In theory the car is using an SQL injection to drop the picture of the car. You have to give it to some people, that is human ingenuity at it’s best!

(Via Gizmodo)

Well Sony managed to make a bit of a mess today with the Playstation Network. I am sure tomorrow this will be all over the news, hell if your smart I would short sale some Sony stock, but as for now it is just boys the their mothers basement raising hell.

As of right now what we know is that it appears to be a bug with the PSN mixed with the old ‘fat’ PS3s (and no that is not just the US consoles, haha). There was a bug dealing with the leap year causing the console to reset it’s clack back to Dec 31, 1999. Which is very ironic considering the Y2k problem, yet seems to be unrelated.

The good news is that it looks like if we are lucky, once the 2nd of March kicks in, all should hopefully work out. The bad part is telling a bunch of people that not only can they not play online, but ANY game that uses the trophy system, will also not run.

Ouch Sony, this is going to hurt!

I love it. It is nice and clean on the top, and the addition of the keyboard is just fantastic. Add in the bluetooth and you finally have a company paying attention to what the consumer really interacts with once the TV makes it home.

(Via Gadget Review)

Another plane takes a hit, but thankfully it was American made and can take on a few birds! This is the story coming out of the Daily Mail:

Dwarfed by the jetliner, they look little more than a smattering of black dots.

But this flock of birds could have brought the plane crashing down in seconds.

They flew straight into the path of the Germania airlines flight to Kosovo as it took off from Dusseldorf airport with 80 on board.

‘It was like a scene from the Hitchcock movie The Birds. One second all was clear, and the next thing you saw were these birds swarming over the plane,’ said an onlooker.

It is thought more than 200 starlings were sucked into the right engine as the Boeing jet approached 200mph.

Others dented the fuselage but thankfully did not pierce it. Their splattered remains could be seen on the plane later.

‘The pitch of the engine said it all,’ said plane-spotter Juergen Kienast, who took these dramatic pictures.

‘It was like sticking a bit of metal pipe into a blender.’

Once airborne, the pilot reported engine damage and circled for almost 45 minutes before landing safely.

No-one was hurt and the plane had only minor damage.

A similar bird strike brought down an Airbus in the Hudson in New York in January this year.

The pilot managed a heroic emergency landing and all 155 on board survived.

(Via Daily Mail)

Here is a great Onion spoof on stalking your children. Not only does it crack me up, I know too many parents that would watch this and think it is a great idea! Some of my friends should be REALLY happy they didn’t have all of these social websites when they were in school. You know what I mean Travis?

Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

(Via Gizmodo)

Terremark enters the more lower end (get the fog reference yet?) cloud computing market with their vCloud Express offering. I have always wanted to be able to use their higher end cloud, but really had no projects to offset the costs. So now we are all going to join the cloud right? Well lets take a look at costs:

Lets say we are going to build a decent Windows Server, but provide our own software and licenses.

We get 2VPUs with 2gb of ram:
$0.14 cents an hour * 24 hours * 30 days = $100.80

We just put in 120gb of storage:
$0.25 a month per gb * 120gb = $30

One Public IP:
$0.01 per hour * 24 hours * 30 days = $7.20

Internet Services (ports open to the Internet): HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP
$0.01 per hour per service * 3 services * 24 hours * 30 days = $21.60

Bandwidth of lets say 50gb
$0.17 * 50gb = $8.50

So our total would come out monthly to $168.10

So it is not the entry level cloud that I am looking for, but it is a pretty decent entry for small to midsize companies. You have to remember that your getting a pretty decent amount of redundancy and very considerable uptime protection. This is not like your dealing with a small time hosting company that is relying on other to keep them running, Terremark is their own large scale provider.

(Pulled from Terremark)

I haven’t laughed this hard in awhile. This is some great posting on Facebook that makes you scramble for the little delete button. Have a few laughs:

Tracy talks about sex

Husband in Heaven?

Brian in the KKK

Fat Chick Lane

Steve pulls hit and run

Ok, now that you have had your laugh I will sadly ruin it for you. Those were actually from hacked accounts. Normally we would probably look down on the hacks, but you have to admit, this stuff is funny. All thanks to 4chan.

(Via Geekologie and 4chan)

This is an interesting addition to the new OS X release.  Although no one really knows what it does exactly, it does add an interesting glimpse on how things are changing for Apple.  Here is a short write up i found:

We’ve gotten reports about an interesting feature in Snow Leopard, the new version of Mac OS X due for release this Friday. According to reports we’ve seen – and the screen shot below – Snow Leopard contains an antimalware feature.

We’re not sure yet exactly how this works, but the above screen shot shows this feature working with a download made via Safari, detecting a version of the RSPlug Trojan horse in a downloaded disk image.

We’re naturally curious about this feature, and about how thorough it is. As soon as we can find out more, we’ll post an article here. We wonder just how serious Apple thinks the malware threat is, especially since their latest Get a Mac ads highlight the fact that PCs running Windows suffer from viruses…

There are several things that I can see this stemming from. Probably the most notorious was the iWork 09, that came with a nice trojan. While it is a horrible reality that companies are having to take extra steps to protect their product form illegally downloaded torrents, I applaud them for taking the first step at least.

(Via Mac Security Blog)

The idea of falling snow being flavored is an abomination on nature, and in return, one of the best idea I have ever heard of! Will it really ever happen, probably not, but we can all hope that science will eventually get this out.

The Cloud Project is a tricky little concept that would spray flavored condensation and liquid nitrogen into clouds, “seeding” them, and forcing flavored snow to fall from the heavens. It’s pretty much straight of of a children’s book.

The whole thing is purely conceptual for now; it involves certain bacteria and ice nucleation and a lot of other science-y sounding words and phrases I don’t understand. What I do understand is the phrase “It will snow ice cream,” and what I wish I didn’t understand is “The technology is a long ways off.” Don’t be fooled by the existence of an actual Cloud Project van—it’s purely for illustrative purposes, and only functions as a regular ice cream truck/science information center.

I am practically getting a sugar high just sitting here thinking about it. I mean the only flavored snow I have seen was yellow, and it wasn’t very good.

(Via Gizmodo and The Cloud Project)

Even as a Mac user myself, I find myself thinking there is no need to worry about viruses and malware. Being in the security industry I know it is an absolutely ludicrous thought, but the chances are low enough that I I just push the idea to the side. Most people would say that the lack of exploits is mostly due to the low market share of the Mac, in attest to that sales are up, and we are seeing malware and even a talk about it at Black Hat this year.

“Most of the existing research (into) rootkits for OS X essentially take older Unix-based ideas and port them to OS X,” Dai Zovi told The Register. “Mine primarily uses the unique features of OS X and this makes it harder to detect the traditional tools and techniques.”

As just another Mach-based operating system, OS X is chock full of instructions that make sneaky rootkits possible. And yet there’s been little documentation, so far, of exactly what they are and how they can be used. Dai Zovi’s talk aims to fill the vacuum by showing how to extend native Mach RPC mechanisms that communicate with the Mac kernel.

“It’s not an inherent weakness in the system,” said Dai Zovi, co-author of the Mac Hacker’s Handbook. “It’s just extending the flexibility of the microkernel-based design in a malicious direction.”

I honestly haven’t looked at the code yet to see how hard the execution is. But with inclusion into the Metasploit Project, I am scared script kiddies everywhere will be able to pull it off.

(Via The Register.)