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review of Mafiaboy: How I cracked the Internet

It’s the story about a young teenager in the West Island of Montreal who hacked website like Yahoo, CNN, eBay, Dell and others in year 2000. The book follows Michael Calce’s involvement in hacking, from his early adventures on AOL, launching the attacks on Yahoo, CNN and eBay in 1999 to the resulting investigation, trial and sentencing that followed. The second part of the book covers a bit of his life afterwards but is mostly on how hacking has changed since his Mafiaboy days and ways for users to protect themselves online.

http://yyztech.ca/reviews/book/mafiaboy-how-cracked-internet-why-still-broken

Blogging with Twitter

I haven’t updated this blog in a while, but that’s not to say I haven’t been blogging pre-say. I realized a few months ago that most of my blogging had moved to Twitter.

Why? Well there’s a few reasons:

• via its gMail interface, blogging is as simple as sending a text message, making it very immediate
• the restrictions (160-odd characters, no images, short urls) make tight writing a necessity
• you don’t feel like you have to write 2-3 paragraphs (that’s me) when you can sum things up in a sentance
• the social aspects – it’s not Facebook, but that’s probably a good thing – really if i want post an album, I can use Flikr
• the 3rd-party apps – there’s a whole host of things built on Twitter’s api, from search engines like TweetScan to Twitbin there’s a lot of interesting things being built around it.
• it’s fun

Blogging certainly has its place, but if you’re looking for something less formal- and quite possibly the way things are going, give it a try.

Tale of 2 cities: Wifi in Toronto and Montreal

Found this posting on the author’s experience with WiFi in Toronto and Montreal via the Wireless Toronto mailing list. While Toronto doesn’t come off so well, he promising a second posting on some of the good spots he’s found.

Bluetooth explained

I’m always looking for good explanations of technical subjects. Over at CBC.ca there’s a good write-up on Bluetooth, the wireless protocol widely used in mobile phones for everything from wireless mics to file transfer.

On the topic of phones, there’s a new series starting on CBC.ca next week, read about it here while fuming over the slow pace of adoption of phones in Canada – case in point, Fido is just now rolling out a G3 service, nice Flash animation, but we’ve got one phone for now.

The CBC series will will be hosted over at http://www.cbc.ca/technology/ and feature a number of industry people from Research In Motion co-founder Mike Lazaridis to Sir Richard Branson. Should be good.

More on the new spam bot

I caught this article a few days ago on something similar to what I got on YYZtech.ca a few weeks ago: spam without any urls. The author has two theories: 1) they are trying to train automatic spam filters to allow certain words – that will be later used from spamming, and/or 2) they want to get the e-mail addresses where the spam was sent from white listed, again, to use for “real” spamming later on.

New kind of spam bot

While checking out the forums on YYZtech.ca for spam, I noticed something new and kind of interesting. I wasn’t sure if it was spam untill I looked at the address, but for a second or two it fooled-me, the bot had taken a short quote (or just the fist word – there where several posts from the same bot) and worked it into a question, so at a quick glance it looked like just part of the normal forum thread – sneaky