“Programmers should be able to program!” program

Well, sad and true in the same time… It is an entertaining reading and one full of insights…

Maybe it’s just one of those reasons why software is getting more crappy, unreliable, insecure, etc.

The non-programming programmers

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UPDATE: A more recent post with Google Calendar support

Comprehensive list of security and hackers conferences 2010

Recently, there is a high span of various security and hackers conferences and conventions going on.

Keeping track of them is not as easy as it seems, since there is no central point where to look up their schedules, locations, call for papers, etc.

So I decided to compile a list for my own (well it doesn’t cover 100% of security related conferences out there, but it tries to cover most of the publicly known/accessible ones).

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I want to present few nice sites which might be interesting for you. At least I enjoyed finding them out and getting information about them.

Welcome to the world of Scambaiting - 419eater.com

From wiki: “419eater.com is a scam baiting website which focuses on advance-fee fraud. The name 419 comes from “419 fraud", another name for advance fee fraud, and itself derived from the relevant section of the Nigerian criminal code. The website founder, Michael Berry, goes by the alias Shiver Metimbers. The 419 Eater forum has over 24,000 registered accounts.”

The people on this forum are taking it as a real-life role-playing-game. They have something like medals on how many fake-banks they “crashed", flags of countries where they “smashed” a scammer, etc.

If you like this kind of long and ad-hoc scenario games, this is the place to try. If not, even just simply browsing the forum is a fun . BTW, on this site you can find almost any phrase which you would find in the emails from the Spam/Junk folder.

Related to this type of activity is the Project Honeypot. More on computer-related honeypots.

Like surfing? What about Couch-Surfing?

From wiki: “The CouchSurfing Project is the largest hospitality exchange network, with over 1.75 million members in 237 countries and territories.[1] According to Alexa it is currently the most visited hospitality service on the Internet, averaging around 40 million daily page views July-December 2009″

Interested? CouchSurfing FAQ will get you started - prepare your backpacks!

PS: though CouchSurfing might be fun, free and exciting, NEVER forget the common-sense for personal privacy and security, just to avoid so called (and over-hyped) CouchSurfing horror stories

(thanks to Veronica to throw some like on existence of such project)

Random thoughts on current events:

• Kyrgystan riots 7 April 2010:
• Exactly same scenario in Moldova (also ex-USSR country) and exactly 1 year ago 7 April 2009:

• As a side note, a good “reading” collection of videos called “Riots Around the World: Other Europe”
• Polish high position delegation dies in plane crash. This is the light of Obama+love+Medvedev to sign landmark nuclear arms pact and given that initially Poland under Lech Kaczynski signed a deal with US to place a defence-base under Russia’s face. Is this like “removing unnecessary and too-much-knowing-and-ambitious witness"?

Yes, may be just coincidences…

As in “Hercule Poirot´s Christmas", I’d say “I can accept one coincidence", but then…