Summer festival camping

I've always loved camping for some reason. It's a primal feeling of survival, I guess, to live in a place you "built", outdoors, unplugged a little from our apartments, houses, electricity, TVs and the interweb.
However, it's been quite long since I last done it, so the fact I'm going to a 5 day summer music festival where we'll be camping out for the duration of it comes as a nice deal for me.

I am quite the forgetful guy. Knowing a checklist would be of great use to me, on to Google for one. This website dedicated to the outdoors had a huge list of things you would only need if you are planning on moving permanently to your tent, but still, it was of great use. I narrowed it down to what seems to be the basics:

Borrowed something like this from my uncle.  4 spaces all for me.

•  Tent
•  Rope/stakes
• Hammer
• Mat for tent entrance
• Backpack
• Dust pan/brush
• Sleeping bag
• Sheets/blankets
• Pillow
• Air mattress
• Air pump
• Utility bags for storage
• Garbage bags
• Knife/swiss army knife
• Shoes
• Jeans/pants
• Shorts
• T-shirts
• Socks/extra socks
• Hat/belt
• Sweatshirt/jacket
• Underwear
• Swim suit/towel
• Laundry bag
• Flip flops
• Towels/washcloth
• Shampoo
• Tooth brush/tooth paste
• Deodorant
• Comb/brush
• Razor
• Toilet paper
• Personal medications (painkillers)
• Sunscreen
• Bug repellant
• Flashlight/batteries
• Camera
• Tissues
• Cell phone/charger
• Small sewing kit

Phew, that's a lot. Since I haven't started packing stuff, I better stop writing and go do that.
Which 3 items, other than the tent and the sleeping bag, you couldn't be without in a camping trip?

What a crazy week

So it's the middle of the summer and everyone, including me, is taking their breaks from routines and going in vacations. However that didn't stop this week from being one of the most action packed one this year so far.

We got countries getting their ratings cut , markets going up and down like roller coasters, London in flames, more people dead in protests in northern Africa, all of this merely days after a nut-case shot all of those people in Norway.
Is it just me who thinks things are getting out of hand?

This was funny though:

Video games are always to blame, aren't they?

Have you ever been reading about some historical happening and wondered how living was back then? Well, open your eyes, history is in the making and we are witnessing it first hand. Some day we might be able to say "Yeah I was there in the big crisis of the 2000s".

Either that or it all goes to extreme shit, and we all start fighting each other for food and internet access becoming modern broadband eating zombies.

The Pwnie Awards

A couple of days ago the Pwnies were handed in Las Vegas. In case you're not familiar with them, they're basically the Oscars for achievements in technology (more specifically Information Security), awarded to those who move the field forwards, but at the same time they're the Raspberries, giving the dreaded "Most Epic Fail" award to those who deserve it.

The ponies pwnies

The big loser this year was Sony. It came as no surprise because it was the only nominee, albeit for a number of different reasons:

Sony After Fail0verflow and GeoHot published how to jailbreak the PS3, Sony got a bit miffed. Apparently unfamiliar with how the Internet works and how difficult it is to remove the piss from a swimming pool, Sony proceeded to try erase the information from the Internet and sue GeoHot et al. into oblivion. Needless to say, this was about as successful as the MiniDisc.

Sony Speaking of piss in a swimming pool, that just happened to be how well Sony protected their Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) users' account info and roughly 25 to 77 million account details were stolen by unknown hackers. That metaphor makes just about no sense at all, but you get the point: FAIL.

Sony Sony is definitely good at one thing: keeping the hits coming and their fans entertained. Oh wait, did we say Sony? We meant LulzSec. I guess that counts as another FAIL for Sony.

Sony After learning the hard way that their PlayStation Network was about as porous as air, Sony had to shut it down for over two months to rebuild it from scratch. In doing so, they made everyone from your 8-year old cousin to your barber learn about the importance of security. Hooray for us, sorry Sony shareholders.

Sony Noticing a pattern here? But wait, it gets better. Sony might have been able to better repel the multitude of attacks if they hadn't just recently laid off a significant number of their network security team. Great timing, guys.

The polar opposite, Epic 0wnage, which goes for "the hackers responsible for delivering the most damaging, widely publicized, or hilarious 0wnage.", went to Stuxnet this year, a worm that targets Siemens industrial equipment and that some say was engineered on purpose to tackle Iran's nuclear program supposedly using black marketed Siemens machinery.

How many centrifuges did your rootkit destroy? How many national nuclear programs did your worm disrupt? How many 0day exploits and rootkits for equipment that no one you has ever heard of have you written? Exactly.

Other nominees included LulzSec, Anonymous and Wikileaks.

Click here for the rest of the winners.