brandondawson.org

So it appears that Charles Barkley will be doing time in Sheriff Joe’s sideshow tents. [link]

It’ll be interesting to see whether this brings Barkley’s inimitably brash voice into the debates surrounding Arpaio’s policies as Sheriff, which, like a lot of sheriffs around the country, seem to be geared more towards electoral stunts and gaining media attention than with protecting the public.

(My short list of regular readers will notice a promised post that hasn’t appeared yet; I’ve been ill the last few days, and that post will appear tomorrow.)

I’ve been trying to get MPlayer installed on my server, and I finally had some success at it. So, I’ll share what I’ve learned:

The problem would seem to be some glitches in the various repositories that prevent MPlayer from compiling properly. You can have the libcaca, caca-utils, and libcaca-devel RPM’s installed, and it STILL fails to resolve the dependency.

The libcucul.so.0 dependency error was solved, in my case, by enabling the RPMFusion repos and THEN installing MPlayer via yum. I did, and managed to FINALLY get mplayer working.

I hope this helps somebody else avoid the four hours I spent researching this.

Here’s 12 Fun Facts about RFID and Biometric Passports, from the Wiki: (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_passport)

Note: I’ve boldfaced parts of the individual snippets I found particularly relevant.

1.) RFID was actually invented –by the Soviet Union– specifically as an espionage technology.

In 1946 Léon Theremin invented an espionage tool for the Soviet Union which retransmitted incident radio waves with audio information. Sound waves vibrated a diaphragm which slightly altered the shape of the resonator, which modulated the reflected radio frequency. Even though this device was a passive covert listening device, not an identification tag, it has been attributed as a predecessor to RFID technology. The technology used in RFID has been around since the early 1920s according to one source (although the same source states that RFID systems have been around just since the late 1960s).

Continue reading…

I’m guessing this one is actually older than Anti-Virus 2009, because it’s called VirusRemover 2008. It uses a trojan horse known as Vundo to infect via Sun’s Java in concert with Microsoft’s Internet Exploiter.

It can be removed quickly and easily using Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware, or with the Vundo removal tool.

Then, make sure both Java and IE are fully updated, even if you don’t use them.