Quotulatiousness

November 1, 2013

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:32

My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The Halloween event, Blood and Madness, is drawing to a close and the new Tower of Nightmares event has begun. There’s also the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.

Let’s hope badBIOS is an elaborate Halloween hoax

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:05

Dan Goodin posted a scary Halloween tale at Ars Technica yesterday … at least, I’m hoping it’s just a scary story for the season:

In the intervening three years, Ruiu said, the infections have persisted, almost like a strain of bacteria that’s able to survive extreme antibiotic therapies. Within hours or weeks of wiping an infected computer clean, the odd behavior would return. The most visible sign of contamination is a machine’s inability to boot off a CD, but other, more subtle behaviors can be observed when using tools such as Process Monitor, which is designed for troubleshooting and forensic investigations.

Another intriguing characteristic: in addition to jumping “airgaps” designed to isolate infected or sensitive machines from all other networked computers, the malware seems to have self-healing capabilities.

“We had an air-gapped computer that just had its [firmware] BIOS reflashed, a fresh disk drive installed, and zero data on it, installed from a Windows system CD,” Ruiu said. “At one point, we were editing some of the components and our registry editor got disabled. It was like: wait a minute, how can that happen? How can the machine react and attack the software that we’re using to attack it? This is an air-gapped machine and all of a sudden the search function in the registry editor stopped working when we were using it to search for their keys.”

Over the past two weeks, Ruiu has taken to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus to document his investigative odyssey and share a theory that has captured the attention of some of the world’s foremost security experts. The malware, Ruiu believes, is transmitted though USB drives to infect the lowest levels of computer hardware. With the ability to target a computer’s Basic Input/Output System (BIOS), Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), and possibly other firmware standards, the malware can attack a wide variety of platforms, escape common forms of detection, and survive most attempts to eradicate it.

But the story gets stranger still. In posts here, here, and here, Ruiu posited another theory that sounds like something from the screenplay of a post-apocalyptic movie: “badBIOS,” as Ruiu dubbed the malware, has the ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers and microphones to bridge airgaps.

The Obamacare moment of clarity

Filed under: Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:49

In the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer on the moment of understanding:

Every disaster has its moment of clarity. Physicist Richard Feynman dunks an O-ring into ice water and everyone understands instantly why the shuttle Challenger exploded. This week, the Obamacare O-ring froze for all the world to see: Hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period.”

The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.

(a) Those letters are irrefutable evidence that President Obama’s repeated you-keep-your-coverage claim was false. Why were they sent out? Because Obamacare renders illegal (with exceedingly narrow “grandfathered” exceptions) the continuation of any insurance plan deemed by Washington regulators not to meet their arbitrary standards for adequacy. Example: No maternity care? You are terminated.

So a law designed to cover the uninsured is now throwing far more people off their insurance than it can possibly be signing up on the nonfunctioning insurance exchanges. Indeed, most of the 19 million people with individual insurance will have to find new and likely more expensive coverage. And that doesn’t even include the additional millions who are sure to lose their employer-provided coverage. That’s a lot of people. That’s a pretty big lie.

Wine with food – the natural pairing

Filed under: Food, Wine — Nicholas @ 07:28

In the Wall Street Journal, Will Lyons discusses the correct way to drink wine … with food, that is:

HOW SHOULD YOU ENJOY a bottle of wine? The short answer is any way you like. As long as you show it a little respect and serve it at a reasonable temperature, you will be hard pushed not to enjoy its myriad flavors and aromas. I have always found that wine is much more portable and robust than you think. Over the years, some of my favorite bottles have been enjoyed not in the presence of white tablecloths and crystal decanters but on picnics in fields, over a simple lunch of fried sardines or with a salad and a plate of cold meats.

[…]

“If you want to get pleasure out of both the wine and the food, you don’t want one to overpower the other,” he says. “Think of the wine as a seasoning, almost, for the food. If you take oysters, for example, a lovely, lemony, crisp white wine is similar to that little squeeze of lemon juice or drop of vinegar you put on the oysters.”

Balance and harmony are the two watchwords in wine appreciation. Sitting down with family and friends, around the table, is one of the human race’s ancient rituals. Pouring wine with the meal is, as the philosopher Roger Scruton points out, a ritual that allows us to achieve harmony rather than slip into the temptations of excess. In “I Drink Therefore I Am,” he notes: “Wine properly served slows everything down, establishing a rhythm of gentle sips rather than gluttonous swiggings.”

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