Well, it's been a while and it's a brand new year so we have a new installment of Line Noise for you boys and girls out keeping the internets real.

In the interest of preserving your sanity while reading Line Noise, Ali suggested this link to prevent yourself from getting rick-rolled ever again. Then again, we could always take this advice to eliminate trolls in general.

This one came up a lot over the last few months, it might be an indicator that we don't actually follow links the other people post. Anubis is a tool for analyzing the behavior of Windows executables (by convention these files normally have an .exe extension) with special focus on the analysis of malware. To this end, the binary executable is run in an emulated environment and its (security-relevant) actions are monitored. This makes it the ideal tool for quickly getting an understanding of the purpose of an unknown binary. There is also an example of it in action.

Since the last Line Noise, there was a US presidential election and the subsequent inauguration, yes I take my time on these. So here's your political round up. Apparently both Obama and McCain got 0wned. The San Diego head of the GOP used to run Fairlight (as in the warez scene back when we all had modems). Israeli hackers started a public attack against Hamas, yay for politicized botnets.

Python 3.0 was released, backwards incompatible and 10% slower wooooo! If you're still working in the older versions, Ali found an older paper on memory profiling python code.

Earlier in January, Microsoft published the "Black Tuesday" bulletins like they normally do. Except this time there was only one. It got some press coverage, but oddly nobody mentioned that it was two ZDI bugs. C'mon infosec bloggers, don't drink up all the hatorade now! If you're interested in the details, you might want to check out Cody's more detailed dissection.

And finally Storm got cracked open, FreeBSD released an introductory course on the FreeBSD kernel internals and someone wrote a genetic algorithm to create the Mona Lisa with 50 semi transparent polygons. If you are wondering what these have in common, I'll let you think about it and we can call it our little game.

That's it for this time, stay classy blogosphere!