A Day Late

Some people have been asking me when/where are the wedding pictures. Well…unfortunately the photographer didn’t give us digital copies of the pictures. We only have one set of little 3 x 4 prints. Apparently we’re supposed to choose the ones we like and “order” the sizes we want. Is it just me or does this sounds like an out dated way to do things? Wouldn’t it be better to charge a flat fee for all the negatives or digital images? Or at least let us purchase the rights and abilities to reproduce the select photos we do like?

Ordering reprints of the ones we like now is fine, but what’s going to happen in ten years when we’d like copies and the photographer is dead, moved or who knows what? A wedding day is easily one of the most important days in someones life, shouldn’t they have the right to reproduce the memories of that day if they need or want to? I’ve taken many pictures over the last few years. Vacations, interesting things I’ve seen, all sorts of pictures. All of which I have the ability to have printed anytime I like. But my wedding pictures? Nope…I’ve got to track some guy down, who lives on the other side of the continent (to make things worse) and order my pictures from him. If this is the price of “professional” photography I don’t think I have much use for it. If I had it to do over again, I think I would have had a bunch of people snapping pictures with digital cameras. Out of all the results I’m sure we could extract a few good ones to remember the day. Sure they might not be as high a quality but at least we’d have the ability to save and reproduce them if our prints get damaged or destroyed.

Enough complaining…if I can get access to a scanner in the near future, maybe I’ll try and scan a few of the 4 x 3 prints in.

Here’s an interesting article about security vulnerabilities that allow the X-Box to be “hacked”.

I’ve had an X-Box for a little over a year now but honestly I don’t use it much. Multiplayer Halo is about all it is used for( Ciara is quite good by the way). I know someone that added a modchip and larger hard drive to their X-Box and turned it into an entertainment machine. He has all sorts of games saved directly to the hard drive and transferred his DVD’s and other recordings to it. It’s an impressive setup. Something I’d like to duplicate if I had the time and/or ambition to do so.

Here’s a handy firefox tip that enables handling urls with line breaks in them. This is particularly useful for those of us still using Outlook, which seems to improperly wrap URL’s quite often.

Here’s another Mozilla/Firefox tip: if you copy a URL wrapped over multiple lines from somewhere and try to paste it into the address bar, you will end up only with the first line of it. To fix it, go to about:config and change editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines setting to 3 or add:

user_pref(”editor.singleLine.pasteNewlines”, 3);

to your user.js file. Now all the line breaks will be removed upon pasting.

The past few days I’ve been following an interesting story about a software engineer named, Mike Lynn, who gave a presentation at the recent Black Hat conference. The presentation contained information about a vulnerability in the Cisco operating system (Cisco routers power most computer networks and the majority of the internet). Lynn didn’t disclose how to exploit the vulnerability; his purpose it seems was to make people aware of the vulnerability and its seriousness.

As a result he was forced to quit his job and is now facing legal action from Cisco. There’s an interview with Lynn posted HERE. It’s interesting and I’d recommend it to everyone, not just techies. I’m having a hard time figuring out why Cisco and ISS (Lynn’s former employer) had a problem with his presentation. If he had included information on how to exploit the vulnerability and take over the routers then I could understand their motivation to keep him quiet. But going after him just for making everyone aware that there was a vulnerability? Come on!

I came across the story HERE as I was browsing Bruce Schneier’s, Schneier on Security weblog. His entry includes several more links about the story and information about a legal defense fund setup for Lynn. Schneier comments:

…Hackers are working overtime to reconstruct Lynn’s attack and write an exploit. This, of course, means that we’re in much more danger of there being a worm that makes use of this vulnerability.

The sad thing is that we could have avoided this. If Cisco and ISS had simply let Lynn present his work, it would have been just another obscure presentation amongst the sea of obscure presentations that is BlackHat. By attempting to muzzle Lynn, the two companies ensured that 1) the vulnerability was the biggest story of the conference, and 2) some group of hackers would turn the vulnerability into exploit code just to get back at them.

I agree.