There's a really interesting article posted by Adrian Chen on Gawker last Friday telling the story of how Michael Brutsch (aka Violentacrez), the worst troll on Reddit (and possibly the worst troll in history) was finally "outed."

What is especially interesting is Brutsch's reaction and attitude in the wake of being exposed. Along with some notes on how sites like Reddit are sometimes willing to to give passive "permission" to trolling in order to get their clicks up.

Fascinating.

Link to full article here.

Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web
Adrian Chen   

Last Wednesday afternoon I called Michael Brutsch. He was at the office of the Texas financial services company where he works as a programmer and he was having a bad day. I had just told him, on Gchat, that I had uncovered his identity as the notorious internet troll Violentacrez (pronounced Violent-Acres).

"It's amazing how much you can sweat in a 60 degree office," he said with a nervous laugh.

Judging from his internet footprint, Brutsch, 49, has a lot to sweat over. If you are capable of being offended, Brutsch has almost certainly done something that would offend you, then did his best to rub your face in it. His speciality is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls, but as Violentacrez he also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed, all on the sprawling online community Reddit.

This is pretty interesting. Project Honeynet has just put up a realtime visualization of cyberattacks on locations which are hosting one or more of the project's passive sensor tools. The visualization doesn't necessarily show "targeted" (i.e. human directed against a specific target) attacks. But it does show suspicious scanning and other activities detected by their sensors. Most are likely to be automated vulnerability scans. But it does provide a sense of just how prevalent vulnerability probing is considering the relatively small number of networks that are involved with Project Honeynet compared to the total number of networks out there.

Check out their website for full details.

Link to Project Honeynet homepage here.

Direct link to the HoneyMap is here.

The HoneyMap shows a real-time visualization of attacks against the Honeynet Project's sensors deployed around the world. It leverages the internal data sharing protocol hpfeeds as its data source. Read this post to learn about the technical details and frequently asked questions. Before going into explanations, take a look at the map itself: map.honeynet.org!

We have seen attack visualizations for quite some time in various forms and availabilities. So far, we only had a GTK canvas based solution and a project around Google Earth and WebGL that would show attacks against our honeypot systems. The most awesome related projects are coming from our Australian folks (thanks Ben) - make sure to take a look at their site.

Despite earlier nice approaches, a pure web based one that could easily be shared was not existing. With better abstractions, more libraries and cool HTML5/CSS3 stuff becoming available for web browsers, Florian decided to try a similar visualization that could be made available as a service without any setup requirements. After the first initial proof-of-concept code, we decided to throw some real data onto the map.

Internally, the Honeynet Project uses hpfeeds for collecting data from honeypots and sharing it across different analysis components and data storage setups. Thus, we added hpfeeds support to our map back-end and translated all IP addresses of our events to geographic locations through the MaxMind IP geolocation. After a short while we had a real-time event visualization that used our already existing honeypot data - and it looked awesome!

Google has announced a new feature of Google Wallet, a micropayments service, that will let websites collect small payments from visitors for services/products via a single click. Google Wallet micropayments

This service will also allow web visitors to sample services, and then get a refund within 30 minutes, if they don't buy. This micropayment feature is in trial (beta) at Google Wallet as an experiment.

http://www.paulallen...ic.aspx?contentId=21

[Allen]: Strangely, there is no way to set the desktop as your default view (there should be).

The new tablet features in Windows 8 are particularly bold and innovative. A few minor issues aside, I'm impressed with its clever integration of a bimodal interface to simultaneously support both desktop and tablet use in the same operating system. I found the gesture navigation on the tablet to be quite satisfying and responsive. And in general, I find Windows 8 to be snappier and more responsive than Windows 7.

I did encounter some puzzling aspects of Windows 8. The bimodal user experience can introduce confusion, especially when two versions of the same application – such as Internet Explorer – can be opened and run simultaneously. Files can also be opened in either of the two available modes. For example, after opening a PDF attachment in Outlook from the desktop, Windows opens the file in Microsoft Reader, an application more suited for use on a tablet, rather than the desktop Acrobat Reader. A manual switch is then required to return to desktop mode. Thankfully, you can alleviate these switching problems by changing file and program associations in Windows, as I will explain later.
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A nice post on his blog on a lot of things to be excited about Windows 8, and how it will eventually get better within a year as apps catch up. Should be interesting, as the wife needs to replace her old laptop that I wish would die already!

Cortex Command, a very interesting indie game, after 11 years of development, has now been released.

Congrats to the developers.

Today, after eleven+ years (I just turned 30) and the help of some extremely talented collaborators, I have fulfilled that vow! Yes, Cortex Command 1.0 is now available on this site (below), on Steam, and on GamersGate! Everyone who has previously bought the game in any way can get a Steam key, right here.
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UPDATE 2: Humble Bundle owners of CC can get a steam key directly on their HIB download pages.

• http://devlog.datare...-command-1-0-is-out/

Useful post on Freewaregenius today evaluating undelete tools..

This post will compare the performance a number of these tools in order to answer that question, for both FAT32 and NTFS drives. After a head-to-head test, we were able to categorize these programs into 1st tier programs that you would want to use, and offer the best performance, 2nd tier programs that you might try if you need to, and 3rd tier programs which you shouldn’t bother with.

http://www.freewareg...elete-tools-compared