Mansour Moufid “hacks” Carleton U’s campus card and emails

The latest “student hacker” story hitting the the media (after the MIT/Boston subway case) is a Canadian 2nd year Math major student at the Carleton University, who “hacked” the campus card and student emails. I use “hacked” in quotes as the police news release says that the systems were breached via “Keylogger software and Magnetic stripe card reader”; and even though Mansour Moufid wrote the keylogger himself (as is said in this CBC article) — this is hardly something innovative, or insightful. It was a “hack” in a mass-media sense of the word.

DWITE 2008-09 Contest Season

What’s new for this season of DWITE is that this year we’ve got stuff to give away — namely I’ve got a hold of 5 copies of Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. That’s one for each round of the contest.

Little Brother is the 1984 for the new generation. Surveillance, hacking, Japanese popular culture, Firefox, TOR, RFID… and that’s just the first chapter!

Anti-computer force field effect

The Gabriel Effect of Penny-Arcade makes for an angry webcomic strip, but it also hits too close to home. At least in my experience.

I’ve been scheduling annual “wipe hard drive and clean install everything” dates with my (now) girlfriend’s computer for years! And while I have very limited exposure to my extended family, the role of the “family tech support” person is still enough to make me wonder if some people are just naturally good at making software not work.