hackaday links

posted Jul 12th 2005 2:15am by Vince Veneziani
filed under: Uncategorized

what a great day out! so great that today’s links are gonna be hardcore. super fast, super awesome, and super rockin. because you should be outside playing football. with me.

netflix be rockin some secret memos….oooh la la.
a real good waste of a tablet pc so it can be a photo frame. [sam]
a guy from japan goes and makes a jetpack from pressurized soda bottles. a must see. [aaron]
the burning scooter. beyond awesome….but it’s hosted via dyndyns. so get it while it’s hot (omg hahaahaha a pun! i’m so funny!) [trilly]
more guitar goodness! i’m in heaven! keep sending in links like these guys! [eric]

and of course it’s how-tuesday over at engadget. read my how-to on building your own cheapie pedal board! now you can totally pretend to rock.

and to you people who “got longhorn beta months ago”…you didn’t. you got an early build of it. the official beta was released a few days ago. :)

the bbc also launched an open source website. i highly reccomend checking it out of course.

NYTimes wrote up a story on the death penalty for hackers (among other punishments of course too). load of crap, read it using bugmenot.

holy smokes. phrack (yes the phrack) is coming out with a final issue. this to me is pretty big news!

lastly, go forth and control thy house with thy psp! [charlie]

Comments [28]

Reader Comments

Hey awesome! I read slashdot, and then I go visit hackaday and can read the EXACT SAME articles all over again! Fantastic!

Posted at 3:54 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by skittles

First its dyndns, not dyndyns, and dyndns is primarily a free dns service, *.dyndns.org is one of their free domains you can register. The guy is probably hosting the site off his connection.

Posted at 4:07 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by pete

Hence why you’d expect it to go down under bandwidth strain.

Posted at 4:25 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by furtim

That NYT article is a load of BS.

Hackers are the Internet equivalent of Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who didn’t manage to hurt anyone on his airplane but has been annoying travelers ever since.

And the fact that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were hackers means… nothing to him?

Posted at 4:31 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by windwaker

that jetpack is fake, when he takes off he starts rotating around a fixed point, except it’s almost completely horizontal, no flips. if the jetpack really did provide enough force to propel him that far, he would have flipped a few times.

that and it’s a japanese game show or something, which we all know are fake, unlike american game shows, where the people really are left on an island and have to eat rats to survive ;)

Posted at 4:31 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by ryan

i wrote a few letters to the author of the NY times article and i suggest you all do also because he is a slime ball

To Whom It May Concern:
I can

Posted at 4:55 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by MAnny

http://stashbox.org/uploads/1121202268/textupload.1121202268.txt

I started writing this immediately after my comment (#4).

He makes me siiick. It’s our duty to inform him about how mislead he is.

Posted at 5:05 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by windwaker

Tell everybody to email the author of the NYT article at tierney@nytimes.com to tell him how much we “like” his opinions. ;)

Posted at 5:27 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by Jedimonkey

Wow… he put a frame over the top of an old tablet PC… wooohoo. Next time disassemble the thing and put a wooden case on the back – then you’ve got a hack worth calling a hack.

Posted at 5:32 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by smilr

Who likes my letter? :

“Dear John Tierney

#3Y (0(|< F4(3 57FU

Yours sincerly
Chris.”

Posted at 6:24 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by chris

Again this has been said if you complian about the hacks make your own better one and psot it if not then dont bother to comment

Posted at 6:28 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by matt2

would anyone happen to have a coral cache of the burning scooter?

Posted at 6:44 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by Mike

“The experts weren’t sure that any punishment could fit the crime, but they had several suggestions: Make the hacker spend 16 hours a day fielding help-desk inquiries in an AOL chat room for computer novices. Force him to do this with a user name at least as uncool as KoolDude and to work on a vintage IBM PC with a 2400-baud dial-up connection. Most painful of all for any geek, make him use Windows 95 for the rest of his life.”
haha pwned!

Posted at 6:44 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by rez

windows 95 was like, good. He obviously knows nothing.

Posted at 7:18 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by windwaker

You think I wasted the tablet? What else would you use a 100Mhz AMD/32 tablet for?

Posted at 7:23 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by Sam Garfield

to #16

Pong?

Seriously, how many retro applications can you think of that’d still be useful today for school, work, reading and such? I’d think that it’s picture quality would be total crap, but I bet I can find at least one hundred uses for it. Hell, I’ve got a few for you.

You’ve probably GOT an old version of word if you have this machine, but if not there’s still dozens of free word processors that you could find to work on it. Ditto for spreadsheets.

A few retro pc games might still entertain the kids (or yourself) and why use a 3ghz machine for solitare. Tablets are awesome for board games between you and a friend because you can just plop it down on the table or pass it around.

Use it as the controller for a robot/rover.

If it has an Ifrared port, mount the thing on or in your coffee table and use it as a multi-purpose remote. Use eye-candy apps and repaint/modify the casing to dress it up. It can run a photo slideshow or any cool screensaver while not in use. Hell, you can keep a few games on it too *duh*.

How about mounting it in the car. It can’t play movies and it’s probably not much good for mp3’s either, but you could take fast notes, keep directions and other important info handy, and collect statistics on the car with the right instrumentation. Again, load up some eye candy screensavers/themes/backgrounds for when it’s not in use.

Posted at 8:13 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by bob

RE number 11
I didn’t make these – but here you go:

http://www.applefritter.com/node/2364
http://www.applefritter.com/node/4971
http://www.applefritter.com/hacks/duodigitalframe/

By comparison his picture frame ‘hack’ is weak.

I’ve made my own, but don’t have hosting for a page about it, nor did I take in-progress pictures, so a writeup on it’s construction is kinda useless.

Posted at 9:02 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by smilr

The tablet frame hacks, while cool, have been done tons of times. >_>

Posted at 10:18 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by windwaker

nice engadget article about duct tape, vince ;)

Posted at 11:13 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by Gino

Here’s another login for the nytimes article:

sdafasdhfasd
sdafasdhfasd

Oh, and re: number 11: I have made my own better one. I’ll try and take some pics and send them in soon. It’s based on a Wallstreet PowerBook G3… a 250MHZ pictureframe. It also has a PCMCIA video-in card on it so you can watch TV on it too!

Posted at 11:21 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by t3h.l33t

pcmcia video-in card, now thats putting the super picture frame to use, i still liked the one where the guy used a touch screen to control audio, etc and when not in use just had a screen saver that were pictures. but could his watch tv?

Posted at 11:51 pm on Jul 12th, 2005 by kolwon

Heres my letter to the !@#$ that wrote that article, if anyone would like to add any thoughts or repost it elsewhere to help kill this guys rep, feel free….

Goodevening Mr. Tierney,

First of all, I would like to congratulate you on making yourself the single biggest ass on the face of the planet.
There are so many reasons why your article “Worse Than Death” amounts to little more, rather much less, than the
binary code enabling the display of your text. I will start with my favorite:

“I’m tempted to say that the correct answer is D, and not just because of the man-years I’ve spent running virus scans and reformatting hard drives. I’m almost convinced by Steven Landsburg’s cost-benefit analysis showing that the spreaders of computer viruses and worms are more logical candidates for capital punishment than murderers are.”
What you are saying here is that you put a monetary value on human life. How painfully stoic. You kiss your mother with that mouth? I mean, that has got to be the single most in-human thing I’ve ever heard. How could you say that someone whos intellect outweighs your own be murdered by the state, for the mere fact that your numbers don’t look good. I’d like to think human life is worth more than a mineral [gold, in case that went over your over-inflated head]
Secondly, your hardly sparing use of the term “hacker” is another obvious red flag portraying your ignorance. The term “hacker” has no certain definition, rather it is a media buzz-word [you would know all about this hmm?] used as a symbol to give a faceless “problem” an identity thus enabling you to give other members of the uneducated populace another object to hate. Those in “the know” usually consider the term “hacker” to mean [I wont quote this because I wouldn't say things I can't recall perfectly and without a doubt, unlike certain people] one who uses an existent technology for a purpose other than what it was intended for. There are actually many large and successful companies in the field of electronics who hold this philosophy.
On another note, you have outdone yourself yet again with a blatently sexist remark, once again a shining beacon of your lack of knowledge on the subject:
“I see his logic, but I also see practical difficulties. For one thing, many hackers live in places where capital punishment is illegal. For another, most of them are teenage boys, a group that has never been known for fearing death. They’re probably more afraid of going five years without computer games.”
You know there are quite a few programmers,

Posted at 2:18 am on Jul 13th, 2005 by Muhzark

While the jetpack was a fake, it still had me laughing big time the first couple of plays.

Then, as you, I started to dissect the details and it fell apart.
But until that point it was hysterical.

Posted at 7:33 am on Jul 13th, 2005 by strider_mt2k

Are you guys really as dense as you illustrate here?

The NYT article was a *joke*! Funny hah-hah, not funny peculiar! Tongue-in-cheek! It was an op-ed, not something written under the guise of real news. Oi.

Go outside, guys. Get a little taste of reality and then come back and play on the computer.

Posted at 1:36 pm on Jul 13th, 2005 by Tim

Is that what you seriously believe? Tim, you sound on awful lot like this tierney.

Hm. Actually, I’d go so far to say that you are him. He sounds awfully afraid of hackers. =D

Nice try though.

Posted at 6:33 pm on Jul 13th, 2005 by windwaker

the jetpack is from the show thats used to make HEY! spring of trivia on Spike channel.. i think ne ways..

Posted at 11:45 pm on Jul 14th, 2005 by marc

Is there anyway that anyone knows of to send a person an email that will disperse it to there account multiple times. I keep getting Nigerian scams from the same guy over and over and I want to repay him.

Posted at 6:34 pm on Jul 18th, 2005 by Rob

I also wrote a responce to the NYTimes article which I have recreated here (for your enjoyment)

Mr. Tierney,

Firstly, I’d like to say that the Death Penalty is not a deterent in any way, shape or form. It never has been and it never will be.

Secondly, I think you are taking this “attack” a little out of proportion. At worst this is a crime, at best a nuisance. Hackers who write worms and viruses do so to exploit loop holes and damaged areas in programs and system security. They have found a weakness and they have written a program to use that weakness. People who complain about the effects these viruses and worms have on systems are burying their heads in the sand and hiding from the truth.

As an analogy: Let’s say that a company makes a lock out of butter. The company says the lock is secure until some “hacker” comes along and melts the lock. Should you blame the “hacker” or the company that made the lock?

See, in reality no company would ever make a lock out of butter. However the question still exists, do you blame the person who found the weakness, or the company who set up the system security.

I quote Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos: “Since it first emerged a week ago, the Sasser worm has been bombarding vulnerable computer systems with the most significant virus attack of 2004,”

What you may have not noticed, which I find extremely pertinent is his use of the word “vulnerable”. Vulnerable Computer Systems. Why were these systems vulnerable? Who was doing quality control on them to ensure system integrity?

As another analogy: If the mouse gets away, don’t blame the mouse, build a better mouse trap.

Thank You for your time,
Crypto(/)aniac

(unfortunately, I think I misspelled several words, which will have the effect of reducing the impact of my letter.)

Posted at 5:30 am on Jul 19th, 2005 by CryptoManiac