Just the one new Aston Martin, Sir?

According to Jacob Appelbaum's experience, any one in the UK, Canada, or Russia could be in danger of having their current account locked out.

Awesome. Whats even better is that we've heard nothing about it and some bastard could be buying a new Aston with my hard earned cash.

Edit:
It seems like other people have experienced this too: Simon Rumble, CC, and SecurityFocus has a statement on it. Perhaps it might be time to start moving all that cash to The Bunker?

Infectious Illness?

Illness must be infectious between my main PC and my body. I've been feeling a bit rough the last few days, but since last night I've felt like someones dropped a bookcase of unsold Linux Desktop Hacks on my head. It also seems my computer must be suffering the same though, as after going for some food last night, I return to find that my machine has crashed and in an endless loop as it tries to boot.

Now, as much as I hate proprietory software, I do use Windows for work and working from home requires Windows pretty much - sure I can remotely desktop in to servers from linux, but it can make supporting users harder if you can't bring up the exact interface immediately. Virtual Servers are good for this, but sometimes not fast enough - especially via VNC/RDP/SSH over the 'net.

Anyway, I've digressed. It seems that the PC won't even boot into linux or Windows safe mode. Oh dear. Now I recently rebuilt this PC software-wise, so I knew it was fine in terms of that, and given that neither would boot I was really starting to crap myself as I needed the PC today for work. So its 10pm and I'm sat cleaning out my machine, reseating everything, and moving it all around just to get the damn thing to boot. In the end I just left it, put the case back on and gave it one final boot - at 3am.

Praise be to the binary gods! It actually worked. Perhaps it was just all a big processor cache cold or something? Now if only my unknown illness would just go in the same way.

So I don't know what I'm doing...

Overall, most professional geeks and nerds I know don't have a problem saying that they can't do something, or don't know how to do something. I'll freely admit I know sod all about a lot of things; accountancy, multimedia creation, blender, the really clever art work you can do in the gimp or photoshop, playing the guitar, dancing. You get the picture.

If its not my job I'll give it a quick look over, if I think I can work out what I'm supposed to do I'll try. If I fail, I ask for help. "Users" and people in a lot of other professions seem to be different. They'll have a go at suggesting whats wrong - usually I don't mind. Occasionally they'll even get something right; but what really pisses me off is when a user uses that condescending tone with the word "obviously". It creates a level of untrust, and....well I don't want to use the word hatred...but I will anyway, hatred which shouldn't exist between IT staff and IT users.

Today such a situation arose; at work we give all users local administrator rights on their machines - this allows them to get on with their job and do whatever it is that they are paid to do (probably browse news.bbc.co.uk and play with their iPod by the look of some home directories). Unfortunately this can often present a problem which needs fixing - but in the long term its still usually best to carry on this policy, attempt to educate and repeat. In a few cases, however, this doesn't work and a cluebat is required, followed briefly by bog standard user rights. Surprisingly this makes me happy, and I think I'm supposed to understand that it's sadistic. I just don't.

"Educational Guide" to "Making a KeyGen"

FluxionTech has a good article on how KeyGen's are created.

It goes into a really rough overview on how proprietory software KeyGen's are created; beware, it assumed a reasonably amount of knowledge of ASM, and some limited C. If you dont know ASM, or even what it looks like you could be confused. Its certainly one of those more interesting articles - definately more interested on "how to rip a DVD".

Getting there

Things arent looking that bad now. At least how I sort of envisaged the whole bog roll looking, at least.

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