Poked.net

Roommate Lauren got me started on a new online game. Check it out if you are interested, click the link even if you aren't and press the button for the correct number - it helps me out even if you don't choose to play:

http://www.kingsofchaos.com/recruit.php?uniqid=e2d22hz2

Sweet. With aim network improvement, you can now IM my cell phone. Just send am IM message to:
+1864XXXXXXX where you replace the X's with my cell phone number. Its pretty cool, although I doubt that I'll ever use it.

This is really cool. Not because it is another vulnerability found in software, but the simplicity of the vulnerability is sweet. Basically you take a huge image, say 19000x19000 pixels. Each pixel in an uncompressed image takes up 3 bytes, so this is rougly 1 gigabyte in size. Yet, if all the pixels are the same color, gif compression will make the whole thing, say, 45 kbytes. But most pieces of software just assume - image, cant be that big, just decompress it all into memory without being any smarter about the process than that. But of course, most software doesn't have a gigabyte of available memory, so the OS requests memory from the really slow hard drives and the system slows to a crawl as we start thrashing (technical term when memory pages are being pushed back and forth between hard drive and RAM in a bad way). Anyway, if you feel like some pain, here is a link to that harmless, little 45k image mentioned above. (Mozilla/Linux couldn't handle the pressure, had to kill the process).

The flip side to this is that you can really download a gig of data in about a second on a phone modem. Heck yeah.