Scott Yang's Playground

iHome – could this be the rumoured USD$499 headless Mac that will power your living room? Looks cool, but at the same time looks like a British (or Australian?) hoax to me. “Centre”?

“Linux kernel uselib() privilege elevation” vulnerbility demonstrated, exploit source code included to show how you can easily get a root shell. Another reason why it is a bad idea to provide shell access to your Linux box. Anyone with CSE login wants to give it a try? :) Updated: and more reported by LWN. Ouch.

Rumour of SixApart buying LiveJournal, via Boing Boing. That is certainly one of the bigger news in the world of blog hosting, and according to the article it would give 6A a user base of 6.5 million users. I wonder how much is 6A willing to pay for LJ. I also wonder what will happen [...]

Despite being procrastinating, I guess somewhere along the line you just have to write that inevitable new year resolution post. So there, here it is my attempt.

CTorrent is fast and light weight un*x command line BitTorrent client, which is why it is the only BitTorrent client (other than the Bram Cohen’s reference Python implementation) I would use. It is just so much easier to ssh into your Linux server, start the download inside a screen, detach it, and 10 hours later [...]

Reflecting upon Tim’s pondering on computer screen size, the advancement in technology seems to be more evolutionary than revolutionary. Many new gadgets are developed to mimic the old ways how people used to solve problems, and a completely revolutionary approach of doing things is rare, and often being criticised as ahead of its time. Take [...]