	CIA director promotes woman who approved destruction of CIA "harsh interrogation" videos http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/sBj3ZtTxhkI/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221344 A woman has been placed in charge of the CIA’s clandestine service for the first time in the agency’s history, reports the Washington Post. She's a veteran officer whom many in the agency support, and the high-level appointment is seen as a step forward for women in Washington. That's the good news! The bad news is... [S]he also helped run the CIA’s detention and interrogation program after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and signed off on the 2005 decision to destroy videotapes of prisoners being subjected to treatment critics have called torture. The woman, who remains undercover and cannot be named, was put in the top position on an acting basis when the previous chief retired last month. The question of whether to give her the job permanently poses an early quandary for [CIA Director John] Brennan, who is already struggling to distance the agency from the decade-old controversies.</p> More: "CIA director faces a quandary over clandestine service appointment". [The Washington Post, via @dabeard]
6:17 am	Cody R Wilson's 3D-printed guns: the VICE documentary http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/lNCOUWnoN-o/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221346 Erin Lee Carr produced this VICE Motherboard documentary on Cody R Wilson of Defense Distributed (DD), who "figured out how to print a semi-automatic rifle from the comfort of his own home" and is now spreading the gospel of "wiki weapons." Yes, they even have a manifesto. Wilson, who recently pitched his ideas at SXSW, is sharing the HOWTO online and encouraging others to join him. This is a story about the rapid evolution of a technology that has forced the American legal system to play catch up. Cody Wilson, a 24 year old University of Texas Law student, is an advocate for the open source production of firearms using 3D printing technology. This makes him a highly controversial figure on both sides of the gun control issue. MOTHERBOARD sat down with Cody in Austin, Texas to talk about the constitution, the legal system, and to watch him make and test-fire a 3D-printed gun. A related item at VICE by Adam Clark Estes reports on the reaction of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). The government doesn't seem entirely sure what to think of Wilson's own institution. I talked to a number of ATF representatives, all of whom sent a similar message: 3D-printed gun technology has arrived, but it's not good enough yet to start figuring out how to regulate it. "We are aware of all the 3D printing of firearms and have been tracking it for quite a while," Earl Woodham, spokesperson for the ATF field office in Charlotte, told me. "Our firearms technology people have looked at it, and we have not yet seen a consistently reliable firearm made with 3D printing."
5:53 am	To watch: PBS NOVA on Russian Meteor Strike debuts tonight, March 27 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Cxm0PkT1TIo/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221335 "A blinding flash of light streaked across the Russian sky, followed by a shuddering blast strong enough to damage buildings and send more than 1,000 people to the hospital." Tonight, the PBS program NOVA explores the science questions behind the mysterious events of February 15, 2013, when a 7,000-ton asteroid crashed into Earth's atmosphere. "Is our solar system a deadly celestial shooting gallery with Earth in the crosshairs? And what are the chances that another, more massive asteroid is heading straight for us?" Watch. Watch Meteor Strike Preview on PBS. See more from NOVA.
Tuesday, March 26th, 2013
8:05 pm	Nuts-and-bolts look at password cracking http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/gUe8eis1eMw/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=220697 Ars Technica's Nate Anderson decided to try cracking passwords (from a leaked file of MD5 hashes), to see how difficult it was. After a very long false start (he forgot to decompress the word-list file) that's covered in a little too much detail, Anderson settles down to cracking hashes in earnest, and provides some good data on the nuts and bolts of password security: By this point I had puzzled out how Hashcat worked, so I dumped the GUI and switched back to the command-line version running on my much faster MacBook Air. My goal was to figure out how many hashes I could crack in, say, under 30 minutes, as well as which attacks were most efficient. I began again on my 17,000-hash file, this time having Hashcat remove each hash from the file once it was cracked. This way I knew exactly how many hashes each attack solved. This set of attacks brought the number of uncracked MD5 hashes down from 17,000 to 8,790, but clearly the best "bang for the buck" came from running the RockYou list with the best64.rule iterations. In just 90 seconds, this attack would uncover 45 percent of the hashed passwords; additional attacks did little more, even those that took 16 minutes to run. Cracking a significant number of the remaining passwords would take some much more serious effort. Applying the complex d3ad0ne.rule file to the massive RockYou dictionary, for instance, would require more than two hours of fan-spinning number-crunching. And brute force attacks using 6-character passwords only picked up a few additional results. The point, really, is that if you want to understand the relative security of different password-generation techniques, you need to understand what's involved in state-of-the-art password cracking techniques. How I became a password cracker
6:34 pm	Boxes sealed with ATHEIST tape lost by USPS 10X more often than controls http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/-EuTfD2EVjI/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221102 Atheist Shoes ("a cadre of shoemakers and artists in Berlin who hand-make ridiculously comfortable, Bauhaus-inspired shoes for people who don't believe in god(s)") noticed that a disproportionate number of their shipments to the USA were delayed or lost. A customer suggested this may be because USPS workers were taking offense at the ATHEIST packing tape they used to seal the boxes. So the company tried an A/B split, and found that boxes emblazoned with ATHEIST tape were 10 times more likely to go missing in the USPS and took an average of three days longer than their generic equivalents. They've stopped using the ATHEIST packing tape. ATHEIST / USPS Discrimination Against Atheism? (Thanks, Alice!)
5:32 pm	Abandoned cake-box at airport turns into inadvertent Portal-themed security worry http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/cWT_lEOQkkI/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=220988 An empty cake-shipping box abandoned at the Tampa airport reportedly freaked out passengers and Portal players: "My visit to Tampa has drawn to a close, and The Lady just dropped me off at the airport. Right by the Air Canada entrance, this styrofoam box marked “CAKE” has been unnerving passengers. It’s empty — it probably held cake for transport but was too big to fit into the car that picked it up — but I let some airport staff know that it was beginning to worry some people. Namely, the security-conscious and Portal players." Unnerving People at the Airport (or: The Cake is a Lie!)
4:34 pm	RPG inside an Excel workbook http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/-Ql_62aD68g/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221041 Cary Walkin, an accountant in Toronto, knows a thing or two about Excel. So great is his expertise that he was able to create a full-fledged RPG inside of its scripting environment, called Arena.Xlsm. I couldn't get it to run in LibreOffice, but it sounds like it's very featurful and fun, provided that you're willing to use Microsoft products: * Random enemies: Over 2000 possible enemies with different AI abilities. * Random items: 39 item modifiers result in over 1000 possible item combinations and attributes. * An interesting story with 4 different endings depending on how the player has played the game. * 8 boss encounters, each with their own tactics. * 4 pre-programmed arenas followed by procedurally generated arenas. Each play-through has its own challenges. * 31 Spells. There are many different strategies for success. * 15 Unique items. Unique items have special properties and can only drop from specific enemies. * 36 Achievements. * This is all in a Microsoft Excel workbook. Arena.Xlsm Released! (via Digg)
3:35 pm	Documentary on activist who taught people to make solar cottage industries in 16 countries http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/3cZ7AlViK7U/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=220995 Gmoke sez, "Richard Komp has taught people how to make solar as a cottage industry in at least 16 different countries over the last few years. There's a documentary called "Burning in the Sun" about his work in Mali and he's even got an Introduction to Photovoltaics series on YouTube. Reports from his 25 international trips available here" Solar as a Cottage Industry
3:27 pm	Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's long history of public drunkenness and brawling http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/UmPUrUQ_84o/story01.htm http://boingboing.net/?p=221037 Two weeks ago, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was accused of drunkenly groping and propositioning former mayoral race rival Sarah Thomson at a Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee charity event. He denied it, and smeared Thomson on his radio show. Now, many people have come forward to say that Ford had become drunk and disorderly at military charity event called the Garrison Ball. These are just the latest in a series of incidents of public drunkenness for the mayor, who is a horrible embarrassment to the city of my birth. The Toronto Star has a long account of Ford's frequent bouts of public drunkenness and brawling, including events that he lied about at the time and later had to apologise for. However, over the next hour, people in attendance noticed that the mayor seemed impaired. According to interviews, he was “incoherent,” “stumbling,” “rambling,” “intoxicated,” “slurring,” “seemed to be drunk,” “was nervous, excited, sweaty, out of it.” Military guests were offended at the mayor’s behaviour, according to guests interviewed by the Star. “It felt disrespectful to the event,” said one organizer. The six guests who provided accounts of the mayor’s condition spoke on condition of anonymity. The Star found that while these guests were concerned with the mayor’s condition, they did not want to be identified for two reasons. First, they did not want to be linked to a story that would cast a poor light on the annual Garrison Ball, which raises money for Wounded Warriors, a federally registered charity. Second, these guests, who all have prominent positions in the community, feared they would somehow be blacklisted for speaking out about the mayor. Rob Ford: ‘Intoxicated’ Toronto mayor asked to leave military ball [Toronto Star/Robyn Doolittle & Kevin Donovan]