Friday, January 18, 2002

Weakened encryption lays bare al-Qaeda files. New Scientist - Weakened encryption lays bare al-Qaeda files . Relatively weak encryption appears to have been used to protect files recovered from two computers believed to have belonged to al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. The files were found on a laptop and desktop computer bought by Wall Street Journal reporters from looters in Kabul a few days after it was captured by Northern Alliance forces on 13 November. The files provide informatio... [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service] 2:04:41 PM

Swarms of Sea-going Nanobots. Researchers at the USC Laboratory for Molecular Robots have come up with a plan that does for the oceans what Smart Dust does for the atmosphere: fill it with millions of nanobots. Smalltimes has the most complete story on the new nanobots. There was also a discussion of the story over at slashdot a few days ago. Even though the goal of dumping millions or billions of nanobots into the ocean is to monitor pollution, the researchers (like those working on smart dust) seem remarkably unconcerned t... [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service] ROBOTS! 11:18:41 AM

Episode Heaven is a terrific downloadable-TV direc .... Episode Heaven is a terrific downloadable-TV directory, with links to dozens of sites that host Real, DivX and MPEG versions of great shows like Futurama, the Simpsons, Ali G and South Park. Link Discuss (Thanks, Yaron!) posted by Cory Doctorow at 05:32 permanent link to this entry [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service] 10:13:18 AM

Two indicted in fraud scheme. A South Barrington businessman with close ties to Rosemont Mayor Donald E. Stephens and alleged links to organized crime was indicted Thursday on charges that he and a partner siphoned more than $280,000 in insurance premiums, using a restaurant that operated right under Rosemont village board offices as part of the scheme. [Chicago Sun-Times] The actual schemes of Chicago Gangsters are just kind of white collar bull-shit.  Come on guys, can't you knock over a armored car?  Or whack a guy in his spaghetti?  You're dissapointing me, and Martin Scorcese. 9:36:55 AM

Well, XML-RPC is like crack.  In about two hours, I learned enough to publish the logs from my AliceBot to a new Blogger site, http://www.lonelylion.com/mcavoyrobot . XML-RPC is a set of XML based tags that define a simple transport between programs.  It's pretty damn cool.  Though my implementation of it isn't anything fantastic, it's still pretty satisfying. 9:05:17 AM