Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Hotel Hacking

This Wired art­icle showed up on Slashdot this morn­ing — about Adam Laurie, chief secur­ity officer of London secur­ity and net­work­ing firm ALD. Using a laptop, infrared trans­mit­ter and TV tuner, Laurie was able to access premium hotel TV con­tent for free, as well as a raft of other good­ies that he shouldn’t have been able to look at. Yay.

“Laurie first dis­covered the vul­ner­ab­il­ity when he was “muck­ing about with hotel TVs to get the porn chan­nel without pay­ing for it.” He was able to bypass TV billing menus by using his laptop to tune in to the premium con­tent being broad­cast from backend sys­tems. He didn’t have to pay for the con­tent, because the sys­tems didn’t know he was watch­ing it.”

The First Open-Source Beer

Back after a week’s hol­i­day, I bring happy news of beeeeer.

Wired ran this art­icle earlier today about recent events in the open-source world — a group of stu­dents who have pro­duced what they claim is the first open-source beer.

The beer isn’t “free” in mon­et­ary terms, but the recipe for brew­ing it has been released under the Creative Commons license. This means that any­one can use the recipe as they please — the only catch is that they must credit the ori­ginal authors if they make changes to the recipe, and release those changes under a sim­ilar license.

This licens­ing struc­ture has been used in the Open Source Software com­munity for some time, but this is pos­sibly the first time it has been applied to an “ana­log” object like a beer recipe.

The beer is also fairly unique in that it con­tains guar­ana — enough to be equi­val­ent to 35 mil­li­grammes of caf­fiene. The group hope this will counter the drowsy effects of the 6% alco­hol level.