08.27.03
Broken Primaries
Thanks to Geisha Asobi I stumbled over Broken Primaries – amazing high-speed photos of breaking wine glasses, filled with colored liquids.
Very cool, smooth pictures of dynamic events frozen in time…
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My latest Tweets:
08.20.03
I love the 80s, the 70s…
Ahhh… VH1 did it again! After “I love the 80s” they have found a new way to glue me to the TV indefinitely- “I love the 70s“.
This show, like its predecessor, has a magic fomula of short vintage TV, film and music snippets intercut with some very, very funny commentary by a bunch of celebrities.
It’s like unearthing childhood memories under hypnosis, just a lot more fun. An endless parade of “I had one of those!”, “I saw that!” and “I LOVED this as a child!”. Pure TV genius.
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Daily Spam #3
My wife got a fake citibank email today…
Subject: Your Checking Account at Citibank.
From: Citibank (Carroll_Karlotte@collegeclub.com)
Well… the email address gave it away… 
Time to take out the magnifying glass and look a little bit closer at this specimen:
The collegeclub email address is probably fake – there seems to be a wave of spam coming from that server and I’d assume that this is a hacked open relay.
The email contains an address to a fake citibank URL which in reality goes to http://211.155.234.84/cgi-bin/s.pl which is a script on www.nanhua.net, a Chinese portal site. The script creates a fake citibank page which asks for identification in the form of your full name and the first 4 digits of your citibank account card (Yeah, right!).
If the user submits the page, he will indeed be sent to the citigroup.com server, so for most users this will be a completely transparent fake – they will never understand that they just sent some personal information to some scumbags who will then busily combine all this good data in their scam databases…
So where does the form send it’s data? To rockahome@msbx.net, which does not seem to be reliably online (bad choice for a spammer!).
Oh – and how many people did receive this spam and click through? For once, we can actually watch in realtime, since these spammers use a russian tracking service (hotlog.ru) and the JavaScript in the fake citibank page contains the id number for the hit counter. Click here (http://hit5.hotlog.ru/cgi-bin/hotlog/count?s=126298&im=201) to see the current number of people who clicked on that spam link. 6 hours after we received the email, 46300 people had done so…
Update 8/20:
The page was taken down sometime yesterday I guess… and more than 182000 people must have clicked on the link in the original spam email, according to their hit counter (the link above still works!).
It’s questionable if the spammers actually got much out of this since their email account for the forwarded user data seems to have been broken most of the time, but this was still a pretty scary piece of email scam.
Update 11/13
SecurityFocus has a great article about this scam. It seems that this and several other financial scams were done by the same gang.
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08.13.03
San Francisco 3D
We were walking across the Golden Gate Bridge last Sunday and I remembered an old pet project of mine – 3D photography!
So I took several photos twice with a slight sideways shuffle between shots and merged some of the more promising candidates into 3D anaglyphs. Take a look!
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08.12.03
Age of Mars
Not many people have taken notice, but – astronomically speaking – we are currently in an age dominated by Mars.
Not only are there several robotic missions on their way to the red planet, but Mars is also going to be as close to Earth as it has not been in 59.600 years.
Coming August 27th, Earth and Mars will be only 55,758,006 kilometers apart – still quite a distance, but it will offer astronomers a good chance for some great pictures.
And even without a telescope you can take a look at Mars right now after sunset and you will see it as a bright, orange-red point of light, much brighter than any other star.
It is worth reflecting about that not since the Neanderthals has anybody seen Mars like this…
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08.03.03
Susie Bicrazorblade
uh-oh… this seems to be a series…
Sutter Street, San Francisco
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Winged Migration
“Winged Migration” is an incredible movie about exactly that. It has some of the most amazing film footage of migrating birds that you will ever see – and to see it in a cinema with a big screen is breathtaking.
The film is only lightly narrated and allows the audience to immerse themselves in the lives of the birds on their voyages. The film makers used ultra-light aircraft, remote controlled models and even camera rigs mounted to bikes to not just follow migrating birds, but actually mingle with them while they fly along in their v-shaped formations.
As a friend who recommended this film said, “You will never look at geese the same way again”.
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