Math killed the market

 An excellent article on the mathematical formula that may have caused much of the current financial collapse

Making the cantina scene in Star Wars all the more real

Enter BaR2D2, a radio-controlled, mobile bar that features a motorized beer elevator, motorized ice/mixer drawer, six-bottle shot dispenser, and sound activated neon lighting.

This looks like it would be fun to have at our next TechMan drinkfest board meeting.

Source: Makezine.com

Carbon-seeking satellite launch ends in failure

Earlier today, NASA launched their Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite toward space, only to have it splash down in the ocean along with the remnants of the launch vehicle.

It was NASA's first satellite built exclusively to meaure CO₂ levels on the planet and gauge how our output of the gas is affecting climate change.

Installing a wireless printer

Installed an Epson Workforce 600 wireless printer over the weekend on my Mac and my wireless network. After doing all the normal printer stuff (loading ink and paper etc.) you connect the printer to your wireless router with an Ethernet cable (provided.)

You then have to install the software on your computer. Then it walks you through setting up the printer on the network. You need to know your network SSID No. and WEP key. If you have a wireless router from your Internet Service Provider, that info is usually with your install material or on the bottom of the router.

After the printer is found on the network, you disconnect the Ethernet cable and you are ready to go.  You also have to configure your scanner on the network, but that is pretty much done on the printer. You do have to provide your computer with the IP address of the scanner, which the printer gives to you.

Whole process took about an hour and went very smoothly.

Reward out for the nasty Conficker

On Valentine's Day, Microsoft sent a gift to the computer security community. The company offered a $250,000 reward to anyone identifying the author of the Conficker/Downadup worm that has infected at least a million computers and possibly as many as 10 million.

This is not the first time Microsoft has posted a bounty. In 2005 the software company paid out $250,000 to two people who helped identify the creator of the notorious Sasser worm. The author was arrested and sentenced by the German authorities.

Conficker is a wily worm. Since October it has been prowling the Web looking for vulnerable computers -- computers that have not kept up to date with Windows security patches. Once it finds such a computer, it replicates itself, then burrows in and makes itself hard to remove. Once implanted, the worm searches out nearby servers and executes a password breaking program. It also spreads itself to any shared hard drives.

But even more dastardly, it makes a copy of itself on any device plugged into a USB port, such as any thumb drives, music players, or digital cameras. When that infected device is later plugged into another PC, it infects that machine, which then begins to similarly spread more infections.

The French military reportedly got the worm from a USB device plugged into its network.

The worm then waits for instructions over the Internet to steal data or turn control of infected computers over to malicious crackers who pool them into armies of bots.

These networks of compromised machines can be used to send spam, as storage for stolen or pirated data and to launch attacks on other machines.

Although Conficker is widespread, its creators have yet to activate its payload to steal data or launch other attacks.

Conficker is just the latest in a series of Internet worms, the most famous of which is the Morris worm, the first big Internet worm.

In 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student at Cornell University, launched the worm from computers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr. Morris said the original intent of the worm was to gauge the size of the Internet, but an error in the code caused the worm to replicate wildly, freezing up thousands of computers.

In one of those ironies that can only happen in real life, Mr. Morris' father, Robert H. Morris, was the chief scientist at the National Security Agency's National Computer Security Center.

Robert Tappan Morris was tried and was the first person convicted under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He was sentenced to three years probation, community service and a fine of $10,000. Today he is on the faculty of M.I.T.

The Morris worm has sometimes been referred to as the "Great Worm," (derived from the "Great Worms" in the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien) because of the devastating effect it had upon the Internet at that time. It prompted the Pentagon to fund the Computer Readiness Emergency Team Coordination Center at the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.

So what to do about the Conficker worm?

To avoid getting it, follow normal secure computing behavior, especially keeping your Windows security updates current.

Conficker also emphasizes a new vector of attack: the USB device or drive. USB drives, or devices with USB drives in them (cameras, e.g.), can carry malware. When you plug them into your computer, you can inherit it.

Obviously USB drives are useful; but like your mother used to say about putting coins in your mouth, don't plug in a strange USB drive because "you don't know where it's been."

Particularly risky are so-called U3 "Smart" drives that can run programs when plugged in.

If you allow someone to plug in a USB drive filled with audio or video they have gotten from file sharing or porn sites, there's a good chance your computer will end up worm meal.

You just knew it

You just knew that sometime after Google announced Google Ocean someone will have claimed to have found Atlantis. 

Facebook caves in

Facebook has given in to user pressure and withdrawn a new set of usage rules that said that the service owned all content posted there, even after a user closed his account. Frankly, TechMan can't see why anyone would want to keep most of that stuff, but who knows, maybe the postings of famous people will be worth something in the future. 

Large Hadron Collider no longer a threat to mankind

And it's all thanks to Tom Hanks, who has been given the honor of starting the thing up when they get it fixed.

The giant underground machine, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, suffered a catastrophic malfunction soon after being switched on amid a fanfare of publicity last September.

A faulty electrical connection led to a leak of super-cold helium causing damage estimated at £20 million to the device, operated by Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva.

As a result, 53 of the magnets used to accelerate subatomic particles around the machine's 17-mile circular tunnel underneath the Franco-Swiss border have had to be brought to the surface for repair or cleaning.

Hanks was approached about the move while filming his latest film Angels and Demons in which he plays a Harvard University academic investigating a plot to annihilate the Vatican with 0.25 grams of antimatter stolen from Cern.

Steve Myers, Cern's director of accelerators and technology, told Nature News that he gave the actor a tour of the laboratory on February 13 and asked him if he would return for the switch-on, to which the actor agreed.

We had a discussion down here in the post-gazette.com underground bunker and we decided that Hanks' character in Road to Perdition is the closest he's ever come to playing a bad guy, so we feel much better about the LHC with him at the controls.

Free audio books are good food

I discovered the folks at Librivox this weekend.  They are a collection of volunteers who record themselves reading public domain books (ie, books published prior to 1923) and you can download them freely as MP3s.  They have a pretty lofty goal: to record all of the books in the public domain.  They've got a good start at 1,946 recordings to date.

I was never one who jumped on the audio book craze but with a long trip to work like mine, sometimes radio and music can just bore me to death.  I started "reading" Ayn Rand's "Anthem" on the daily commute this week with my iPod hooked up to the car stereo.

The quality of the audio book is quite good.  The volunteer that recorded the book is speaking very clearly and she adds emphasis where needed so that the thing doesn't come off sounding like a lecture.  That would also bore me to death.

You can download the entire set of MP3 files one at a time, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed for the book in iTunes.

Speaking of being bored, if you happen to be, why not swing over there and volunteer your time to record some audio books?  If you've listened to me in the podcast for any length of time, you know that I have no business volunteering for them.  I'd bore you to death.

Librivox recording catalog

Volunteering to read for Librivox

Fallout 3 moves to post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh has showed its face in a number of movies and has been on TV a lot recently with the Super Bowl and all.

But TechMan didn't know of any major computer games set in Pittsburgh.

Until now.

In March, Bethesda Game Studios, the maker of the popular computer game "Fallout 3," will make available a scenario for the Xbox 360 and PC that sets the action in post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh.

One of the problems storyline computer games have is that once you play them to the end, they're pretty much useless. In order to bridge the gap until the next game is produced -- which takes a while because of increasing complexity -- game makers have come up with downloadable content packs (DLCs). By downloading these over the Internet for a fee, a game player can use the same characters and even continue the same storyline.

"Fallout 3's" next DLC will be called "The Pitt."

Here's the storyline as gleaned from the Internet (with TechMan's comments in parentheses): The game player will journey to an industrial raider town, called The Pitt, from the location of the original game, which was post nuclear-war Washington, D.C. (The Wash?)

The journey takes place by railroad (but the journey is difficult because Amtrak service to Pittsburgh has been cut back so severely.)

Although Pittsburgh has not been hit directly by a nuclear bomb (we always seem to be behind other cities), the surrounding Three Rivers have become irradiated (just wait until they figure out there is a fourth radioactive "river" underground making the fountain at the Point look very impressive at night.)

The radiation from the rivers has changed the populace, making them into Super Mutants (NFL linemen) or turning them feral (ferals do things like gather regularly at a place where violent sports are played and cook large hunks of meat over open fires. Oh, wait, that's Steelers fans.)

The Lone Wanderer (the player) will go there disguised as a slave to usurp a band of raiders who have taken over the steel yards (does the steel industry make a comeback?)

But first a little background.

Owyn Lyons and his gang, called the "Brotherhood of Steel" (later changed to the Steelers?), decided to clean up The Pitt. To do this, he led his gang in an attack over "Mt. Wash" (I hope not at rush hour because getting on the Fort Pitt Bridge is bad enough without a lot of invaders involved).

They "rid the area of the 'scum' in 'surrounding regions' " (I assume this means West Virginia, although it could also mean Baltimore or Cleveland.)

This attack became known as The Scourge (or The Immaculate Scourge or Renaissance III.)

Although they were outnumbered, the Brotherhood razed the place to the ground (thanks a lot.)

They also picked up every nonmutated child they could find, of which there were 20 (10 for offense and 10 for defense.) One of these children grew up to become Paladin Kodiak (who apparently is some kind of hero in the game, but as a kid was a bear.)

Even after The Scourge, The Pitt is still a center of raider and slaver activity. A holotape found in the city of Rockopolis (Fred Flintstone's hometown) shows that the entire populace of that town was taken to the The Pitt to be sold as slaves (which might explain why so many guys in Pittsburgh are named Dino.)

It is in this post-Scourge city that the game takes place (I think, although I may have the timeline entirely wrong.)

Now, although TechMan does not promote specific products, let me just say that if "The Pitt" does well, there could be a new entertainment niche for the city.

Why couldn't the main game take place in Pittsburgh? It could be called "Fallaht 3."