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First a disclaimer, I have been a reader of 2600 for several years and have even been published several times within its pages. However, none of my articles or letters appear in this book.

About a month ago, the friendly neighborhood UPS delivery person deposited a giant box on my doorstep. When I picked it up, it felt as though it weighed several pounds. I set it on the kitchen table and slowly peeled away the tape and eventually gazed at the shiny cover of The Best of 2600 (A Hacker Odyssey).

Clearly this book was lovingly crafted. It contains over 800 pages of articles, news, and reports from 2600 over the past three decades of its existence (spread over 24 years).

When I started reading 2600, it was in mid 2004, and most of the articles and resources in those issues focused on comptuers and a little bit on social engineering. I always wanted to read some of the earlier issues, where the emphasis was on phone phreaking, but didn’t know how, or which issues to get, nor did I have the $325 to order them all, or the time to read them all if I did.

This tome contains a lot of information from just as many sources: Phone phreaking, computers, law, the beginnings of the Internet, lock picking, and hacking, just to name a few. You don’t have to be interested in any of those fields in order to gain enjoyment from this book.

http://www.2600.com/news/view/article/11552

I just read The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain.

In the book, Mr. Zittrain states that in the beginning of the computer networks that would eventually form the Internet, computers connected to it would run whatever code or programs they encountered because all there was was free and good code.

Then came along the Morris Worm in the late 1980s and that started to change peoples perspectives on running every piece of code that flowed down the turnpike. People became afraid that one day their computer would encounter bad code such as viruses, spyware, Trojan horses, etc.

Slowly, over the years with the advent of Web 2.0, computers and programs started to become less and less generative, to the point where most devices are becoming “tethered” in a way.

A tethered device is a device that for all intents and purposes “calls home” from time to time to get new code and programming from the company that created it. No user serviceable parts inside.

One of the more interesting examples of tethered appliances given is that of the TiVo. Everyone knows of the TiVo, that little device that allows you to record television shows to its hard disk for future viewing. One thing I found interesting was that in a small Texas town TiVo, Inc brought a lawsuit against the makers of EchoStar charging that the EchoStar device infringed on several of TiVo’s copyrights.

The judges decision in this case was that EchoStar was to remotely disable the offending units through its tether to EchoStar.

Countless subscribers of the EchoStar box are going to be punished (and forced to buy a TiVo box) because of the decision of a court in Texas. To me, this is almost like someone knocking on my door telling me the airbag in my car will have to be disabled because it infringes on some other car company’s copyrights

To this end, Mr. Zittrain argues that people need to be mindful of what they do online and know that somewhere out there Big Brother is watching.

http://futureoftheinternet.org/

We apologize to our readers for our unplanned disruption of service. The Stylemac domain name expired under our noses and it took us a few days to be able to re-register it. We thank you all for your concern. We are back on the air.

Tomorrow, June 17, 2008, the Mozilla Foundation aims to release Firefox 3 for download.

Nearly one and a half million people around the world have pledged on their website (link below) to download Firefox 3 as part of Mozilla Foundation’s attempt to get into the Guiness Book of World Records for most software downloads in a 24 hour period.

Firefox currently is in the #2 spot as far as Internet browsers go. Over the years it has steadily creeped up on the #1 title holder, Internet Explorer.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

On May 30th, the Blender Institute released its first movie, “Big Buck Bunny” on its website in .avi, H.264, .m4v, and several other video formats and resolutions.

The DVD has been available since May 20th, ten days before its wide release on the web.

The film follows the “Big Buck Bunny” as he thwarts three nefarious woodland creatures (2 squirrels and a rat) bent on causing mischief.

As mentioned in an earlier posting, Big Buck Bunny was created using Blender and other free and open source programs, and as such, is itself released under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Source: www.bigbuckbunny.org

I guess I’m a bit late on this one and everyone else knew about this site years ago but anyway, Layers magazine is a really hot tutorial & learning central covering everything Adobe. Instead of reading this paragraph you should go there now and dig through all these tutorials… Still here?
http://www.layersmagazine.com/

StyleMac, being a rather old site by todays measures, had been based on WordPress 1.5.2. I’d long thought about updating it to a recent version, but just as I couldn’t find time to post I couldn’t find time to update it. This hit back some weeks ago, when a WordPress 1.5.2 exploit surfaced, that allowed to gain control over the System and thus infected StyleMac with lots of spam. The attacker modified my templates and most of the content in the db. All entries were befouled with spam for all kinds of products.

During the past 2 weeks I’ve been working on not only updating WordPress to a recent version but also transferring the site to a new, faster, server. StyleMac runs on a SVN WordPress 2.6 Bleeding now - which makes it a lot easier for me to update to newest revisions. So, all of the uglier effects of the past exploit are be gone now and should not happen again.

If you’re a naturl born designer with a brilliant taste for colors, art and style you probably don’t need this and avoid the actual idea in disgust, but many other people lack a decent taste for colors and style, and thus might love the Color Scheme Generator from wellstyled.com. It basically crates color schemes and palettes for good-looking and well balanced harmonic web pages. If you like this idea you should take a look at it:
http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/