I started going to cons in the early 1990's and John Draper "Captain Crunch" was always notorious for trying to invite newbie hackers to his hotel room for "meditation" sessions which included massaging and touching and whatever else happened if you allowed it go any further. The guy was always known to be a pervert. Everyone joked about it. He would literally go person-to-person through the crowd and invite whoever he could upstairs for a little one-on-one if you know what i'm sayin. Every con he would show up and do this. The best was at summercon 98 he showed up and did a talk about how everyone owes him thousands of dollars because he is so old school and how he invented the hacker scene. The guy was a fixture at every con. pumpcon, defcon, summercon.

I guess we're not talking about working with Java Struts. When you do, turn on mysql logging, and then tail -f mysqld.log, you'll see garbage like this: select column_623 from table_943 where column_142='xxx'; ---- is that readable to you? Is that supposed to improve readability by abstracting so far away from the database that no one can understand what is going. I basically have to grep for values inserted or updated or selected from tables in order to figure out what table stuff is being written to. It's not ugly, its an abomination. Who ever thought up the idea doesnt know what they are doing. Easy to read..... YEAH RIGHT -- its a joke. It takes 5 times longer to reverse engineer this spaghetti mess than any other languages. Straight Java code is easy to read, if you don't intrude abstraction layers on top of the language, like Struts.

I wrote a machine learning program that did when dice.com came online around 1990. I still use it today and it searches jobs (or any posting) on craigslist, monster, dice.com, hotjobs. It looks for keyword pattern matches in the job title, job description, etc, to give a score to a job posting, then if the job scores past a threshold, it will send a cover letter and email to the job. some of the most advanced features is that it will auto-generate sentences in the cover letter and/or job description depending on what it says in the job posting.

speak for yourself, Matt Gemmell, oh and by the way, Get off my lawn.

AT&T and others stand to profit billions of dollars by creating slow lanes and fast lanes on the internet. The real issue here is that customer already paid for an internet connection at a certain speed, so its some level of fraud or deception (false advertising, bait-and-switch) to be selling a service at a certain speed and then not delivering the service that the customer is paying for.

So, I've been thinking of how could we prevent such a rogue device from operating on the cellular network? The way it is done is pretty easy actually:
* First you have to create a database of longitude / latitude coordinates of where we find cell tower sites at 100% signal strength.
* Next we allow Android's baseband processor to issue handoffs to cell towers that are within range of the GeoIP coordinate database
* So when a Stingray device pretends to be a cell tower, and it is not within range of the geoIP coordinates database, it will be rejected

This could be easily implemented in Android... and you could also add notifications when a cell tower was rejected due to being too far away from the known cell tower real location.

There was a story back in 2003 that talked about CD's degrading after less than 2 years.