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Hacks To Be Truly Paranoid About
snydeq writes: Nothing is safe, thanks to the select few hacks that push the limits of what we thought possible, InfoWorld's Roger Grimes writes in this roundup of hacks that could make even the most sane among us a little bit paranoid. "These extreme hacks rise above the unending morass of everyday, humdrum hacks because of what they target or because they employ previously unknown, unused, or advanced methods. They push the limit of what we security pros previously thought possible, opening our eyes to new threats and systemic vulnerabilities, all while earning the begrudging respect of those who fight malicious hackers."
None of these are new.
This stuff has been out there for more than two years for most of it except maybe the badusb. Go write a real news story and come back when you have something good...
The only thing that scares me is that you can buy a harddrive that might have it's firmware modified so they always have a backdoor into your system.
Be seeing you...
... I have heard of these before, but it's good to get a run-down.
Stuxnet is my fav. It reminds me of the "drunk walk" algorithm I entered into a TRS-80 using BASIC, back in 1978 and stuff.
As an IT person, reading the article was like looking up symptoms for an illness: I think I have every fatal disease and hackers are crawling all over my system.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Yes you're right. That honour goes to Adobe Flash.
How many friggin' ways are there to hang shoes in your closet? You'd think that just piling your shoes on the floor has been holding us back all these years, and we're just beginning to get a handle on this shoe storage thing. Buy expensive plastic drawers, make things out of moldy cardboard, hang 'em and wrap 'em like flies in a spiderweb, on doors, above your bed. Make labels. How about an entire room full of wax people in various positions to wear our shoes for us? To select a pair just tip over the wax person and take their shoes off. Simple.
There is always some 'Target Number'. No one ever has a bright idea any more, they must save them up until there is a round or round-plus-one number. Only a brain dead doofus would click into '100 uses for a dead cat' when another article promises 101 uses.
Zero-Day Life Hacks are the worst. Mixed in with the rest, at a glance you can tell that they were made up on the spot to help the author achieve the target number, and are not worth the time spend reading them. And there is no way to unread them, no delivered punishment for this crime. The last time someone felt guilty about wasting another person's precious time was back in 1959.
Life hacks don't just present these tips, they go on about them. You can't just be told to slide a friggin' block of wood along the floor to help set molding at the proper height. There has to be a Using A Block Of Wood Smartly video, and there's always a FAQ with dumb questions like, when I slide it into a corner, what then? (start over in another room, maybe it will work there) and What if the wood falls over? (find another piece). Even the most ludicrous and contrived aspects of something generates lengthy discussion, as if we have carved out a Corner of the Universe devoted solely to wood block molding sliding. The comments slide off into oblivion and disappear like they do everywhere else, the Internet is now like a continuous roll of one-sided toilet paper.
The people surfing these 'Hacks' are really asking themselves, I have these opposeable thumbs connected to a brain. What are they for? Well one thing you could do is spend every spare moment of your life in a voyeuristic journey paging through Life Hacks. As the senses dull and the little voice in our head that says, "Now THAT's clever" becomes over-used, our desperate brains are spurting little endorphin rushes that represent the Eureka! moment, and for a split second we pretend to be filing away every Life Hack like some modern day Sherlock Holmes, to regurgitate it some day at the precise moment when it will attract that mate, save that marriage, save your life and impress everybody
The truth is that you are forgetting them as fast as you are absorbing them and your own brain is becoming that one-sided continuous roll of toilet paper. It's a scam and you are both scammer and scamee. When you go to bed tonight, try to remember all the valuable tips you've learned. Then in the morning. In the place of hands-on basic 'aboriginal skills' of problem solving with the use of fingernails, using levers, found objects and baling wire, things upon things --- we're just merely glancing at things
You know those night-time satellite photos that show cities, highways and towns as shimmering webs of light? Well in terms of average depth of human concentration... those lights are winking out. Celebrities who've had their asses reamed by hateful people on Twitter and delete their accounts (whoosh!) to go back to old-fashioned interviews and press conferences teach us an important lesson about modern culture and long term mental health... which I will not share. This is no 'Life Hack' tip here... figure it out yourself.
Life Hacks also eat up idle quiet time, in which the mind fits things together in silly ways that are uniquely your own. We must use the Internet -- to find the slow tides of thought, laughter and fable we wish to use to construct our worlds, and spend equal time out in the most desperate emotional wildernesses of our time, to tame them to our liking. Not passively surf 'Life Hacks'.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>