Kevin Mitnick Has the Best Stuff in His Luggage!
Kevin Mitnick, the hacker that was famously jailed for 5 years after getting arrested on multiple cracking charges, was detained as he came into the country through the Atlanta airport from Columbia recently. In the article detailing his “adventure” was this descirption of what they found in his bags:
In his luggage, they found a MacBook Pro, a Dell XPS M1210 laptop, an Asus 900 mini-laptop, three or four hard drives, numerous USB storage devices, some Bluetooth dongles, three iPhones, and four Nokia cell phones (with different SIM cards for different countries).
They also found a lock-picking kit and an HID proximity card spoofer that can be used to snag data stored on physical access cards by swiping it in front of them. The data can then be used to enter locked doors without having to make a forged access card. Mitnick says he used the device in a demonstration about security in his speech in Bogota, but that the customs agents’ eyes lit up when they saw it, thinking it was a credit card reader.
I’ve had several people I take way too much tech gear with me when I travel, but apparently I’m put to shame by Mitnick…I’m especially jealous of his Asus 900 that he takes along with his Mac Book Pro. I wants me a “netbook” bad!
Technorati, the blog search engine, is searching for a new CEO… I guess it would be snide to suggest that their search will take forever, miss the obvious candidates and eventually time out with no results? Oh well.
Nice. (via Neil McIntosh through Valleywag)
This Mike Flynn is the Most Important Mike Flynn in the World
…according to Google
…as of yesterday
Yes, last night after Google-ing my name I had found that I, Mike Flynn, was the most important Mike Flynn in the world (according to Google). How did I find this out? Well Hell Yeah Bitch! .com came up as the #1 result on a search for “Mike Flynn“. Its not there now though. The center for the Baltimore Ravens, Mike Flynn, has reclaimed the #1 spot, but it was there last night. I swear! As of this writing, I’m #2, which all obvious jokes asside, I’m still excited about. It wasn’t long ago that even searching for “Hell Yeah Bitch” didn’t even produce a link to us on Google, but a few years ago we finally climbed to #1 on that search. Now a new search’s top spot, one that proves my greatness (as compared to other Mike Flynn’s), is within our grasp. There’s no telling what I can do after taking over as the top Mike Flynn in the world….maybe I can finally start to see some progress on those camps I want to make to “concentrate” the Jewish population in.
Editor’s Note: Its just a joke! What, like the Holocaust can’t be funny all of a sudden?
AOL Got Drunk and Blurted Out a Little Too Much Information
I’m not one to report on news that the rest of the tech-blogger union is currently harping on, but this is pretty crazy. Have you seen the front page of techmeme? Its all about AOL.
If you haven’t heard, AOL released a huge text file that is a listing of some 20 million search queries run by their users. The usernames have been replaced by numbers, but that isn’t much of a smoke screen when you see the type of data that is in this listing. Not only that, but even without usernames, they are still tied to a unique id. That may not sound bad, but because they are still tied to another form of a username, you can figure out that user 17556639 is a freaking psych (as The Paradigm Shift did) Check out the listing of search queries that Paradign Shift pulled coming from user 17556639:
17556639 how to kill your wife
17556639 how to kill your wife
17556639 wife killer
17556639 how to kill a wife
17556639 poop
17556639 dead people
17556639 pictures of dead people
17556639 killed people
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 dead pictures
17556639 murder photo
17556639 steak and cheese
17556639 photo of death
17556639 photo of death
17556639 death
17556639 dead people photos
17556639 photo of dead people
17556639 www.murderdpeople.com
17556639 decapatated photos
17556639 decapatated photos
17556639 car crashes3
17556639 car crashes3
17556639 car crash photo
Ok. Yikes. Sucks for him, because I heard that a Google search is way more helpful on murder tips that an AOL search.
So, if you were wondering: Yes, I’m downloading the file right now. Yes, I’m going to pour through it later like many others are. I was thinking about throwing it into a database and setting up a site to make it oh so easy to go through, but I’m sure there are already about 30 sites popping up beating me to the punch. As far as commentary? Well check the techmeme link above if you want more than you will ever want. If you are looking for my commentary…well…I don’t know yet. Was it stupid? Probably. But I don’t really want to give my full take until everything quiets down and cooks for a little while. I’ll give you my take in a week or two. This does prove one thing though: AOL will do anything to take geek’s attention away from Apple’s WWDC today huh?
More:
Torrent Link: http://www.mininova.org/tor/388815
TechCrunch | AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data
Technorati Explore: What Technorati Should Have Been
So Technorati has gone the way of Google and decided to release beta projects to the world at large. While I’m not a huge fan of this move, it does seem to be en vogue as of late and thats fine. The real issue I have with this step by Technorati isn’t the entire program in of itself (which they’ve oldly named “The Kitchen”), but with the Kitchen’s first course specifically.
“Explore” is what they are calling it and they are billing it with this short description:
Find out what bloggers are saying right now on any topic, organized by how many links their posts are getting. Think of it as a newspaper front page for any subject.
Now correct me if I’m wrong…but doesn’t that statement sound like what Technorati was supposed to be? Way before the stove was hot in “The Kitchen” or even before when “The Kitchen” was created, Technorati was billed as the site where one could go to see what was being discussed on the Web at any given moment. It was supposed to be a tracker in the on-going converstation of the (I shudder as I type this) blogosphere. I thought this was still the point of the site on the whole up until an hour or so ago when I found “The Kitchen”. Right? I couldn’t have been that misinformed right? Telling the world of the talk on the web currently was the point of even making Technorati to begin with right?
So what the hell happened? Somewhere along the lines Technorati decieded to take the purpose of their site and make it into a feature…or better yet…a beta feature! Its amounts to Google releasing a new beta program of Google Web Search tomorrow. Improving your site is one thing, but this is a whole new and strange level. Say Explore takes off, what is to become of Technorati? I really just don’t understand any of the reasoning behind this. Its sound like an upgrade but they are treating it like an added feature.
I’ll give them one thing though, it takes balls to take a failed goal and turn around and market it to your users as a brand new idea.