SOCOM II

My wife bought me SOCOM II along with the PlayStation 2 Network adapter and a USB Playstation headset. I was up to 4am on Friday playing this game. I think that I am going to enjoy it. I haven't plugged in the headset yet, so I don't know how the game play will be with that. I have heard that the voice recognition is not the best.

I did try playing online, and when I did, I got my butt kicked. I am going to have to practice some more before I go online again.

pLog plugin to validate trackbacks

In my last post, I described some ways to prevent spam trackbacks. I wrote a plugin for pLog 1.0 that implements the first suggestions

When this plugin is installed, and a trackback is received, the plugin downloads the contents of the html pointed at by the url, and looks for a trackback url. If it isn't able to download the html or is not able to find a trackback url, the trackback is deleted.

The plugin can be downloaded here. This currently requires the changes to pLog listed in this bug report. This plugin requires pLog 1.0.

Update: The latest revision of pLog 1.0 in the repository has these changes made.

Other possible ways to fight trackback spam

Last night, I thought of a couple more way to combat trackback spam (previous post):

1. Only allow trackbacks with to pages that be auto-discovered to have a trackback url.


2. Auto generate the trackback url, to make it more difficult for automated trackback programs to work

iControl

Blogging DEMO has a couple posts (first, second with video) about iControl. It looks like they are creating a network based home monitoring system.

Their network device connects to their iControl web service, then it looks for all of the iControl devices wirelessly (I don't think that this is using a 802.11 protocol). Then you can log into their service to see the status of your devices.

Google Maps and Address Book

A couple of days ago, Google released Google Maps. This is the best mapping web site that I have seen, with some pretty cool features.

This article at macosxhints describes how to hook Google Map into Mac OS X's Address Book.

Laptop beacon

I just heard this tip on the Feb 5th episode of Inside Mac Radio. 2600 - The Hacker Quarterly had an article on how to secure your PowerBook. He includes a php script that the will track the ip addresses that connect to it, and send an email when a new one is seen. Then a cron job is added to the PowerBook that will connect to that php script.

There also is a version of the script that will cause the PowerBook to run a command when it encounters a new ip address. (So theoretically, you could have the PowerBook wipe the drive or shutdown when it is stolen.)

Logfinder

This podcast at Geek News Central mentioned that the eff has posted a tool that can be used by administrators to determine if their servers are logging personal data. This could be useful to make sure that ISP are not logging information that could be subpoenaed by anyone.

I like this for administrators of personal servers for these purposes:

1. Make sure you are not logging your own personal information


2. Can potentially tell if a hacker has access to your computer and is logging this same information.