Cuppabits September 28th

Posted by Walt Published in Cuppabits

Links from all over — The fresh ones and the stale, all links must go!

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AOL IM is vulnerable to attack and AOL won’t patch it until sometime next month

When the good guys are trying to demonstrate that an attacker can format your hard drive or run any nasty process on your machine, they instead call up the Windows Calculator. The link shows that with the right malformed link in your AIM, some random person can pull up your calculator on your Windows Machine. (The so called “Proof of Concept” that the hack works.) Obviously if a bad person were to give you this same thing, you could kiss your computer goodbye.

I use Trillian, which connects to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ…
Apple’s iChat is not vulnerable.

[via Wired]

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If you’re old enough to remember why Americans were forced to switch coolants in their automobiles, you know that the formula for Freon had to be changed. You know that it was chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that persisted in the atmosphere, slowly migrating to the North and South Poles to then be broken down by sunlight high in the atmosphere, destroying the Ozone layer. That was 21 years ago[National Science Foundation].

Well, that’s probably still true. But apparently the calculations of the breakdown process were off, and by a large factor, too. Some atmospheric scientist says that new calculations say that the rate of breakdown of the CFCs can’t be right, and his work is being published in an upcoming issue of the well respected NATURE magazine.

Now, we can see how big the hole in the Ozone layer grows each year, but now the scientists are saying that they can’t figure out the exact method of how that happens. CFCs are still responsible for the process, but their role may go from “primarily responsible” to a “partly responsible” role.

This is all a geek way of saying that we switched away from the wonderful Freon because of a scientific overreaction.

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Your moment of Lizard Zen [LAist]

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The Silent Conspiracy Theory

Stay with me, because this gets complicated. Back in July, there was a chemical weapons accident deep inside Syria. At least 50 people were killed when some chemical weapons were being loaded onto “Scud” missiles. Additionally, a strange ship from North Korea docked in a Syrian port, and unloaded what some folks believe were North Korean nuclear materials.

On September 6th, Israeli jets went on a daring bombing raid, deep inside Syria. The jets dropped their bombs in the middle of the desert and left. The Israelis called it Operation Orchard.

Here’s the deal: The Israeli operation bombed something, but nobody knows what it was. It was either nuclear materials or the chemical weapons area.

Here’s the upshot: The Syrian paid for the best antiaircraft protection system in the world, and it was apparently completely and totally silent for the entire Israeli raid. It’s a Russian system, one that the Iranians have started investing in. And Syria has remained silent about the entire affair, acknowledging only that Israeli jets violated its airspace and dropped some bombs in the middle of the desert, recently claiming that the bombs didn’t even go off. (Of course, these bombs that didn’t go off would be called “extra fuel tanks” but we’ll let others figure that out)

But here’s the REAL DEAL: The Iranians are freaking out. They have noticed several things about all this, and realize that Iran, and their entire nuclear program are vulnerable to attack, and if they get their nuclear sites bombed, they won’t even know until the bombs are dropped. There’s no secret that Iran would like to destroy Israel. The issue is, if Israel can fly bombs around through any air defense, the Americans can too.

Scary stuff.

[link]

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Guess which way Larry Craig voted in the Senate when homosexual hate crimes legislation came up?

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Would YOU watch a new KNIGHT RIDER series starring K.I.T.T?

What if KITT could transform into different cars?

What if David Hasselhoff was nowhere near the show’s production? Ahh, I have your attention now. Good.

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One of the longest articles on Wikipedia, and yes, it’s on something that nobody cares about.

The line of Royal Succession to the British Monarchy, carried out to the 1286th person in line to the British throne.

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