Geekery · iDunzo.com

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Archive for the ‘Geekery’ Category

TIFF Exploit Cracks Open iPhone and iPod Touch

October 10th, 2007 by iDunzo

Want to beta test a new iPhone and Apple iPod jailbreak?

You’d have to be crazy or rich to risk sacrificing your iPhone to this cause, but if you’re up for it, you can get in on the deal at channel #betatest on irc.toc2rta.com.

If those directions need further explanation, it’s a fair indication this is an experiment you should skip.

Engadget’s Ryan Block used the proposed mechanism in the wee hours of this morning and reports success.

The upgraded iPhone’s file system was unmasked last week, giving users read-write access to handsets running 1.1.1, but little in the way of usable beef.

The hack under testing, however, combines this with a second exploit based on a well-understood vulnerability in TIFF files, a popular graphics format.

It’ll be easy for Apple to crush this one in a future update, but it’s progress.

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William Gibson To Appear In Second Life

July 10th, 2007 by iDunzo

William Gibson, whose 1984 novel Neuromancer was a bible for Internet pioneers, is making an appearance in Second Life.

Gibson wasn’t the first person to use the idea of “cyberspace,” but he coined the word and popularized it.

Gibson’s publishers at Penguin write:

Over the next few weeks – to celebrate and, yes, promote his new novel Spook Country, – we’re planning a range of William Gibson activities in Second Life; we’re screening his fine and strange movie No Maps for These Territories; there’s a competition to design an avatar for the man himself; we’re giving away shipping containers packed with Gibson goodies and at the beginning of August, William Gibson himself will be coming into Second Life to read from Spook Country and answer questions.

Wikipedia has a good definition of cyberspace: and history of the idea, dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Plato. “Cyberspace is the metaphorical space of computer systems and networks, in which electronic data are stored and online communication takes place.”

In Gibson’s novels, and many other cyberpunk science-fiction in the 1980s, cyberspace was navigated is if it were a physical space, with three-dimensional objects representing computer systems and databases.

Neuromancer was an inspiration for Internet pioneers through the 90s, although it’s been somewhat eclipsed by Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, which postulates the Metaverse. Second Life is the Metaverse in every important respect except popularity.

Boing Boing appears to have what looks like an interesting interview titled: William Gibson explains why science fiction is about the present.

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Star Trek Cribs

April 16th, 2007 by iDunzo

“Hey baby! No salsa on the leather. Keep it on the chips.” Classic.

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Weird Al Yankovic’s latest parody

September 24th, 2006 by iDunzo

Weird Al Yankovic’s latest parody music video “White & Nerdy” has become an instant online classic.

The lyrics include a surprising number of very relevant computer-geek references, including MySpace, Minesweeper, “killer apps,” JavaScript, Segways, ergonomic keyboards, Wikipedia, “ROTFLOL,” and HTML.

As an added bonus, Donny Osmond is a back up dancer for Weird Al.

This video is a lot better then David Hasselhoff’s Jump In My Car for sure