neonascent

Cafepress have managed to capture under-represented niche markets wholesale and at the same time create some fabulously surreal and ironic products. In one fell swoop they have claimed the “I love X” product base, with such incongruous gems as “I love my kids” thong-style underwear, and “I love sex education” baby’s bibs.

Providence brought me to this particular page of theirs when I absent-mindedly typed “I love ducks” into Google. With this site proudly servicing the world’s consumers, there is no chance of having your love for a particular country, politician, animal, drug, or obscure abstract concept going unknown. It is obvious that there has been very little human input into the creation of these products, as can be seen from such clumsy phrases as “I love Earth”, and the automatically generated product images.

If nothing else, I find this site warmly comforting, as it shows that there is as much a niche to fill for thoughtful, creatively produced clothes design as there is for Alpacaphile products.

I am passing through the park on a sunny Wednesday afternoon on my way back from studies. A cool breeze intermittently plays against my face as I amble along a well-worn dirt path between islands of palm trees. There is a small chestnut on the ground, and I pick it up. I think about how I could plant this seed wherever I felt like, and have made a difference to the future of the tree that may germinate from it. On closer inspection I notice that there is a borehole in the nut, and that there must be a small bug in it.

I have effected this bugs existence in a profound way, and it is in no way aware of my existence. If anything, it may see - in some limited awareness - its change of environment as natural or coincidental - Its sphere of phenomenological perception is almost totally alien to mine and vice versa.

We exist within a vast spectrum of consciousnesses. Some are approaching our own and are significantly aware of us, the consequences of our actions, and thus can communicate and socialise with us to a limited degree, but many many cannot. As a species we measure ourselves as having the highest awareness to our environment: the most inclusive, most reflexive, most coherent sphere of awareness.
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The BBC, amongst many other sources, reports that three new security holes have been found in Internet Explorer. For those of you out there surfing using IE, here is my strongest recommendation: Get Firefox!*

On top of the security benefits Firefox is faster, and comes with a bunch of features that really improve one’s browsing experience such as tabs and Livebookmarks for RSS sources.

Mozilla [Firefox] has bugs to (sic). Lots of them. The difference, however is the time it takes to patch them.
…This vulnerability is the perfect example: MS was notified about this on 13/02/2006, 40 days ago. They had all the opportunity to fix it in this month’s security patch, but thy did not. So the patch will come no earlier than 2 months after discovery - that’s a huge window of exposure. (Stellian commenting on Slashdot)

Microsoft obviously doesn’t think that the two holes allowing full-hijacking of a computer are serious enough to deviate from their regular second-Tuesday-of-every-month patch release, saying that they would only consider releasing earlier if the “threat grew significantly”.

and I love this typically useless piece of advice:

To avoid falling victim, Microsoft urged users to avoid websites they did not trust … (BBC Article)

I think if we want to seriously comply with Microsoft’s suggestion, we might as well unplug our broadband now. How about this little nugget of wisdom: Avoid using browsers you do not trust.

* I realise that some of you may be forced by company policy to use IE, and in this case I would urge you to bring up the intelligence of such a policy with whoever is responsible. Why waste workers’ time and their computer processor power on the plethora of spyware, adware and malware that typically accompanies Internet Explorer use?

Those of you not in Australia may not be aware of this little tidbit of information: Australia has delayed the standard hour shift for daylight savings in order to accommodate the Commonwealth games.

It took me and a friend about five minutes to come up with a whole heap of scenarios where confusion and problems would arise from this. Why did this appear to be a good idea? There must be a sea of critical business logic that relies on predictable time changes.

The politics of this decision seem to be based on the discourse of the Commonwealth games as an important construction of nationalism for Australians;

Swinburne University’s senior lecturer in media, John Schwartz, said local coverage of the Commonwealth Games had been ridiculously nationalistic. International athletes were marginalised and those stepping up to collect their medals are just cut off. (Junkforcode)

This is something I find difficult to endure, along with the pervasiveness and power of military legend of the ANZACS. Colonial Australia is a very young nation, and seems to feel the need to concretely strengthen patriotism and nationalism of her people.

• Link to the Age article regarding change
• Link to Junk for Code entry on Nationalism & Sport

sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! is a program for mixing sound and video snippets taken from any (music) video source into a new audio-visual experience, based on any audio input, and in realtime. The promo video gives the best summary of what it does and how, and also has an example of the software being used. This is fab, and hopefully the software will soon be released (as GPL for open-source developement) so we can all have a go!

Not much blog activity recently - sorry.

Check out the placeholder for the Dirty Suzie (subculture photo magazine) website. It features an exquisite illustration by Haruka Nishii, and is sitting happily at http://www.dirtysuzie.com.

Please comment any feedback you have for it.

The “4DLK” exhibition has finished, and scanned polaroids from Haruka Nishii’s hug work are online at http://hugs.neonascent.com. They are all quite fun, so why not check them out? (She managed 101 - brilliant!)

I’ve now set up the Internet TV infrastructure to allow us to easily host a “video channel” of Carrie & Vostok episodes. A Carrie & Vostok channel is available which, in after downloading Democracy, will allow easy subscription to episodes downloaded distributively via BitTorrent.

The channel is empty at the moment, but hopefully will soon be teeming with movies!

(Edit: I’ve found the perfect set of network analysis tools. See the last section of this entry.)

Have been investigating WiFi security recently in preparation for beefing up my brothers WAN settings. Installed two wireless packet sniffers; Airopeek (for NIC drivers) and airsnort, but my D-Link AirPlus G+ DWL-G650+ is not supported, as it uses Texas Instruments chipset. This took a while to realise, as DWL-650 and DWL-G650 are both supported, but apparently D-Link has a habit of naming their cards very similar irrespective of differing chipsets even between different revisions of the same model!

(The two packet sniffers require a specially modified driver that allows the wireless cards to run in “promiscuous” mode, i.e. accepting all packets regardless of their MAC address target.)

Cain and Abel is proving a scarily effective tool. Using APR (Address Resolution Protocol Poisoning Routing) to have traffic routed to it even on a switched network, and allow man-in-the-middle attacks of HTTPS sessions via certificate faking (As the faked certificate cannot be properly signed, the client-side browser will pop up a message prompting for an okay - except for the digital sig it is identical to the original, and users almost always accept without thinking). This is all ethernet based, but similar man-in-the-middle attacks can be done with a SSID clone wireless access point powerful enough to unsurp the legitimate one. The takehome message here is to always use SSL for sensitive information, and never accept a security certificate unless you completely trust it!

A great selection of Linux network security tools is bundled together on a Linux Live CD. The distro is called BackTrack (available via Remote-Expoit.org) and is the perfect environment from which to work. Checking discussions on that site will help you find a good wireless card that supports promiscuous mode, but as a general rule the Atheros chip set cards do.

Mark Ronson has created a fantastic cover of Radiohead’s “Just” from “The Bends”, treated to a funky horns section and fun London graffiti-montage video.

I’ve linked to the high quality Quicktime movie; more formats and more info can be found from the contactmusic.com page.