Category: General Interest

Items of general interest – for mass consumption

How to be a great audience

Marketing guru Seth Godin has a nice article on how a good audience can bring the best out of a speaker or performer. Too many people go passively, falling into the trap of just waiting for information to be poured into their heads. But a good, active audience gets more from the presenter – more energy, more focussed answers, and more generally, form better relationships.

The next time someone says, “any questions,” ask one. Just ask.

The next time you see a play that is truly outstanding, lead the standing ovation at the end.

The next time you have an itch to send an email to a political blogger or post a comment or do a trackback, do it. Make it a habit.

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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.

  powered by clipmarks blog it

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.”

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