Free Republic

K-12: Logic Bombs and Pac-Man A logic bomb is code designed to destroy data in a computer. Imagine you programmed someone to ask people on the street, “Are you from Jupiter?” If people don’t say, “Yes, of course,” you knock them down. Thus they are bombed one by one, as you work your way across the city, until no one is left standing. All very logical.

North Korea is so isolated that rather than bring the Internet to its hackers, it brings them to it—in a swank hotel in China. The luxury hotel that has been called a command post for North Korean hackers would make for a unique holiday getaway and give you lots to talk about back home. “Surprisingly Great Hotel - Clean, Tasteful.... and North Korean!” says a trip advisor review for the Chilbosan Hotel in Shenyang, China. For just $53, you get “a deluxe twin room,” including a North Korean breakfast considerably more substantial than those enjoyed by the vast majority of...

WASHINGTON Intelligence shortcomings, as we see, have a thousand fathers; secret intelligence triumphs are orphans. Here is the unremarked story of "the Farewell dossier": how a C.I.A. campaign of computer sabotage resulting in a huge explosion in Siberia — all engineered by a mild-mannered economist named Gus Weiss — helped us win the cold war.Weiss worked down the hall from me in the Nixon administration. In early 1974, he wrote a report on Soviet advances in technology through purchasing and copying that led the beleaguered president — détente notwithstanding — to place restrictions on the export of computers and software...

The teenage daughter of a top foreign affairs department official was being treated in a Pretoria hospital for second degree burns suffered when her laptop computer's battery pack exploded. Fifteen-year-old Nikita Sooklal is the youngest child of the department's deputy director-general responsible for the Middle East and Asia, Dr Anil Sooklal. Sooklal told Sapa that his wife and daughter were at their Pretoria East home on Tuesday around 3.20pm while he was at the office. "My daughter had switched on the laptop and was looking for a website about Macbeth, her school set-work, and my wife was upstairs. "Suddenly there...