Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.
- Klobuchar humiliated herself and accidently destroyed Biden.
- From the archives: Shane Parrish on Writing to Think.
- Lately you have to wonder if this is actually satire.
- The missing $.75 in computer fees. Great story I was unaware of.
A funny story about "The Cuckoo's Egg" and me. In the early 1990's, as the most junior faculty member in the Math/CS department, I took over managing the department's computer lab, which among other things, contained a MicroVAX II. The department received some funding to network the labs and connect to the Internet (at the time via a T1). I was pulling cable, adding network adapters, etc., when I read "The Cuckoos Egg." One of Clifford Stoll's stories was about how the German hacker took advantage of factory default passwords for the "admin" account of Berkeley's systems, and sure enough, our department's MicroVAX II had the factory default password for the "admin" account. Reading "The Cuckoos Egg" was was my first exposure to cybersecurity.
ReplyDeleteRichard Feynman was what you call an eccentric and one of the skills he developed was safe cracking. He later admitted that one of his tricks was to know the type of safe he was "cracking" and first try the default combination from the factory. That was rarely changed and he was often able to open many locked safes to the amazement of onlookers.
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