I've never been a fan of Boston's poor excuse for a public transportation system. I'm not sure what combinations of failures led to such a poor system for getting around in such a tiny city. It has been in the news lately because a few MIT students exposed holes in basically every security measure it uses (including getting unlimited free rides from the RFID cards). The MBTA responded by suing the students and trying to prevent them from revealing their findings. The court ultimately found that this last ditch security measure was not valid, and it failed like the rest of them. I've read through their presentation, and I'm thoroughly impressed. Plenty of social engineering along with brute-force tactics aimed at weaknesses. It's still pretty embarrassing how easy the MBTA made it for them though. Without further adieu, here's the presentation:
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf
A security researcher named Dan Kaminsky released a fundamental flaw in the design of the internet today that allows hackers to, among other things, send you their own web pages when you request a url such as "google.com". The flaw lies in the DNS system that translates domains to IP addresses (numbers that identify your computer on the internet). When you make a request for google.com or any other domain name, you ask your ISP what the IP address for that domain is, and then you connect to that IP address. Kaminsky published a way for an attacker to flood any ISP implementing the DNS protocol with requests in a way that sends other users to any IP address the attacker wishes.
Here is his webpage. He also has a tool that allows you to check whether your ISP has patched their system yet.
Democratic Party Nominee for President of the United States, 2008
The manhattan solstice takes place yesterday and today. Every year at this time, the sun sets between every street in manhattan. Wikipedia has a more detailed article about it here. Here are some pictures taken from various streets walking up 6th avenue that I took yesterday around 8pm.
This is one of the most incredible stories I've read recently. Apparently tribes still exist in the rainforest of Peru and Brazil that (in the year 2008!) have never been contacted by the outside world. Here is a picture taken by a plane flying over the area, which they must have thought to be a bird or evil spirit.
From the article,
"It is extraordinary to think that, in 2008, there remain about a hundred groups of people, scattered over the Earth, who know nothing of our world and we nothing of theirs, save a handful of brief encounters."
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