Monthly Archives: May 2005

Northeast has Dumbest Drivers

Posted on May 27, 2005 by Kevin

Who would have guessed that Massachusetts drivers knew nothing about driving? (if you’ve ever driven around the Boston area, you’ll get the joke)

From CNN:

bq.. When faced with a written test, similar to ones given to beginning drivers applying for licenses, one in ten drivers couldn’t get a passing score, according to a study commissioned by GMAC Insurance.

Drivers in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states did worst. Twenty percent of test-takers failed there.

The state of Rhode Island leads the nation in driver cluelessness, according to the survey. The average test score there was 77, just eight points above a failing grade.

Those in neighboring Massachusetts were second worst and New Jersey, third worst.

For instance, one out of five drivers doesn’t know that a pedestrian in a crosswalk has the right of way, and one out of three drivers speeds up to make a yellow light, even when pedestrians are present, the study said.

Drivers not only lack basic road knowledge, but exhibit dangerous driving behavior as well.

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Voyager Enters Solar System's Final Frontier

Posted on May 25, 2005 by Kevin

From NASA’s web site:

bq.. NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered the solar system’s final frontier, a vast, turbulent expanse where the Sun’s influence ends and the solar wind crashes into the thin gas between stars.

“Voyager has entered the final lap on its race to the edge of interstellar space, as it begins exploring the solar system’s final frontier,” said Dr. Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which built and operates Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2.

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In November 2003, the Voyager team announced it was seeing events unlike any encountered before in the mission’s then 26-year history. The team believed the unusual events indicated Voyager 1 was approaching a strange region of space, likely the beginning of this new frontier called the termination shock region. There was controversy at that time over whether Voyager 1 had indeed encountered the termination shock or was just getting close.

“The consensus of the team now is that Voyager 1, at 8.7 billion miles from the Sun, has at last entered the heliosheath, the region beyond the termination shock,” said Dr. John Richardson from MIT, Principal Investigator of the Voyager plasma science investigation.

The termination shock is where the solar wind, a thin stream of electrically charged gas blowing continuously outward from the Sun, is slowed by pressure from gas between the stars. At the termination shock, the solar wind slows abruptly from its average speed of 300 to 700 km per second (700,000 – 1,500,000 miles per hour) and becomes denser and hotter.

p.

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William Safire's Rules for Writers

Posted on May 24, 2005 by Kevin

*William Safire’s Rules for Writers*

  1. Remember to never split an infinitive.
  2. The passive voice should never be used.
  3. Do not put statements in the negative form.
  4. Verbs have to agree with their subject.
  5. Proofread carefully to see if you words out. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
  6. A writer must not shift your point of view.
  7. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
  8. Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.
  9. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!!
  10. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
  11. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
  12. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
  13. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
  14. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
  15. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
  16. Always pick on the correct idiom.
  17. The adverb always follows the verb.
  18. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.
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WiFi crypto can be broken in 3 mins

Posted on May 17, 2005 by Kevin

Via Boing Boing:

WEP, the access-control system for WiFi, is notoriously shit. Now Fed computer scientists have shown an attack that can break a WEP key in three minutes. Gabe sez, “Brilliant approach, using a second computer to re-send the same packet back to the router, thus generating more traffic, thus catching more weak packets, etc.”

The FBI team used the deauth feature of void11 to repeatedly disassociate the laptop from the access point. Desired additional traffic was then generated as Windows XP tried to re-associate back to the AP. Note that this is not a particularly stealthy attack, as the laptop user will notice a series of “Wireless Network unavailable” notifications in the taskbar of their desktop screen.

Another attack method the FBI team used is a replay attack. The basic premise of this attack is to capture at least one packet traveling from the victim laptop to victim access point. This packet can then be replayed into the network, causing the target AP to respond and provide more traffic to capture.

Link

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