Archive for February, 2006

I was surprised to find that there is another country (Canada) whose government is even more intimate with their recording industry than the US government is with the RIAA…. Wow….

My understanding:

1. If you own material you can according to “Fair Use” legally change (format shift) the medium that material resides on for your own use.
2. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act says that you cannot decode the encryption on media you own to perform the “Fair Use” cited above.

The two points above being said…
Here is a link outlining how to rip your DVDs to put them on your Video iPod

Here is another interesting link, where a company called Makayama has built a utility to transcode to the Video iPod, and makes the claim that their product does not violate DMCA and provides “Fair Use”…

Rooster?

Having a bit of familiarity with auditing, I’ve always been amazed at the risk that giving data to an auditor presents to a company, and that no auditor ever has that listed in the audit findings. The security controls in most audit shops are horrible. Many (if not most) audit firms send sensitive information to and from client sites via email on the open Internet (something that would almost certainly be an audit finding if the client did this themselves)…

Deloitte & Touche Auditor loses McAfee employee data.

Ernst & Young fails to disclose high-profile data loss.

The only reason these are getting so much press is that they involve personal data loss by audit firms. Businesses out there would be amazed at how carelessly their sensitive data is treated by auditors…

Kind of a “who watches the watchers” scenario, but don’t get me started on the hypocrisy in the auditing biz…

This one is for all my former security auditing buddies. The link is for a freeware password cracking tool. The cracking tool has downloadable dictionaries (called rainbow tables), and is supposed to be much faster than a typical brute force attack.

A Quick and dirty overview of what Chaos Theory is.

Hurra Torpedo: Total Eclipse of the Heart

Cute… Not good, but cute…
Quail Hunting School

Has Bush started drinking on the job?

Just to be sure everyone knows where to go look for torrents…

A nice little HowTo that might leave you wondering why you need cable.

All the internet video goodness might be short lived, as major torrent sites have come under attack by the MPAA. This might not be a problem as China’s “People’s Daily Online” newspaper is speculating that the RIAA and MPAA might not be arond much longer… One can only hope it’s true… ;-)

Hmmm, maybe hydrogen technology is viable…

It is not often that I publish work related items, but I found this one telling. Perhaps Congress should have listened to the numerous attorneys, judges and professors that actually have an understanding of bankruptcy.

Study: Controversial Bankruptcy Law Reforms Not Working – 97 Percent Unable to Repay Debts, Most Pushed to Brink by Crisis: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance

This could make watching TV a little more interesting…

Explaining Ice still leaves scientists baffled.

We used to have so much fun playing with Liquid Nitrogen at my last job (your tax dollars at work)… But these guys have done their homework.

So, Dr. Suess was a political cartoonist between 1941-1943. Here is a page doumenting his work; it is pretty interesting.

Untitled Document

Wired News: Literacy Limps Into the Kill Zone.

I thought I was the only one who noticed… Oh my parents seem to have noticed a milder version of it years ago, when I was a child…. Hmmmmmm…

Ahhh, so the Palm Pilot has been replaced and the magic box that slips under the physical security radar…
Beware the ‘pod slurping’ employee.

The headline should read “Attention Network Security Weenies… fear any device that an employee can use to store data”….

I bet everyone has received emails with pictures of at least one of these houses in their email. Here at last are the details…