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Blogging using clipmakrs

Clipmarks is a neat firefox/internet explorer addon which allows you to essentially cut-n-paste into your blog one or more chunks of content from any webpage with a single click. Very easy to use. For example, in this post I have clipped descriptions of clipmarks’ features from their website.

clipped from clipmarks.com Clip-to-Blog You can now post clips directly to your blog, with or without saving it to clipmarks.com. Supports WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Movable Type, LiveJournal and Vox. Clip-to-Email You can now email what you clip without saving it first.

The story of Microsoft’s openness

Wired has this long but interesting article about how a few people at Microsoft went against their PR department and other top management to essentially start a culture of open communications with the outside world. This is now largely seen as a major success story – and Microsoft is one of the few major corporations that now has this culture of open blogging (with about 4500 employees blogging).

Lenn Pryor who started this initiative, go this idea after the following experience:

Pryor used to be terrified of flying. A close friend had survived a near-crash in the early ’90s, and it affected Pryor deeply. The idea of putting his life in the hands of two pilots he didn’t know gave him panic attacks. Before boarding a plane, he was routinely sick to his stomach, and he spent most of each flight alternately meditating and gripping his arm rests in fear. Then he met a pilot for Delta Air Lines. Pryor quizzed the pilot about every detail of flying jetliners, how many backup systems they had, what it would take to make a plane fall out of the sky. It worked. By getting inside the pilot’s head, he came to understand how safe flying actually is.

A decade later, Pryor was seeing similar signs of anxiety in the tens of thousands of software developers who create programs that work with the Windows operating system.

See full article

ACM Queue – Criminal Code: The Making of a Cybercriminal: Queue’s first-ever narrative chronicles one man’s transition from small-time hacker to big-time crook.

ACM Queue magazine has this fictional account of malware creators and their experiences. Although the characters are made up, the techniques and events are patterned on real activities of many different groups developing malicious software. Very interesting read.

“A guarantee? You want a guarantee?” Misha frowned at the screen. His negotiations with kru5h3r via IRC had been going well, till now. Kru5h3r wanted a full-function rootkit that he could distribute to build a botnet. He was willing to pay, but he didn’t want his investment to go up in smoke if his rootkit signature found its way into popular intrusion detection software.

“Nobody gives a guarantee,” Misha thought, but as he was about to type that reply, something made him pause.

“That’s right… we offer them insurance!” Misha grinned. Slava looked at him in disbelief. “Of course, they pay for the custom rootkit, but for a little bit extra every month, we will give them protection from the signature databases. If their kit is spotted and tagged, we’ll give them another one that does the same thing, but doesn’t match the known signature. They pay us a subscription fee through Aurum, so it all stays nice and anonymous.”

Read full story.