Hackery

I wrote an article about the Comodo hack for Deutsche Welle here. The following is an introduction to the full interview (further below) with Comodohacker. On March 15, 2011, a major Internet-security company, Comodo, said that it sustained a major security breach, by allowing nine “SSL certificates,” to be issued in their name. These certificates are used to digitally authenticate a secure connection to websites like Gmail, Hotmail and Skype. The hacker acquired fake certificates for Gmail, Hotmail, Google, Yahoo,…

So I have a set of data in a Google Docs spreadsheet of SF Bay Area Farmer’s Markets. Each market has data for the following columns: Day, County, Location, Hours, Months, Intersection, City, State, ZIP, Phone, URL. There are entries for over 100 markets. What I want is a simple web page (ideally iPhone-friendly) that will have a few text input fields: ZIP, City, Day (or even a pull-down menu for each one). Then based on those inputs, the program…

Apparently for the last 18 months Scott Adams has been suffering from Spasmodic Dysphonia, a disease that affects the larynx, making ordinary speech extremely difficult. Somehow, he figured out how to hack his own brain to figure out how to speak again: My theory was that the part of my brain responsible for normal speech was still intact, but for some reason had become disconnected from the neural pathways to my vocal cords. (That’s consistent with any expert’s best guess…

For those of you who’ve downloaded Google Earth, the guy at the demo booth showed me a minor easter egg in it. When you’re in the view mode, press CTRL-G, and you’ll enter a flight simulator mode. It’s pretty sweet. 🙂