Nuclear Monster

  • Schneier’s write-up of the Stuxnet worm is good:

    None of this points to the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran, though. Best I can tell, this rumor was started by Ralph Langner, a security researcher from Germany. He labeled his theory “highly speculative,” and based it primarily on the facts that Iran had an usually high number of infections (the rumor that it had the most infections of any country seems not to be true), that the Bushehr nuclear plant is a juicy target, and that some of the other countries with high infection rates–India, Indonesia, and Pakistan–are countries where the same Russian contractor involved in Bushehr is also involved. This rumor moved into the computer press and then into the mainstream press, where it became the accepted story, without any of the origina caveats.

    via Schneier on Security: Stuxnet. Make sure to check out the comments as well.

  • “They actually conducted surveillance. They followed him from his work to his house,” Feldstein says. “They staked out his house. They looked at it for vulnerabilities … [and dicussed] how they could plant poison in his aspirin bottle. They talked about how they could spike his drink and they talked about smearing LSD on his steering wheel so that he would absorb it through his skin and die in a hallucination-crazed auto crash.”

    via Nixon’s Failed Attempts At ‘Poisoning The Press’ : NPR.

  • Well, at the very, very beginning, I noticed that people had not really got a good understanding of Photoshop and what you could do with it. People were paying a huge amount of money to go and have themselves in front of a Bentley, and hire models, and rent jewelry, and go to a location… I also had a background in photography, and before Pen & Pixel, your photoshoot could be 15 to 20 000 $ just to get everything right. And there were still not the dimension, the bling-bling, that was limited on what you can do with it. So what I said is “Why do all that when we can actually do that at one-tenth of the price? We have everything: we have pictures of Rolls Royces, pictures of girls, pictures of diamonds, we have all this stuff, including their clothes!” If they didnt want to buy clothes, all we can do is photograph the face, and we will have a body model, mimick up their bodies and we would put it in a place where you would never know the difference. And it worked. That formula worked very very well.

    via Shawn Brauch Pen & Pixel Graphics | Interview sur Abcdrdu Son.

  • (Ed: This article is outdated, please see the updated version at feld’s site by clicking here)

    I just set this up today and it was a pain in the arse, so I figured I’d leave a trace of it somewhere on the internets. I hope this helps you.

    (more…)