Blog-o-Mix

EUSecWest 2010 is near

I invite you to take a look at EUSecWest 2010 agenda and register. Perhaps we could meet there, who knows…

Fata Morgana in Limassol

I have read many times about Fata Morgana effects and the beautiful image illusions it creates.

However, on Friday 7 May 2010 around 12:00-13:00 in Limassol, I was pretty lucky to observe this amazing effect.

There was only 1 sea-cargo, near horizon which was optically affected. At the horizon level, there was a band of a slight darker colour compared to sea or sky. That cargo-ship was optically lifted un-inverted on top of the band. As the effect was fading away, there was a mirror-like image of the cargo-ship on the same level, departing from the ship itself towards left-side…

Few minutes later after observing the effect, when taking our lunch out to the company-terrace, fata morgana was already gone … It is as true as it’s said “Here She is, and here She’s not…”

Other two interesting related blog posts.

I suppose, in general terms experiencing Fata Morgana is as nice as experiencing Tramontane

“Programmers should be able to program!” program

Well, sad and true in the same time… It is an entertaining reading and one full of insights…

Maybe it’s just one of those reasons why software is getting more crappy, unreliable, insecure, etc.

The non-programming programmers

Read more! »

Comprehensive list of security and hackers conferences 2010

Recently, there is a high span of various security and hackers conferences and conventions going on.

Keeping track of them is not as easy as it seems, since there is no central point where to look up their schedules, locations, call for papers, etc.

So I decided to compile a list for my own (well it doesn’t cover 100% of security related conferences out there, but it tries to cover most of the publicly known/accessible ones).

Read more! »

I want to present few nice sites which might be interesting for you. At least I enjoyed finding them out and getting information about them.

Welcome to the world of Scambaiting - 419eater.com

From wiki: “419eater.com is a scam baiting website which focuses on advance-fee fraud. The name 419 comes from “419 fraud", another name for advance fee fraud, and itself derived from the relevant section of the Nigerian criminal code. The website founder, Michael Berry, goes by the alias Shiver Metimbers. The 419 Eater forum has over 24,000 registered accounts.”

The people on this forum are taking it as a real-life role-playing-game. They have something like medals on how many fake-banks they “crashed", flags of countries where they “smashed” a scammer, etc.

If you like this kind of long and ad-hoc scenario games, this is the place to try. If not, even just simply browsing the forum is a fun . BTW, on this site you can find almost any phrase which you would find in the emails from the Spam/Junk folder.

Related to this type of activity is the Project Honeypot. More on computer-related honeypots.

Like surfing? What about Couch-Surfing?

From wiki: “The CouchSurfing Project is the largest hospitality exchange network, with over 1.75 million members in 237 countries and territories.[1] According to Alexa it is currently the most visited hospitality service on the Internet, averaging around 40 million daily page views July-December 2009″

Interested? CouchSurfing FAQ will get you started - prepare your backpacks!

PS: though CouchSurfing might be fun, free and exciting, NEVER forget the common-sense for personal privacy and security, just to avoid so called (and over-hyped) CouchSurfing horror stories

(thanks to Veronica to throw some like on existence of such project)