Make Your Own Flamethrower

And just in time for your Independence Day celebration! If this kid lives long enough to attend college I'll be surprised. Scroll down when the page opens. Lots of pictures and video available.

Of course, no discussion of do-it-yourself WMD is complete without mentioning my own favorite:
Backyard Ballistics




LEGAL DISCLAIMER -- This sort of s*** can get you killed, maimed or arrested. I cannot be held responsible for your use of the information provided here.

But for perfectly legal entertainment, try:
Drozd BB Rifle by IZH-Baikal

Fear and Closing in Big Bend

On May 10, 2002, the Border Patrol, which has always pursued narcotics traffickers and illegal immigrants, began, without warning, to enforce the law against crossing, period. Twenty-one people were arrested, including "Gordo," the 18-year-old boatman who rowed the jonboat back and forth at Paso Lajitas.

Gordo was taken to El Paso, to await deportation. He couldn’t have been 20 yards from the Mexican shore when his boat was confiscated in the middle of the Rio Grande.

Another fine example of Your Tax Dollar At Work. I've been down to the Santa Elena Canyon and walked across into Mexico, to the little town of Boquillas. This tiny little collection of adobe shacks appeared to exist for only one purpose: selling cerveza to thirsty Americans. But that was before Homeland Security closed the border.

U.S. Expels Iranian Guards at U.N. Mission

The Iranians were caught on three occasions taking photos of infrastructure, transport systems and New York City landmarks, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Hello? Let me see if I get this straight -- there are foreigners, in New York City, taking pictures of buildings, bridges and stuff? Damn! Terrorists!

Hiding Behind Certification

For reasons I fully understand but totally reject, many CIOs increasingly look to certification and accreditation standards as "market signals" indicative of professional quality and reliability. This represents the laziest and most dangerous kind of cover-your-ass thinking by C-level executives.

No, Michael -- tell us how you really feel.

Michael Schrage is codirector of the MIT Media Lab's eMarkets Initiative. And he has a dim view of so-called "accreditation standards". He wrote this article for the 6/15/04 issue of "CIO Magazine".

Bypass Compulsory Web Registration

Tired of all those web sites (specially newspaper sites) that require you to sign up and log on? Seems more and more newspapers demand information from you before you are allowed to read an article. I think that stinks, and apparently so do the folks at BugMeNot. Visit their page, key in the offending URL, and they will give you the logon. They have 4,847 sites cataloged as I write this; add your own if you wish.

Optical Camouflage

This is new, from Tokyo. It's not exactly invisible, but it's close.

Multiple Antivirus Scanners DoS Attack

From BugTraq:

While having a manual scan of compressed files; several Antivirus, Trojan,
Spy ware scanners suffer a DoS attack if the software tries to completely
extract the archive and scan its content for a hostile file.

I just tried their proof of concept file and found it locks up AntiVir as well. Suspect it gets most AV and scumware products.

High Performance Humanoid Robots

From the Sarcos web site:

Sarcos generates revenues and profits through the sale of commercial products and through contract development projects for governmental and commercial clients. Sarcos commercial products are unique and intelligent systems that address specific economic and performance requirements.

TheOpenCD

This collection of Windoze software is truly amazing. You get GIMP, OpenOffice, PDFCreator, TightVNC (much better than RealVNC), PuTTY, Really Slick Screensavers, and many more titles. All programs are distributed under an Open Source License. The CD is packaged as a zipped CD image file -- just download (about 275M), unzip and burn the .iso file. The software is then accessed from a very descriptive browser-based menu system. Tres kewl!