Friday, July 28, 2006

Aaagh! Give me back my thumb!

Enucleation Attack: A particularly gruesome method of defeating biometric authentication methods, by physically removing a body part from the user in order to present it to the authentication device

from the Glossary of Computer Security Terms

Friday, July 21, 2006

mutter mutter

Subverting Subversion

Background: I committed a whole lot of files to an svn repository, then realised I really didn't want them there at all, and wanted to roll back the whole repository to before the commit happened. I couldn't find an easy way to do this - but here's an effective if nasty little hack, which will work if you have a working copy elsewhere representing the state you want to get the repository back to.

1. Make a temp dir, and copy your working copy to it.
2. Remove all the svn meta-information (found this here)

find . -name .svn -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

3. Check out the project from the repository, and copy all the files from your temp dir into the new project dir
4. Commit all the changes

The repository should be back to before your unwanted changes.

I'm hoping someone comes up with the 'right' way to do this, but for now I'm posting to avoid needing to figure it out again the next time.




Thursday, July 06, 2006

Mind the Communists

Kind of as a sequel to my post on powerloss, here's a link to the one of the worst ideas to come out of South Africa in quite a while.

www.crimexposouthafrica.co.za is a site designed to 'inform foreign tourists about South Africa's crippling violence' (this according to IOL). While I wouldn't disagree that a problem exists, and quite a severe one, scaring off foreign tourists will hurt the economy, increase unemployment and extreme poverty, and undoubtedly increase the crime rate.

I'm all for warning tourists to be careful, and also for making crime stats as accurate as possible and as widely available as possible. This isn't the purpose of the site though - no statistics, rather 'first-hand accounts' (read: bias) and 'gruesome pictures' (read: gory voyeurism). Not to mention revenue-generating advertising opportunities (absolutely everywhere) for the site's poor victimised creator. Please Neil Watson, emigrate now - I may be tempted to organise some mob justice.

Checking google to see who else was talking about the site, I came across this gem from the Boerevryheid Forum (who else):

"Hierdie is net wat die wereld nodig het om ver eens en vir altyd die gru dade van die komunistiese regering van nader te beskou.

Ons as Boerevolk moet sulke inisiatiewe 100% ondersteun."

Beware the Red Menace, because as much as you might like to believe it, this isn't 2006.

Another post, from an opinion page on litnet

Natuurlik wil die regime niks aan misdaad doen nie, omdat hy self met misdadige middele - terreur, wetteloosheid en anargie - aan bewind gekom het.