The arms race escalates between spammers and CAPTCHA

Boing Boing:

“Ars
Technica is reporting that spamboys have now officially cracked the
CAPTCHA systems of Windows Live Hotmail and Gmail. Worse, they’re able
to tear through the average CAPTCHA protection system in less than a
minute:

Windows Live Hotmail’s Anti-CAPTCHA automatic bot, which
hooks itself into Internet Explorer on a victim’s machine, has a
success rate of about 10-15 percent. That means that it takes up to one
minute for a single bot to create a new account.

In one day, the bot can amass at least 1,440 accounts. And that’s
just one bot. This same bot can then send spam to multiple e-mail
addresses (using both CC and BCC lists) continuously, switching between
accounts (both in the from: and to: fields) in order to lower the
chance of being spotted.

Meanwhile, it takes me, an actual human being, upwards of ten
minutes to analyze and cypto-decipher the average CAPTCHA, all the
while screaming “What kind of moon-man frickin’ Cylon do you have to be
to read this thing?”

But, really, what’s the alternative here? On my other blog, we weed
out spam with a simple text question system (ex: “What is the color of
the yellow snow?”) but I don’t doubt that this utterly simple scheme
would quickly fall apart if spammers were actually trying to dissect
it. How do you suss out a human with 100% infallibility?”

Gone in 60 seconds: Spambot cracks Live Hotmail CAPTCHA [Ars Technica]

The PS3 Laptop

Engadget:

“Rewind back to late 2006. The PS3 was launching alongside the Wii and
geeky editors like ourselves were having a field day. We’d already
managed to convince our good pal Ben Heck to build another Xbox 360 laptop and the Wii Laptop,
so it was only a matter of time before we started brainstorming on how
the hell we could possibly fit a PS3 into a “portable” enclosure.
That’s the part where Ben stepped up his game and worked his magic –
on and off for almost a year and a half — to build… the PS3 Laptop!

The essential specs:

• Original backwards compatible 60GB model
• 17-inch LCD HDTV screen: 720p
• HDMI-DVI connection (same as last Xbox 360 laptop)
• Built-in keyboard, USB ports, stereo speakers, headphone jack
• Size: 17 x 13.75 x 3-inches
• Weight: 16 pounds!

You want this one of a kind piece of kit for your very own, PlayStation
fanboys? You got it. We’re auctioning this thing for charity real soon,
so watch out for details (we’ll also have some video of the PS3 Laptop
in action on the site tomorrow). And, naturally, big ups to our pal Ben Heck for the long hours and love he put into this thing. The man is truly a hero of ours, so be sure to hit up his site to check out his other projects, as well as the other instructional stuff he’s done here on Engadget.”

Quake 3 hits the iPod touch, makes for portable LAN party

Engadget:

“Future generations will most likely divide the timeline of history at
this point: when Quake 3 achieved motion-sensing, wireless network play
on two iPod touches. Just think, less than a year ago we were
salivating (or at least mildly enthused) at the prospect of rocking Doom on this thing, and now Quake 3 Arena is yours for the taking — or at least will be once we get any sort of hard info on this app.”

[Via PMP Today]

SlySoft cracks Blu-ray BD+ encryption

ZDNet: “SlySoft, the makers of AnyDVD HD, have released an updated version of
the copy-protection removal tool which allows Blu-ray owners to back up
their discs.”

iPhone Dev Team jailbreaks firmware 2.0… before it’s out

Gotta love these guys….

Engadget:

“This is just getting silly, don’t you think? The iPhone Dev Team has
once again proven their totally gnarly talents by freeing up the latest
firmware before it’s even the latest firmware. Apple, here’s
our suggestion — just let people do what they want with your devices,
since they’re clearly going to do it anyway. That way, instead of
making enemies, you’re making lifelong buddies. Reasonable, right?
Steve, give us a call, we’re more than happy to riff on some ideas for
playing nice with the end-user.

Update: Dev chat room chatter claims that the 2.0 is now fully unlocked as well.”

Make your own Aperture Science PC workstation

Engadget:

“We don’t know if this guy got his box running GLaDOS, but it sure as
hell looks like standard issue Aperture Science, if you ask us. We’d
like to see it running Portal though — only that would be recursive
enough for our tastes.”

Continue reading Make your own Aperture Science PC workstation

Passively Cooled PC Uses Giant Heat Sink for a Case

Boing Boing:

“In the pursuit of a passively cooled PC with no fans, Ville “Willek”
Kyrö happened upon a solution ingenious in its simplicity: make the
entire case a giant heat sink. A whole bunch of custom rigging later,
his Opteron-powered machine was a success—ignoring that the case
weighed over 44 pounds.”

Project: Passive [Metku.net]

Vista SP1 still vulnerable to activation hacks

Engadget: “Oops. One of the Microsoft’s big goals in releasing Vista SP1 is the closure of a pair of known Vista activation exploits. While the OEM BIOS hack and grace timer hacks are now indeed now useless in the face of SP1, a third remains. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes over at ZDNet
tracked down a hack that required “a few seconds in the command prompt”
to trick Vista SP1 into thinking it was genuine. Now that SP1 is riding the torrents, we can’t say we’re surprised.”

Master Diebold Key Copied From Web Site

Slashdot: “In another stunning blow to the security and integrity of Diebold’s electronic voting machines, someone has made a copy of the key which opens ALL Diebold e-voting machines from a picture on the company’s own website. ”

Update: 02/06 17:40 GMT by Z : We previously discussed this story, early last year.

The Xbox 360 Elite laptop

DVICE:

“Ben Heck is a modding god. The guy can take any console and make it sexier and more portable, as he’s done many times before. But now he’s gone and outdone himself.

He’s gone and turned an Xbox 360 Elite into a laptop, a portable
gaming system that can be brought anywhere. The screen has a resolution
of 1280×720 which allows for native 720p HD viewing, and it even has an
Xbox camera built in. I’d say it’s the perfect gift for a serious gamer
who travels frequently, but as it’s a custom creation you won’t be able
to buy it anywhere anytime soon. But hey, at least we can drool over
it, right?”

Ben Heck, via Gizmodo