Vorg security blog
Policemen inciting riots?
Here's a CBC report (video or text) about police dressing up as anarchists and trying to start a riot during the recent SPP protests in Quebec.



The boots of the provocateurs match those of the police, and the men fled behind the police line to escape. The police refuse to say who the men were, and no other protesters recognize them. You can watch the full union footage on youtube, which is where the CBC got the story from.
Posted by dustin on August 23, 2007. Tagged with
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How to disable QuickTime movies opening webpages
Some QuickTime movies contain embedded "HREF tracks" that will open a webpage in a browser window during the movie (or at the beginning or end). This is highly annoying, not to mention a possible security risk. I looked far and wide, but I couldn't find a way to stop QuickTime from opening website links embedded in movies it plays.

The fix is to set movies to open in the excellent VLC media player instead of in Quicktime. VLC will play the movie properly, but ignore any links inside of it. On a Mac you can do this by doing "Get Info" on a movie file and changing the "Open With" selection box to be VLC. Then click the "Change All..." button below it.
Posted by dustin on April 26, 2007. Tagged with
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My wireless network appears to have been compromised
Here's an interesting message dialog that I just got on my new laptop:

The full text states "The wireless network appears to have been compromised and will be disabled for about a minute."

This happened when I had connected to my MacBook Pro from a wired Mac Mini and was transferring some files between them. The MacBook Pro was also downloading a file inside Parallels at the same time. The local network is on a TrendNET router using WPA-PSK as the wireless security option.

I'm pretty sure this is a false alarm. Googling the message returns a few other people who have seen it, and one of them mentions a TrendNET router is involved.

Posted by dustin on November 3, 2006. Tagged with
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BarCamp Vancouver post-unconference report

This weekend I was a participant in BarCamp Vancouver, a 24-hour localized geekfest. I met a bunch of interesting people in a pretty wide variety of fields, learned some funky new stuff, further grokked stuff I was already aware of, and had a general fun time.

Here are some short notes on some sessions (that I can remember):

Hacking the CBC (hosted by Tod Maffin (Inside the CBC)):
Lots of discussion about podcasts, music licensing, radio 3, regional representation, HNIC, ratings in TV/radio/web (can the current CBC be considered a success if it doesn't crack the top ratings?), and how to get the CBC to deal with the changing participatory news/blogging world of today.

I think the answer to that last bit is to create a Canadian style digg or reddit where any Canadian can post a link to relevant stories (written by the CBC, the Globe, the Star, canada.com, or any other blogger/publisher) and the entire country can vote up the news that we care about. All of Canada shares in ownership of the CBC, and with the new social news technologies out today, there's no reason that all of Canada can't help program the CBC, and use it to amplify ordinary Canadian voices on the net.

Photocamp (moderated by Kris Krug):
A bunch of different topics were covered. Questions were asked about the future of cameras. It was said that digital photography is capable of doing a lot more more then traditional film photography. New methods are being used (HDR) or researched (post-production re-focusing, physical place mapping from photos), and the future looks to have some serious goodies in store for digital photographers.

Warwick Patterson shared some photoshop processing tips: Filter->Sharpen->Unsharp Mask command as the first and last thing, with Curves (or Levels), and switching to sRGB mode (for display on the web) in between.

Open Source Business Practices (hosted by Robert Scales):
Talked about some techniques for open business practices, along with goals and possible consequences of it. Stuff like releasing your sales numbers to the public, building relationships with other shops in your field and related areas to help each other out (help push the rising tide that will lift all the boats).

Tagging for World Domination from Alexandra Samuel.

SEO and the Long Tail by Jason Billingsley from Elastic Path:
Create lots of (valuable) content targeting the long tail around your area of expertise. General SEO tips: the title tag is key, put your important targeted words at the front, etc.

The Meme Epidemic - A Case Study from Darren Barefoot.

CACert by Robin Johnson:
CAcert.org is a web of trust based Certificate Authority that issues certificates free of charged (as long as you're accepted into the trust web). It doesn't currently come installed in the major browsers, but looks like promising for the future. The worst case scenario is that it sucks just as much as the existing security authorities (that charge you a pretty penny for their trust).

There's tons more text in the blogosphere and photos on flickr reporting on BarCampVancouver...

Posted by dustin on August 27, 2006. Tagged with
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