Day Two of The Water Festival, aka Bon Om Tuk, as seen from The FCC Cambodia. City officials expected about 4 million people, or more than a quarter of the Kingdom’s population, to arrive from the provinces. Down on the riverfront on Sunday afternoon, it didn’t feel like nearly that many. In fact, the crowds seemed thin. But maybe the midday heat kept wiser people indoors.
The NY Times has more on Stuxnet, humanity’s first instance of weaponized software. Initial theories — Stuxnet was written by the U.S. and/or Israel and designed to sabotage Iran’s nuclear centrifuge programs — look increasingly plausible.
WordPress beat out Drupal and Joomla to win this year’s Open Source CMS Hall of Fame Award. Says Matt:
We have to be careful because if this trend continues people might think WordPress is a real CMS, useful for more than just a blog. This would ruin our stealth campaign and might bring dozens of new users to the WordPress community. If you could keep this on the DL we’d appreciate it.
So don’t tell anyone.
The New York Times Magazine details the rise and fall of Albert Gonzales, aka soupnazi, a Cuban-American who Secret Service agents call the world’s greatest cybervillian.
Over the course of several years, during much of which he worked for the government, Gonzalez and his crew of hackers and other affiliates gained access to roughly 180 million payment-card accounts from the customer databases of some of the most well known corporations in America: OfficeMax, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Dave & Buster’s restaurants, the T. J. Maxx and Marshalls clothing chains. They hacked into Target, Barnes & Noble, JCPenney, Sports Authority, Boston Market and 7-Eleven’s bank-machine network. In the words of the chief prosecutor in Gonzalez’s case, “The sheer extent of the human victimization caused by Gonzalez and his organization is unparalleled.â€
For years an informant/adviser to the the U.S. government’s cybercrime unit, Gonzales is now two years in to a 20-year stretch at Club Fed. Reports of hacking dropped noticeably in 2009 when the government shut him down.
The WPtouch plug-in will convert your WordPress site into a mobile-optimized app with no more hassle than installing a plug-in. Brilliant! MobilePress, which says it does the same thing, doesn’t look bad either.
I’ve never used either of them, though, so I couldn’t say how well they work. With a little luck, that might soon change.
Top 15 Blogging Best Practices, from Adventures in Technology, via Matt — bite-sized nuggets of wisdom for the attention-span challenged brain.
Some smart advice on food photography.
The first step in making ugly food look edible is to turn to other masters for inspiration: painters. The Dutch masters made food still life about setting, balance, symmetry and light, and when it comes to ugly or boring looking food you should do the same.
Choosing an attractive table setting, beautiful props and/or using interesting angles and exquisite lighting will take the focus off of the food and onto the image as a whole. Creating a scene that has other elements for the viewer to focus on besides the fact that your herring potato salad is clumpy and gross looking is essential. In this image I chose to give the viewer something else to look at in the form of an elegant bowl and a lighting scheme that complemented its modern design. The result is a portfolio piece rather than, and may I borrow a line from Frank Bruni here, a “gastronomic apocalypse”.
Robert Graham of Errata Security takes a look at the recent “Web 2.0” report card compiled by Digital Society, and remarks:
Of the major webmail providers in the U.S., only Gmail is secure against sidejacking attacks. Yahoo Mail and HotMail are insecure, and can be compromised quickly. There are still a lot of HotMail users out there — they are fools.
I talked to the people at Microsoft responsible for fixing this problem ALMOST THREE YEARS AGO. Yet, they’ve done nothing about fixing this huge hole. I just tried it out today — while FireSheep looks a bit funky (it doesn’t correctly show the user name), it easily hacks into HotMail accounts.
Among the best on the card? WordPress!
I hadn’t even heard about this. But in April, a group of Gmail users sued Google over privacy violations regarding Google Buzz, the search giant’s underwhelming attempt at social networking. Google settled yesterday for $8.5 million. Gmail users, however, will not see a cent.
The Plaintiffs allege that Google automatically enrolled Gmail users in Buzz, and that Buzz publicly exposed data, including users’ most frequent Gmail contacts, without enough user consent. Google denies the accuracy of Plaintiffs’ allegations and denies that it violated any law or caused any harm by the launch of Google Buzz.
Under the Settlement, Google will establish an $8.5 million Common Fund to fund organizations focused on Internet privacy policy or privacy education, as well as to cover lawyers’ fees and costs and other expenses. Google will also do more to educate users about the privacy aspects of Google Buzz.
By and large, it appears that most people just don’t care about online privacy, as the never-ending Facebook fiascos can attest. (Despite the habitual misuse of private data, people still flock to Facebook by the millions.) The tiny minority who protest this kind of abuse need support from us all. Because without them, the corporate titans of the world wouldn’t have even the slightest reason for pause.
Russian police have shuttered the operations of Spamit.com, and they are now on the hunt for “suspected spam kingpin” Igor A Gusev. People who pay attention to such things say that global spam volumes are down 1/5 — or about 50 billion spam messages per day — since police raided Gusev’s operations in September.
Full story from The Times.