As a fantasy movie it is one more movie following the traditions of the genre: simple story, poor CGI, poor actors, poor directing. Yet it can be fun, you know: 'the cheaper they are, the better they are'. But since it is called Solomon Kane, I cannot accept it. Imagine a Lord-of-the-Rings movie with a hero Bilbo who fights the black sorcerer Saugalf with the help of his dwarf friend Aragorn and the beautiful heroine Shadowfax. And with a final fight where the three use a magical ring to kill the evil sorcerer who has transformed into the dragon Gondorian. Imagine that. This is exactly what this movie has done with Robert Howard's character Solomon Kane.

This is an awesomely harsh burn review. Excellent!

The experiment failed.

The experiment didn’t fail; the experiment taught us about what the burdens were. We would actually need a team of five or six people whose job was just to arrange these auctions.

You plan to continue the auction idea in the future …

We plan to continue it, but we know it will take more resources. But if we pursue that we will not do that for single documents. We will instead offer a subscription. This would be much simpler. We would only have the overhead of doing the auction stuff every three months or six months, and not for every document.

So the exclusivity of the story will run out after three months?

No, there will be exclusivity in terms of different time windows in access to the material. As an example: there will be an auction for North America. And you will be ranked in the auction. The media organisation which bids most in the auction would get access to it first, the one who bids second will get access to it second and so on. Media organisations would have a subscription to Wikileaks.

I'm really interested in seeing how this continues to develop.

Naturally the whole Wikileaks situation is a complicated one:

• Whistleblowing to abuse of power and corruption is good.
• Leaking of classified documents and state secrets is (arguably) bad.
• Subscription and auction models to keep the heat off of journalists who write at news agencies? interesting.

The economic argument is getting worse (Score:3, Informative)

by H4x0r Jim Duggan (757476) writes: on Wednesday January 13, @12:11AM (#30747322) Homepage Journal

I can only speak for the domain of software development, but there was a period from 1996-2008 when the USA was disproportionately feeling the rewards of software patenting. The rewards were always severly outweighed by the costs ($11 billion in 2008 [swpat.org]), but there were always people pointing at these rewards.

Now that the companies of the USA's economy will increasingly become the targets of software patents instead of the users, those rewards will diminishing.

Patent policy for other domains can be considered while only looking at the economic effects. For software, the social effects have to be considered too because software development is something that individuals can do and participate in - like writing a book, reporting news, or writing music. So, it makes sense to have economic studies [swpat.org] to make our point, but we also have to remember to have other arguments [swpat.org] and to point out that these other issues exist.

The good news is that there's the Bilski case [swpat.org] which might solve the problem, and there are also initiatives in other countries [swpat.org], most notably Israel [swpat.org], New_Zealand [swpat.org], the EU [swpat.org], Australia [swpat.org], and something starting in [swpat.org]. Help sought.

Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, and Adi Shamir have released a paper showing that they've broken KASUMI, the cipher used in encrypting 3G GSM communications. KASUMI is also known as A5/3, which is confusing because it's only been a week since breaks on A5/1, a completely different cipher, were publicized. So if you're wondering if this is last week's news, it isn't. It's next week's news.

[T]he attack here is completely practical. Here is a quote from the abstract:

In this paper we describe a new type of attack called a sandwich attack, and use it to construct a simple distinguisher for 7 of the 8 rounds of KASUMI with an amazingly high probability of 2−14. By using this distinguisher and analyzing the single remaining round, we can derive the complete 128 bit key of the full KASUMI by using only 4 related keys, 226 data, 230 bytes of memory, and 232 time. These complexities are so small that we have actually simulated the attack in less than two hours on a single PC, and experimentally verified its correctness and complexity. Interestingly, neither our technique nor any other published attack can break MISTY in less than the 2128 complexity of exhaustive search, which indicates that the changes made by the GSM Association in moving from MISTY to KASUMI resulted in a much weaker cryptosystem.

If breaking 80%+ of the worlds GSM networks wasn't enough for last week, I guess they're breaking the rest this week.

Contrary to popular belief, there are people out there using Smalltalk on the web. Two of them. One Smalltalk software company running a web server written in Smalltalk, and another:

Server: Swazoo 0.9 (Columbus)X-WIKI-ENGINE: SmallWiki 1.0CACHE-CONTROL: no-cacheX-WIKI-COPYRIGHT: Software Composition Group, University of Berne, 2003

running a Smalltalk user’s group web site with a wiki written on Smalltalk on a web server written in, you guessed it: Smalltalk. Cool.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be the Internet without an appearance by a BOFH:

X-BOFH: http://www.xxxxx.de/bofh/xxxxxx.html

The actual URL it points to has been obscured to protect the guilty, and a local mirror provided in its stead.

These kind of people who write articles like this are definitely some of the kind of people I like to hang out with.

"I knew of a gentleman who was collecting them off the street and throwing them in the back of his station wagon, and all of a sudden these things are coming alive, crawling on his back and almost caused a wreck," Magill said.

Clearly an important and vital story that all should know about; iguana hibernation.

The LOPSA sent me a survey today.

I am not a paying member.

These were my answers:

Bunch of SAGE and ex-consultants I know founded it.

2. What is your age?

29-35

3. Which of the following SysAdmin events have you attended in the past 5 years?

None
Other [ I go to infosec events. Blogs take care of the rest. ]

4. How many years have you been a System Administrator?

16 or more years

5. What benefits could LOPSA provide that might increase your willingness to become a paid member? (This question really matters to us. Providing an answer will greatly assist our planning.)

None really. I'm on the mailing lists and look at them a couple times every few months.

6. Are you a member of any of the following other organizations?

Local Sysadmin Group
Local User/Technical Group
Other [ ISSA (past. not worth it), ISC2 (no value besides their baseline cert). Good ones: CCC, Defcon, Toorcon, LayerOne ]

7. If applicable, what does the above organization(s) provide you, that you find valuable?

Framework and compliance resources. Public speaking engagements.

Like the open source movement, everyone has their own little and irrelevant org that accomplishes not much. Perhaps it issues a certification that no one needs. Maybe it sells a framework.

What an org should really do is pay it forward and make a wiki of useful information. It should attract members by being valuable instead of promising to be valuable sometime and not delivering.

Really a lot of these organizations (and not necessarily LOPSA, but definitely the majority) need to collapse into large organizations that are not just industry relevant, but non-industry relevant.

The sooner admins, network jocks, and risk managers/infosec architects start thinking and treating themselves like a serious business and not just a bunch of dips in parents basement with linux boxes, the better off we and the tech industry in general will be.

If we're not acting serious and akin to the profession of JD or a MD, we deserve not to be taken seriously.
http://www.abanet.org/about/?gnav=global_about_lead
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/about-ama/our-mission.shtml

We really need to get our acts together. The stuff we do is too important to let this trainwreck continue because a large chunk of our membership are not able to behave in public.

Is $300 a fair price for your time? Or if you want, I can pay you in X-Men comics as I have a few grand worth gathering dust!

I could totally see myself saying this.

What about my Punisher limited series? How about Spawn?