Bitbucket February 2000
MacArthur genius grant nominee
Wondering what to do with old computer hardware, say, a 5.25-inch floppy drive? Neil Fraser, a high school roboticist figured out an excellent solution: add a little coat hanger here, a little toilet paper tube there, get an old tin box, and voila-- a better mousetrap! Also noteworthy is Young Fraser's gizmo for brute-forcing rotary combination locks. We're happy to see Innocent Youth uploading useful information to the net rather than merely downloading it. But we want to see what he does with an old mouse.
Nailbiter, meet anklebiter; anklebiter, nailbiter
We're not exactly sure what the Dutch Windows 2000 Challenge was supposed to be, other than some kind of online "game" to keep us from biting our nails to the quick while we waited those excruciating last two thousand minutes until Mr. Bill Officially Released "W2K." Sadly, it wasn't to be: the game was canceled when the site (running Microsoft-IIS 4.0, naturally) collapsed under denial-of-service attacks.
Orp, orp, and away
Tragic.net.genius and prodigious.pest Antiorp (a/k/a and/or known associates =cw4t7abs, a9ff@hell.com, f1f0@m9ndfukc.com, meter@flicker.dk, integer@www.god-emil.dk, etc., etc.) is suffering from a serious case of "tristesse profonde," as it would say. It seems that its upstream provider, proventum.dk, put an end to its reign of ASCII terror-in-a-teapot--maybe because hundreds of Antiorp's messages mysteriously started bouncing to the ISP's hostmaster. Initial reports claiming that the ISP had killed Antiorp's two domains, www.m9ndfukc.com and www.god-emil.dk, seem to have been greatly exaggerated: as of this writing -- just one day after the reports, far too fast for new DNS records to propagate -- both webservers were alive and well.
On a peak day, antiorp spammed out dozens of long messages at a litany of what it was wont to call "korporat fasc!zt male !mbez!lz"; Bitbucket's own T. Byfield was Numero Uno Supremo on this list for almost two years, but targets included several people associated with moderating nettime, music-dsp, MAX, and assorted other mailing lists, and numerous innocent bystanders. Antiorp's unique blend of B1FF!!! and Europanto was unmistakable--well, almost unmistakable.
De De DeCSS
The Ghost of Cypherpunks Past lives on in two exquisite efforts designed to torment the legions of stooges bent on quelling the distribution of nonlicensed DVD-decoding software. One such effort, written by a contributor to the collaborative Pigdog journal is a handy perl-based utility for filtering out those pesky Cascading Style Sheets -- hence its name, "DeCSS." The author urges fellow netizens to distribute his utilities as widely as possible, thereby making the task of sniffing out the DVD-decoding DeCSS a touch more difficult. The second effort, the Trojan Cow Project takes a more oblique approach. Its author encourages you to file a comment with the U.S. Copyright Office regarding the U.S. Congress's ambitiously overreaching Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Noting that the CO republishes public comments in PDF format, which can include images, he set up a simple email autoresponder: write a comment, send it to his autoresponder, get your comment back with an attached PDF, send the comment with attached PDF to the CO, which will then republish it. The trick? The PDF you receive will include one of two different images of a cow, each of which contains half of the code of the DVD Content Scrambling System (CSS) cryptographically embedded in the cow pictures. When the Copyright Office publishes the comments with cows, they'll publish the CSS code -- but in a format that the movie industry stooges cannot reverse-engineer or decode, for precisely the reasons they're arguing in court against over five hundred defendents. The brains behind this operation figures the algorithm for extracting the code is worth US$10M, but our five bucks says he'll open source it Real Soon Now.
More to the point: we look forward to seeing these techniques deployed on an as-needed basis in the future. In other words, a lot.
Bitbucket - Data In Hopeless Turmoil
Bitbucket February 2000
Bitbucket Nr.1 (last Millennium)
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/5/5592/1.html
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