The Hive Archive

From the New York Times:

In the annals of international diplomacy, it is not exactly Yalta. But today’s visit to Graceland — the ticky-tacky Elvis Presley mansion here — by President Bush and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan brings a little bit of shake, rattle and roll to American foreign relations.

The prime minister is a die-hard Elvis fan; the two share a birthday, Jan. 8, and a pompadour hairstyle, though Mr. Koizumi’s locks are longer and grayer than those of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll. On Thursday, in a joint appearance with Mr. Bush at the White House, the prime minister had a message for the United States:

“Thank you very much, American people, for ‘Love me Tender,’ ” he said

Though the whole Web 2.0, look at us try to shoehorn a desktop application to the web thing is getting a little old, I was really impressed by how easy DabbleDB makes publishing data from a Spreadsheet, check out the 7 Minute whirlwind tour.

Microsoft adCenter Labs has interesting demos of algorithms they are using to help target their ads. Google obviously has similar tools, but they have kept them internal (probably to keep spammers and SEO guessing). I ran through some of them for this site. Results follow.

Content Categorization:

Categories Confidence
Computing\Software 0.110 People & Chat\Homepages 0.063 Computing\Internet 0.061 Entertainment\Games 0.050 Computing\Computer Science 0.050 Computing\Networks & Comm. 0.036 Computing\Sales 0.032 People & Chat\Email 0.029 People & Chat\Forums & Lists 0.027 Computing\Multimedia 0.025 Entertainment\Humor & Fun 0.024 Computing\Hardware 0.023 People & Chat\Chat 0.022 Entertainment\Music 0.020 Computing 0.01

Demographics Prediction:

Gender: Male Oriented

Age: 25~34 Oriented

Online Commercial Intention:

Result: NonCommercial (Page)

Probabilities for Each OCI Type:
NonCommercial                    Prob.: 0.91448
Commercial-Informational    Prob.: 7.6531e-002
Commercial-Transactional    Prob.: 8.9882e-003

After attempting to play back some MPEG and DivX videos, I was getting strange colors in every program I was using, including VLC, Windows Media Player and mplayer.  Even tweaking the gamma, constrast, hue, brightness and every other setting I could find, the video still looked washed out and dark.  The only thing affected was video playback.  The desktop, web browsing and games all looked fine.

Finally, I figured out that in the NVidia control panel, there are seperate settings for video playback.  Somehow they had all been changed to bizzare values.  All it took was to return them to the default to fix the problem.  Very strange, as I know I didn’t touch any of these values and I had just reinstalled this system from scratch.  Anyway, hope this helps someone Googling this problem as I wasn’t able to find any useful information.

Ever wanted a new identity?

The folks at xbox-linux have a great article on the 17 Mistakes Microsoft Made in the Xbox Security System. Following is an excerpt of just one back and forth between hackers and Microsoft Security.

The history of Microsoft’s reactions to the font vulnerability is the perfect lesson of how to do it wrong.

1. After MechInstaller had been released, Microsoft fixed the buffer vulnerability in the Dashboard and distributed this new version over the Xbox Live network and shipped it with new Xboxes.
2. For the hackers, this was no major problem: It was possible to downgrade the Dashboard of a new Xbox to the vulnerable version. Just run Linux using a savegame exploit, and “dd” the old image. Some people felt downgrading on new Xboxes was not piracy, because after all, Microsoft upgraded Xbox Live users’ hard disks to the new version without asking.
3. As the next step, Microsoft blacklisted the old Dashboard in the new kernel. It was impossible to just “dd” an old Dashboard image onto newer Xboxes.
4. Still no major problem for hackers: The second executable on the hard disk, “xonlinedash”, which is used for Xbox Live configuration, had the same bug, so it was possible to copy the old “xonlinedash” and to rename it to “xboxdash” to make it crash because of the faulty fonts.
5. Microsoft consequently blacklisted the vulnerable version of “xonlinedash”.
6. Again, no major problem for hackers: All Xbox Live games come with the “dashupdate” application, which adds Xbox Live functionality to the Dashboard for the first Xboxes which came without it. This update application has the same font bug, and it can be run from hard disk. So it is possible to copy the file from any Xbox Live game DVD, rename it to “xboxdash” and let it crash.
7. Microsoft could not blacklist this one. Xbox Live enabled games run the update application every time they start, making sure the Xbox has the Xbox Live functionality. Blacklisting “dashupdate” would break these games.

We won.

Found the following at http://daemons.net/~matty/blog/?p=456:

SARC case 2004/368 : Secure By Default
BUG/RFE:4875624 *syslogd* turn off UDP listener by default
BUG/RFE:5004374 Ship with remote services disabled by default
BUG/RFE:5016956 By default rpcbind should not listen for remote requests
BUG/RFE:5016975 By default snmpd/dx should not be enabled.
BUG/RFE:5016998 By default inetd should not listen for remote connections.
BUG/RFE:5017041 By default sendmail should not listen for remote connections
BUG/RFE:5046450 Create a greenline profile for Secure by Default installation
BUG/RFE:6267741 RFE: One-touch knob for outbound-only sendmail
BUG/RFE:6414308 syslogd could use some lint soap

Oddly enough, I was just complaining about this myself.

The closest match for ‘matt michie’ is ‘Materishche [Zalesnaya], Novgorod, Russia’. If the closest match is incorrect, enter the complete address including country name and commas, and try again.

local.live.com

I was playing around with Microsoft’s new web search and was amused at this result. Of course my entry was nonsensical, but trying out some legit queries on the search engine side left me mildly impressed. The search results are returning more what I expect. I’m not completely sold on the AJAX interface, but it is novel and works on Firefox. The birds eye view of Local Live blows away Google Maps, at least for Albuquerque. Looks like we’ve got some competition going!

With Mexico’s presidential election two weeks away, the drug wars are a central issue in the race, and the main candidates are all trying to look tough on the issue, while splitting over whether U.S.-style solutions are needed.

Roberto Madrazo of the former ruling party claims the toughest law-and-order platform: One of his campaign ads depicts a criminal wetting his pants out of fear of Madrazo’s proposals for stiffer sentencing. “Criminals can’t play around with me,” Madrazo tells voters.

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