The Flowing Candy Bees

A flood hit Binghamton and the surrounding environs this morning, resulting in a state of emergency and evacuations in the South and East side (I am on the West side.) There is an article on CNN, and one of the pictures in their rotating picture gallery is of the park around the corner from my house—which you can see here, on the left. Under the river.

Click on the pictures for larger images.
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Stashcard.

Hide your valuables inside your laptop, because no criminal would ever think of stealing your laptop.

My PowerBook got hosed this weekend and wouldn’t boot. I tried fsck -yf in single user mode, and even a few things at the OpenFirmware prompt, which is a fully functional Forth interpreter. I also tried a few new curse words.

Anyway, the next time you power up a Mac, hold down Cmd-Opt-O-F, and try typing this pointless three-line command sequence at the prompt:

: P 4000 */ ; : Q 2dup 7e begin 1- >r 2dup 2dup + -rot - P -rot P 2* 
2over rot + >r + dup dup P r@ tuck r> P + ffff > r@ r> 21 < rot or 
until emit ; 26 -25 do cr 30 -80 do i 8 << j 9 << Q clear loop loop

Enter it verbatim, paying careful attention to the spaces. After you’re done playing with fire, “boot” will start the OS again.

Super bonus points if you can guess what it does before you type it.

The Underhanded C Contest is a challenge to write innocent-looking C source code implementing nonobvious malicious behavior. From the site:

Every year, we will propose a challenge to coders to solve a simple data processing problem, but with covert malicious behavior. Examples include miscounting votes, shaving money from financial transactions, or leaking information to an eavesdropper. The main goal, however, is to write source code that easily passes visual inspection by other programmers.

Question for the reader (both of you): what, in your wildest imagination, is the worst, most sensational privacy-related disaster that can befall a single individual? I’m thinking of making this a homework problem for my security engineering class.

This was brought to my mind by a recent panel discussion on privacy at Princeton University.

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Back in grad school I did a little research on the key distibution of online tunebooks. This was lost for a while, but I recently found the article and graphs buried in my computer.

So to test image tags and floating bodies, here follows a statistical snapshot of Henrik Norbeck’s online tunebook, from about 4 years ago.

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