Slashdot Mirror
Domain: usrnull.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to usrnull.com.
Stories · 2
-
Stalking the Wily Analemma
avi33 writes "Wired has an article on the short list of photographers seeking to capture a shot of the analemma - the sun's figure-eight-shaped declination in the sky over the course of a year. Only a handful of people are known to have done this, and of course the obstacles are many: maintaining the equipment and its positioning, the finicky nature of film, the weather, and the photographer's persistence. Is it just me, or is this crying out for digital automation? Mount a cam to a hardpoint, have it snap a shot every x hours, and overlay them? Why I bet some of you could do this with a perl script in an afternoon. There's a shortage of photos from outside the northern hemisphere, so get busy." -
Spammers Using Hacked Machines as Decoys
avi33 writes "This Wired story shows a disturbing alliance between hackers [sic] and spammers. Interestingly, they blame part of the alliance on market forces, leading some skilled engineers to the dark side for profit's sake. A Polish firm claims to have control of 450,000 Trojaned systems that it uses to mask the IP addresses of its hosted sites. In other words, you could host your Viagra-peddling site with a company that has a stringent no-spam policy, but a DNS lookup will point to a home user's compromised machine. Not quite bulletproof, but certainly ups the ante in the spam war."