Chris Baker's Blog

I recently picked up the 2010 Remaster of Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine. It was remastered by Tom Baker at Precision Mastering in Hollywood, California. It sounds awesome, so much more crisp and defined than the original release. I've read some complaints it suffers from symptoms of the "loudness wars", although it is a lot louder than the original release, to me it doesn't sound muddy or clipped. 

While looking up information on the release I also found a chiptune release of Pretty Hate Machine by Inverse Phase called Pretty Eight Machine. It's the whole Pretty Hate Machine album re-created chiptune style; very impressive! This has to be one of my favourite chiptune homages, almost as good  as my favorite, the brilliant Kind Of Bloop.

I tried overclocking my Linksys WRT54G/GS/GL with the Broadcom BCM4712 chip rev 1 pkg 2 chipset running Toastman Tomato VPN firmware and it was stuck at 216 mhz. Doing some research it looks like it may be locked for a reason (possibly some legacy fix) but I couldn't find any solid conclusions.

What will overclocking do? It should increase bandwidth on vpn client and server connections as they take up a lot of cpu. Tomato firmware is great and can run vpn client and server on really old hardware, but this is a big burden on the cpu - espcially openvpn.

Other pluses that I think most poeple would be interested in are an increase in regular download speeds.

According to Mac World, security researchers from Poland-based security firm Security Explorations claim to have discovered a vulnerability in the Java 7 security update released Thursday that can be exploited to escape the Java sandbox and execute arbitrary code on the underlying system.

Oracle broke out of its regular four-month patching cycle on Thursday to release Java 7 Update 7, an emergency security update that addressed three vulnerabilities, including two that were being exploited by attackers to infect computers with malware since last week.

US counterterrorism expert Cofer Black warned Wednesday that the Cold War has given way to a "Code War" in which cyber weapons can be unleashed with devastating consequences.

A sophisticated hacking campaign exposed earlier by computer security firm McAfee was no surprise to Cofer, who saw it as a sign of more to come. The United States, United Nations, defense contractors and the International Olympic Committee were targets of a massive global cyber spying campaign, McAfee said, with China seen as the likely culprit.

California-based McAfee said in a report that it had identified 72 victims in 14 countries of a hacking effort dubbed "Operation Shady RAT," which it traced back to at least 2006.

Read the full article by Glenn Chapman (AFP)

Wired's Kim Zetter has written a fascinating article detailing the unravelling of the Stuxnet malware, the world’s first publicized cyberweapon. Research from experts around the globe have revealed that Stuxnet's intent was industrial sabotage of centrifuges in Iran's developing Nuclear facilities. While most of the over-arching details concerning Stuxnet have been discovered, many of its details still remain a mystery.