A blast of cold air compromises national security

It seems that researchers at Princeton have discovered you can hack into an encrypted hard drive by blasting the computer’s RAM with cold air. It seems that memory which has been treated with some cold air will retain data even after the power is removed from it.

In case you’re not familiar with RAM it is volatile memory meaning that when the power is removed it loses whatever is stored there. Unlike hard drives which store data using magnetism. It’s a bit more complex than that, but for our purposes that is all you need to know. So the long and short is that when you pull the plug on RAM the data on there is “released” (for lack of a better term). With a hard drive the plug being pulled results in no data loss. At least that is how it has always been up until this discovery.

The article about this discovery didn’t give exactly how long the RAM would retain old data after being hit with the cold air. Nor did it say at what temperature it would start to lose the data again. It did however note that your common compressed air can turned upside down and sprayed on the memory was enough to do the trick.

Don’t get to worried though. It’s not quite a simple as just spraying some cold air and getting your data from the RAM. You actually need something to read the “frozen” memory, and store the contents without heating it up and causing it to be overwritten. Not to mention the fact that it would require a running (or sleeping/hibernating) machine that someone could physically get access to, freeze the memory, and read the contents.

What does all this mean for computer security? Not much at all. Use common sense and if you’re going to leave your computer in an unsecured environment for any significant amount of time shut it off. After a few seconds the memory will be clear and you’ll have nothing to worry about. At least not in regards to this.

I do have one question though. Who thinks of these kind of things to try?

Posted in Technology and Computers | 3 Comments »

Who wants to buy a blog? (and the elections)

Before I launch into my diatribe about the US election just wanted to let everyone know I am considering selling this blog. No, I don’t expect to get rich from it so the asking price if I do sell it will be normal for what it is. Somehow I’ve managed to get myself a Page Rank of 5 and a pretty loyal following. I’m still mulling over the idea of selling it to someone who has more time and passion to either continue as it is (except bigger and better) or just start from scratch. If anyone is interested let me know and we can discuss it. As I said I’m not 100% certain of everything yet, but thought I’d lay it out on the table for readers before I advertise it to the world. That will come in the next few days.

As for the election. Someone please, please, please tell me where one party ends and the other begins? Why do we even call them republican and democrats? Why not just call them “thieves, liars, murderers, adulterers, and shameless pigs”? It would be a great deal more accurate than trying to define them by their ideological separations. Problem is there are none between the three front runners.

More than that are we really deciding between a republican and a democrat or are we deciding between Clinton and Obama? Speaking of Obama someone please tell me where he stands on an issue. Any issue. Because I’ve been listening and reading what he has to say and aside from speaking well he’s got no position on anything.

How about “Hill”? Is she a vicious woman or what? “Hell hath no wrath…” Yeah it’s heresy but it is almost fitting to Clinton. I wonder if she gets it from Bill? It seems “Americas first black president” isn’t in such good graces with the black vote. Which leads me to ask what exactly is “the black vote”? What happened to the American vote? Now we have black, spanish, and gay votes but the rest of us are just “the voters”. As if those groups somehow deserve recognition above and beyond the rest of us common voters.

How about McCain? Please don’t tell me that boob is going to get into the Whitehouse. I’m almost certain he won’t, but then I ask myself why is he even still in the race. Are “we the people” really that stupid that we can’t see him for what he really is? Everyone gave Kerry hell for flip-flopping on his opinions during his campaign, but McCain has made a career out of flip-flopping in the Congress. But now we’re giving him serious consideration for the Presidency? Are you serious?

Huckabee I’ve not seen anything bad about, but I wouldn’t put it past him. I pay more attention to him over the coming days assuming he doesn’t drop out. I didn’t pay him much mind before because I just assumed he wouldn’t be around. Kind of like Ron Paul who hasn’t dropped out but he’s stopped campaigning to focus on his congressional race. Sad thing that, Ron Paul could have been a breath of fresh air. A break from the party lines, but oh well.

So who will I vote for? I’ll ask God for his wisdom when the time comes. None of them impress me

Posted in Blogging, Making Money, News and Politics | 4 Comments »

The lonely side of the blog

I had almost forgotten how cold and lonely it could be waking up to an empty blog. Recently I’ve been reminded how dreary it can be as I’ve been working on my blog about pet snakes. With this blog I get a couple of hundred people visiting on average per day. It sits at a Page Rank of 5, I have a respectable number of subscribers to my RSS feed, many of whom use the email RSS feed (no doubt hoping to win some money). Even when I don’t post for days at a time (like recently, sorry about that work and “stuff”…) I still get visitors. It takes almost no effort on my part to retain the status quo. Which of course means if I were to put in a concerted effort this blog would probably grow. But not so with the other one.

Getting visitors to it is like pulling teeth. Big, hardy, deeply rooted teeth. It used to be like that around here, but as I’ve grown I’ve begun taking it for granted. Starting this second blog has been an eye opening experience for me. It’s a lot of trail and error due to the fact that it is a niche focused blog whereas this one is not. On the other hand everyday I know exactly what topic I’m going to blog about over there. I have Google Alerts setup to notify me of news, groups, blogs, and videos that might deal with snakes and reptiles. Currently I’m only writing a few articles a week for it due to “ramping up” and having learned from this blog that too many articles can be a turn-off especially when the blog is young.

Here’s a list of some of the things I’ve learned from my Pet Snakes blog:

Search engine ranking

I concern myself with each articles ranking in the search engines. The first thing I do when I’m thinking of a topic is start plugging various titles into Google, MSN, and Yahoo! search. I’m looking for word combinations that get between 75,000 and 500,000 results on average. The reason for this is because I know the lower the results the easier it is to rank higher. The caveat is that it means a lot less potential generic search engine visitors.

Keyword Tracker

I also run the potential title through a keyword tracker which helps me to determine how many average searches both the word(s) entered will receive, but also what different combinations including those words can be expected to receive. I’ve not reviewed how they determine that information, but I suspect it has something to do with querying search engine results. Either way it is a handy little tool to have.

Monetization

The potential to make money is a lot better with a niche specific blog because the majority of people who are there have an interest in the topic. Currently I’m just using Adsense to gauge how many clicks I can expect to get. Since the payout for the snake niche is almost nonexistent I’ll be switching to something else in the near future. For now however it lets me see if there’s any potential. I can’t give exact stats but if I had the same percentage of click-throughs on this blog (and they were paying the same average rate) as I do on that blog I’d be pulling in an extra $300 to $500 a month, easily.

Content is still KING

I’ve always believed it to be true and on more than one occasion I’ve even preached it to you folks who read this blog. My experience with pet-snakes.com is the same. Content makes the world go round. I was a little surprised to find how easy it is to write on a niche topic. I’ve always been “passionate” about snakes (reptiles in general), but had expected it to be a huge bore writing about them all the time. So far I’ve got more topics to write about than I know what to do with. But no matter how many ideas I have in the fire, or how many topics I want to cover I’ve learned not to sacrifice the quality of content for quanity.

Never stop learning

I’m a huge advocate of lifelong learning. From cradle to grave I believe we are not only capable, but best served by continually learning new things. This blog taught me a lot, but it’s going to a whole new level with the new blog. First and foremost because I’m continually learning new things about the snakes. Secondly because as I work towards realizing the blogs full potential I’m learning new blogging, design, and marketing techniques. It’s a continuous process which has been extremely rewarding.

I invite everyone to checkout Pet-Snakes.com if you haven’t done so already, and keep your eyes open for a contest over there that will be announced sometime within the next 3 days!

Speaking of contests I’ve been running the “500 email rss subscribers” contest here. Well I’ve changed the rules a bit. Decided instead of 500 we’ll set the limit to 100. Which means that once I have 100 ACTIVE email rss subscribers to this blog I will randomly draw 1 name and send the winner a check for $50 $100.00!

Posted in Blogging | 3 Comments »

The baglady of Concord

Kathi Rienstra handbag
Kathi Rienstra uses old plastic grocery store bags to make the hand bags using a technique called crocheting. I’ve not seen one in person, but from the looks of them you’d be hard pressed to tell they are made out of old plastic bags. Not sure how they’d hold up to the real world as most plastic grocery bags now days are made out of biodegradable material that will break down. For more information visit her blog and take a look at her interview in the Concord Insider

Posted in Potpourri | 5 Comments »