Curt’s Basement

A tool that automatically steals IDs of non-encrypted sessions and breaks into Google Mail accounts has been presented at the Defcon hackers’ conference in Las Vegas. Last week, Google introduced a new feature in Gmail that allows users to permanently switch on SSL and use it for every action involving Gmail, not just authentication. Users who did not turn it on now have a serious reason to do so, as Mike Perry, the reverse engineer from San Francisco who developed the tool, is planning to release it in two weeks.

To turn this on, go into Settings, and then at the bottom turn on “Always use HTTPS” beside Browser Connection.

And if you use Notifier at all, then you need this patch for it to continue working.

From Slashdot

This is really impressive. It’s probably some of the most realistic 3d animation I’ve ever seen.

from Gizmodo

Gizmodo

If you get a chance, and the time (it’s an hour and fifteen minutes long), check out this video of Randy Pausch’s last lecture he did before he died. It’s not important whether you know who he was or what he did before watching.

Here’s a neat little web app that, very simply, checks to see if it’s just you who can’t reach a website or if it’s truly down for everyone. It’s dead simple, but also very handy if you often visit a website with spotty uptime. I’m not positive, but it seems to be made by Google.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

By now you guys should’ve probably got a bunch of emails from Google regarding invites for Google calendars. I figured I’d add in the events calendar at long last so we can stay organized as a group. Obviously, there was some challenge in setting it all up and there still is. I originally shared my own calendar, but it was including personal events (doctor’s appointments, etc) and I’d really like it to be a bit cleaner than that. So I created a new calendar and invited everyone to have access to it, and that’s the one you see shared here. Unfortunately, things still aren’t quite working as planned. Carl tried adding an event earlier and it seems it added it to my own personal calendar, not the site’s calendar.

Just thought I’d give everone a heads up. I’m sure once everything’s working as planned it’ll work great, we just need to sort it all out.

UPDATE: Alright, everything seems to be squared away. Hopefully you guys didn’t have to agree to too many public calendar invites. Now when you add an event to the calendar, and set it to public, it should show up on the website. This should help us keep everything organized (for D&D in particular).

The new radiohead music video was created entirely with data.

Manipulate it here

Just bought a new laptop. A Dell XPS 1730, 2 Cores, 2 Video Cards, 2 Sticks Ram, 2 Hard drives. Its like two laptops in one :D.

Click the image to check out the specs.

This is very spiffy. He should go fight crime.

You can read more on Gizmodo.

After my Actionscript workshop I was pumped and ready to do something in flash… but what to do?

I decided to use my new knowledge of flash and PHP to recreate my flash chat app, and so far so good. In one day I have managed to do much of what I did when I first created the app so many years ago.

Before I continue my work I want to hear from you guys. What would you like to see in the program? I want you to “blue sky” it, anything and everything goes. Dice rollers, shared scratch pads/whiteboards… anything at all.

Currently I have managed to make a connection, allow for unlimited connections, show who is in the chat and scroll the chat when it gets to big for the dialog box. it also allows HTML, so href’s, font tags, breaks and even img’s to some degree are allowed (Although I may catch and post img’s to a seperate window you can toggle through.

Let me know and maybe next game we can try it out.