There’s been a lot of talk recently about Apple, the new iPad, and Jobs’ denouncement of Flash.  Supposedly Steve Jobs thinks Adobe has gotten lazy and he believes them to be evil similar to Google.  What does Jobs think he’s doing when designing hardware with proprietary connectors, closed hardware etc?

YouTube has a beta site with HTML5 + h264 (Firefox won’t work yet). An interesting comparison is to view a video with Flash and then view the same video in theirHTML5 beta site.  Open your task manager and watch your processor usage — notice a different?

Mudge (from L0pht) has just been hired as a program manager by DARPA. (I didn’t even know DARPA still existed). Do you remember when L0pht testified before congress that they could bring down the internet in 10 minutes?

You don’t hear this much but there’s an interesting article in defense of security theater.

I previously wrote about how you could get a knife on board a plane without first having it in your luggage or on your person.  Now some folks have done a study and tested various “safe” objects and how lethal they are by using a dead pig (stabbing the pig’s neck, measuring blood loss). If that’s not enough, someone leaked a copy of the TSA’s Screening Standard Operating Procedures which is out there on Wikileaks.  There’s a great article titled ‘TSA: Worst Than Useless‘ which I recommend everyone read.

It’s great the TSA employs people.  But why not keep paying them and allow them to just stay at home?  They inconvenience so many people and don’t provide any value; as Schneier says, it’s complete security theatre.  I understand that unemployment is very high today in the United States (> 10%).  Why not create something like the Tennessee Valley Authority and pay folks to work on public projects even if it’s picking up trash or beautifying state parks?

I previously wrote about installing and using the alternative linksys firmware, DD-WRT. Well, after running DD-WRT for about 5 months I’ve decided to roll back to the original linksys firmware.  Here’s my reasoning:

• My linksys wrt54g v8 was only capable of running dd-wrt MICRO.  Micro has the least amount of features of any of the dd-wrt releases (the linksys doesn’t have enough nvram to store any more features/applications)
• IPtables support was crippled in dd-wrt micro v24 that I was running.  I wanted to setup a span/mirror port which was not possible (at least not for me).  I’ll have to spend a few bucks now and buy a hub (if i can find one anywhere!  No one seems to sell hubs..)
• The DD-WRT was randomly forgetting all of its settings (port forwardings etc, which was causing me to lose all remote access to my machines).  DD-WRT doesn’t run SSH at the micro level and there’s no way I’m leaving telnet open publicly.
• DD-WRT was unreliable.  I had to reboot it at least once a month because it would lock up and stop routing packets.

Has anyone tried OpenWRT?

I recently got slapped with a DMCA notice from my ISP, Time Warner. Below is a copy of the page where all of my traffic was redirected to. All of my requests were hijacked until you acknowledge the notice. Using FireBug I tried altering the javascript to send different return codes back to Time Warner. Unfortunately, they seem to be performing input validation on the return code and nothing was working.  Has anyone else had any success manipulating this?  What kind of workarounds have you tried?  OpenDNS?  Any pirate firmware for the Motorola Surfboards to change the physical address?  How do you get the new MAC address registered on Road Runner’s end?

Below is an excerpt of the webpage:
    ....


     


....

?

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">

<!--

// Push the window forward if the user goes back...

window.history.forward(1);

function MM_reloadPage(init) {  //reloads the window if Nav4 resized

if (init==true) with (navigator)

{

if ((appName=="Netscape")&&(parseInt(appVersion)==4))

{

document.MM_pgW=innerWidth; document.MM_pgH=innerHeight; onresize=MM_reloadPage;

}

}

else if (innerWidth!=document.MM_pgW || innerHeight!=document.MM_pgH) location.reload();

}

MM_reloadPage(true);

 function RequestRelease(sReasonCode) {

 document.ReasonForm.ClickedCode.value = sReasonCode;

 document.ReasonForm.submit();

 }

//-->

</script>

<td align="left" background="imgs/index_r2_c2.gif" bgcolor="#ffffff" valign="top">

<form name="ReasonForm" method="post" action="ReasonPg.aspx?[SOME_HASH_KEY_1]" id="ReasonForm">

<input name="__VIEWSTATE" value="[SOME_HASH_KEY_2]" type="hidden">

<input name="ClickedCode" id="ClickedCode" type="hidden">

<td rowspan="5" align="left" valign="top" width="94%"><span><span><a href="Javascript:RequestRelease('[I TRIED DIFFERENT VALUES HERE]')"><b>I am aware of this issue and will take steps to resolve it.<b></b></b></a><b><b><br><br></b></b><pre><b><b>Dear Subscriber:

(message here --- see screenshot)

Road Runner Customer Care</b></b></pre><b><b><br><br><a href="Javascript:RequestRelease('ABUSE-LEGALCOPY')"><b>I am aware of this issue and will take steps to resolve it.<b></b></b></a></b></b></span>