Hacker Blog

Cyberpunk has slowly evolved and muted into Transhumanism.  Shedding the skin of their grungy punk father into a new savvy coat.  The transhumaist community has grown out of the lone basement dwelling “console cowboy” to computer enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and otaku fanboys.

These culture represents the future.  Their aim may be slightly high, as the Age of Spitual Machines will show, but they will eventually hit their targets.  A machine as intelligent as you and I or transferring your minds “self” through an electronic medium sound like science fiction now, but what technology hasn’t?  If you explained the relativity of space and time to Aristotle he would think you were mad.  This culture beats a path to the future so others can follow.  Gaining cultural acceptance for ideas like genetically modified children or funding artificial general intelligence have very real benefits and we have the transumanists to thank.

We have enjoyed the presence of transhumanism since the birth of cyberpunk.  The highly acclaimed cyberpunk author, William Gibson, wrote in Neuromancer about transhuman-esque individuals, the panther moderns.  They seize upon the latest technologies and integrating electronic components.  Serial Experiment Lain is more transhumanist than cyberpunk.  She realizes that reality is not confined to the world of atoms as we see but, extend to the electronic medium.  The quintessential cyberpunk magazine, 2600, has even made mention.

Transhumaism isn’t so much a new idea but, a refined and elegant version of cyberpunk.

Today I was perusing though some social engineering videos and found a very good one from DefCon 15 that I thought I would share.

The main idea of the talk is to rephrase sentences to lead others to the conclusion you want. These are the same techniques used in hypnosis; literally hacking how the mind works.

You do want to learn about this, don’t you?

(Sorry, there is just text on the video.)

If you liked the talk you can go to the blog of the presenter, Mike Murray.

Today I had a small product photo-shoot and lo and behold, I forgot my CF card.

Canon has this nifty program called Digital Photo Professional through their EOS Utility.  You can take a picture from and save to your computer with it.  Every Canon camera comes with a cd full of great software like this.. but like any true techie I threw away the manufacture disks.

For some reason Canon refuses to give away this software online. Even though the software only works with their cameras and every camera comes with a copy they wont let you download it! Some bigwig CEO must have freaked out when hearing “free” and “online” in the same sentence.

Whats worse is this software is not on any torrent sites or rapidshare.

Well, fortunately for me, there was a work around.

For Mac:

1. Download the latest “Updater” for your program here.
   1. Choose EOS > Digital EOS Camera > Your Model
   2. Navigate to “Drivers and Downloads”
   3. Choose OSX under the “Driver / Software Section”
2. Mount the dmg image file.
3. In the image you should see a file called “UpdateInstaller”  Drag that to you desktop.
4. Control-click the “UpdateInstaller” on your desktop and choose “Show Package Contents” in the menu.
5. In the new window go to Contents > Resources
6. Delete updated.plist - update: it may be called update.plist now
7. Run the software.
8. Enjoy!

Canon, mind getting your act together? Its not like some Nikon user is going to take advantage of the free software you payed good money to develop.  You are a leader in digital photography, so step up to the digital age and distribute the software freely in both material and digital form.