Many attempts have been made to bring h4X0r culture to the mainstream. But code, though elegant, is difficult to discern at a glance and would be completely passed over by all levels of geek below some of the more accomplished demi-nerds. Consequently, Hollywood’s worms and virii are 3D animated structures that are much more likely to awe the average movie goer at the expense of the technically savvy.
Hackers portrays the worm used to steal millions of dollars from an oil company (launched internally I might add) as a beautiful flowing structure that resembles a flowing chain of sea urchins. As it turns out, whether they knew it or not, they were on to something.
Alex Dragulescu has produced amazing, intriguing 3D representations of malware and spam text. It’s like a fractal based instead on code iterations instead of complex equations. It’s mindbottling. From his own explanation:
For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density and grouping are mapped to the inputs of an algorithm that grows a virtual 3D entity. Therefore the patterns and rhythms found in the data drive the configuration of the artificial organism.
I’ve been playing with andLinux; a full port of the Linux kernel to Win32. I’ve installed a few little fun apps like tuxeyes and they all seem to be working, albeit with the usual visual idiosyncrasies of running Xwin in Windows. And while cute and technically impressive (It’s a whole lot of fun having synaptic sitting next to Internet Explorer!), I’m a little confused as to where this little bastard belongs.
While running Windows programs on Linux is extremely valuable (Ubuntu + Photoshop FTW!), running graphical Linux programs on Windows is kinda dumb. I can’t think of a XWin program that I’m dying to have on WinXP that hasn’t be ported over to run on Windows anyway. I just want the precious command line.
Cygwin gives me the ability to interact with my Windows file system through a bash shell. While developing on Windows, I want to be able to run mvn, p4, svn, and jboss from a bash commandline instead of the crappy pos that Windows attempts to call a shell. Aside: Seriously, why isn’t it dynamically re-sizable? It’s also dumbed down enough that non-unixy people can get into the CLI without having to worry about mount points and user permissions. Since there’s a win32 port of rxvt, it satisfies all the requirements of a bash command shell.
andLinux will (theoretically) allow mounting of windows partitions via the virtual cofs files system, but I’ve be unsuccessful in my attempts. Samba is pretty much the only other option, but keeping Windows shares open all the time is less than desirable. Still, having the entire Ubuntu repository of free software available to me is pretty damn impressive.