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.”

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.