[blog.rayfoo]

Twitter server error

I never knew that Twitter used aliens in addition to the bird and the (fail-)whale

The alien‘s limb is broken… I was wondering though, shouldn’t it have more hands tentacles since it’s supposed to handle a lot of activity at the same time?

ChemBot

Interesting application of science here.

iRobot (the makers of the Roomba) made this for DARPA, and have released a video of this scary looking robot .

CNET’s description of how it works:

It gets around by way of a process called “jamming,” in which material can transition between semiliquid and solid states with only a slight change in volume.

In ChemBot’s case, a flexible silicone skin encapsulates a series of pockets containing a mix of air and loosely packed particles. When air is removed from the compartments, the skin attempts to equalize the pressure differential by constricting the particles, which shift slightly to fill the void left by the evacuated air.

Video as follows:

(via psfk)

Collected these over the past few months, reverse chronological order. Seeing different machines attempting to connect hundreds of times a day each is just, wow.

Some might say that a SSH blacklist daemon might help, but it only increases the time taken for a brute force attempt, and is of no use against a botnet trying to brute force the ssh login.

There are plenty of things that can be done to lock down the ssh server, and restricting it to only publickey is by far one of the most effective, counting that the resource (the server) you’re protecting is pretty important.

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