Fabrice Bellard –of QEMU fame– has implemented a PC-emulator in JavaScript. So now you can boot Linux in your browser. How geeky is that? Enjoy the show… Here are some technical details.
There is a small C-compiler available. It is ‘tcc’ (also from Bellard). You can use it to compile the sample (hello.c) 
Oh whow this is really nice… The iPhone uses its front-facing camera to track the head of the viewer. Since it knows where the head of the viewer is it can actually simulate a 3D display as can be seen in the video below… is that a cool piece of software or what?
Also on the iPad:
Helaas. Elf jaar te laat maar liever laat dan nooit zullen we maar denken. Een website als deze had nooit nodig hoeven zijn maar nu die er toch is… Ik doe dit niet vaak maar ik zou graag willen oproepen om dit prachtige initiatief van Microsoft® van harte te steunen. Microsoft® wil graag het marktaandeel van IE6 naar minder dan 1% terug brengen. Op de website IE6 countdown geven ze onomwonden toe hoe slecht IE6 eigenlijk is… Webdevelopers wisten dat al 10 jaar geleden. Een stukje zelfreflectie-gebeuren naar de webdeveloper toe… 10 jaar te laat.
Maar goed: steun dit initiatief! Sterker nog: laten we de lat nog net iets hoger leggen. Streef naar een Microsoft®-vrij internet! Op technologisch inferieure producten zit niemand te wachten. Dus als je toch van IE6 wilt afstappen: overweeg eens een echte browser! Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera of één van de andere gratis webbrowsers… Ook een raadzaam advies om op te volgen als je een nieuwere versie van IE gebruikt. Dumpen die handel!
Bedankt Microsoft®! En voortaan met je smerige poten van open standaarden afblijven. Schorem!
Microsoft is once again back at its core business: stealing from others. Here’s a remarkable writeup on a analysis of search results from Google and Bing (Microsoft search engine). Google was suspecting that Bing was somehow copying its searchresults… So they set a trap and guess what they caught (red handed)? Read it here.
Hahahaha… nou je kon er op wachten natuurlijk… de ov-chipkaart is volledig gekraakt. Eerder beweerde Trans Link Systems (de beheerder van deze ov-chipfail, een samenwerkingsverband van de ov-bedrijven) dat men fraude zou ontdekken en dat het tot blokkade van de kaart leidt. Kennelijk kan men zien dat de kaart niet is opgeladen maar wel het saldo verhoogd is. Nu blijkt echter dat de blokkade gewoon op de kaart zelf zit… dus met wat aangepaste software kun je deze gewoon deblokkeren.
Mensen met meer dan twee communicerende hersencellen wisten dit al maar even voor alle politici, beleidsmakers en automatiseringsprutsers: “security by obscurity” is GEEN security. Lees het. Onthoud het… en breng het in de praktijk. Saillant detail: de ov-chipkaart is een door De Nederlandse Bank goedgekeurd betaalmiddel. Whahahaha… ook een stel prutsers dus. En Nout Wellink maar roepen dat DNB een goed toezichthouder is. Welterusten.
Gelukkig is de ov-chipkaart voor een groot deel gefinancierd met extra-gratis belastinggeld dus het geeft niets. Op naar het volgende miljoenen verslindende bijvoorbaat kansloze project… Onze belastingcentjes worden gelukkig zorgvuldig besteed…
The words ‘hacking’ and ‘hacker’ are used in many context nowadays. I like this definition on Wikipedia:
In home computing, a hacker is a person who heavily modifies the software or hardware of their own computer system. It includes building, rebuilding, modifying, and creating software (software cracking, demo scene) or electronic hardware (hardware hacking, modding), either to make it better, faster, to give it added features or to make it do something it was never intended to do.
Now we all know people who actually ‘hack’ equipment (in the definition given above) but there are also people who treat their body as a piece of equipment. They actually operate on themselves and make bionic modifications to their body. They are called ‘biohackers‘ and they are performing ‘transhumanism‘. How fascinating. Here’s a quote
She does her own surgery, with a scalpel and a spotter to catch her if she passes out, and an anatomy book to give her some confidence she isn’t going to slice through a vein or the very nerves she’s trying to enhance.
from this article. Read and think about the concept of regarding your body as a device you can tweak… fascinating… Now let your imagination run wild… What would you like to add to your body if you could? Drop a comment if you have a really cool idea. I would like a device that automatically records everything I hear or see with a recording time of around 1 hour. So 1 hour after the recording I can still back it up to some external device using bluetooth… or maybe a USB connector that I implanted behind my ear. So much cool stuff you could do…
At the Chaos Computer Club Congress Microsofts Bruce Dang shared the knowledge gained by analyzing the Stuxnet worm. Stuxnet appears to be written to specifically attack Irans nuclear centrifuges. It spreads through windows based systems and is pretty nifty… well the most shocking of all is to see the enormous amount of stupid privilege raises that happen because windows doesn’t have a very secure foundation on which it is built (“a print-spooler flaw that allowed remote guest accounts to write executable files directly to disk”… tsk tsk tsk). This is a nice read-up about the stuxnet worm.
Oh wow. You really have to see this for yourself. Is this a cool app or what? Unfortunately I don’t come across much Spanish still from a technological point of view… this is really cool. Download it for free from the AppStore.
Well we’ve all been in a situation where the location you work at allows restricted access to the internet. To an IT-guy restricting access to the internet is like squeezing his throat. We can’t breath without unrestricted access to the internet…
Now I do understand you don’t want to grant any employee unrestricted access to the internet from the corporate network. At least half of them will double-click (execute) files called ‘clickme.exe‘ or ‘funny-picture-of-your-mom.exe‘. So here’s a nice trick to get yourself a little more freedom (and privacy) in the office. I will not explain all details. You already need to understand how to tunnel your SSH through the corporate proxy. If you don’t: you are out of luck… and probably someone who would click on ‘unreleased-justin-bieber-song.bat‘ anyway.
Whoahaaa… Good collegue Eric told me he was fiddling with his Samsung Galaxy S phone and he heard a ‘camera snapshot sound’ and got a message ‘Screen captured. Saved as image file.’
Reproducing how he actually did that wasn’t successful. Googling for the phenomenon showed a lot of links that requires the Android SDK to be installed… Browsing a little more showed a link to this page that describes how to do it from the phone itself. It’s really easy:
For this to work you probably need to have Froyo (Android 2.2) installed on your Samsung Galaxy S. This trick may (or may not) work on other Android phones with Froyo installed. Please try it out and leave a comment that indicates if this works on your phone as well. Thank you.
Here’s (the resized) result. In this case I started the camera application pointed it at my desktop (the fractal you see in the background) and I opened the menu of the camera application:
He he he, I don’t really need this but I think it is a nice gadget… the Table Connect for iPhone.
Oh wow, I have a new phone. It’s an android phone. The samsung Galaxy S. I had the phone lying around for a month but now it’s finally activated. Still reachable under the same number though. That’s why I had to wait.
Oh boy what a pleasure to work with. It has swype text input. This allows you to just swipe your finger or in my case my thumb over the keyboard. Single finger and fast text input. Very convenient.
Although I do like apple products and I was definitely considering to go iphone4 I decided to go android. First of all: I already have an ipod touch which is basically an iphone without the ability to make a phone call. So getting the iphone would not really be a new experience. So I go for the both worlds option. iOs and android. Let’s see what will turn out to be the better choice. So far so good: I love the samsung galaxy S.
Oops, if this is true this may be a killing blow to all of you MicroSoft fanboys out there. According to Computer World a tech-worker on the oilrig crashing windows systems may be part of the problem that eventually let to the spilling of oil. And we’re not talking a little Dr.Watson, an occasional “general exception”… we’re talking about a full-blown BSOD (blue screen of death). Well maybe we learn a little lesson here. Never use a computer system for critical mission computing that can’t even keep itself alive for longer than half an hour… If this doesn’t teach us then maybe this will… one day…
Whahahaha.. brilliant. Rop Gonggrijp is at it again. Together with some researchers he like totally p0wnez Indian voting machines. Rop already demonstrated that dutch voting machines are inherently unsafe. Check the site “Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet” (English). That is the reason why we (again) vote with red pencil and paper in the Netherlands. Now in India they will probably do the same thing. Looking for a career change? How about manufacturing red pencils… India will need a couple anytime soon. Here’s a cool video that can also be found on Rop’s site.
This is Google’s motto “Don’t be evil” however more and more it seems to be applicable to you and not to Google. The latest news is that the Street-view vehicles are also registering WLAN’s and MAC addresses while mapping your neighbourhood. Big issue in Germany (here’s a German article from newspaper ‘Der Spiegel’) where this was discovered.
Now the most appalling and worrying is that Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said internet users shouldn’t worry about privacy unless they have something to hide. Right. “Don’t be evil” also includes to not collect data that could facilitate any evil.